Things I couldn’t find elsewhere

Code

TL866 firmware updater macOS support

I own a TL866CS IC programmer. Wonderful device - I truly recommend it (and I assume its successor is even better). It’s been known for many years that the company who made them had one hardware revision, and limited the CS revision compared to the A revision purely in firmware. That limitation has of course been hacked for almost as long as the device has existed. Someone going by the name “radioman” detailed many years ago how the bootloader could be reflashed from CS version to A, after which the original software and firmware updates will see the device as the A model in all aspects.

Apple · Code · Development · English · Retro · Uncategorized

1 minute

Atari ST new video modes

I’ve done an extended writeup of a little project I’ve been working on and off on for the last few months. Extending the video modes of an old Atari ST in new and interesting ways. Going from 4 colors to 16 might not sound much with today’s tech, but for us oldies this is pretty fascinating ;)

Atari · Code · English · Retro · Uncategorized

1 minute

Atari ST picture conversion

It’s somewhat easy finding modern software able to read ancient data formats (note, "somewhat"). It’s often more difficult finding the opposite - conversion from modern formats to older ones. When I’ve wanted to edit graphics using modern software (GIMP) and convert it to Atari ST I’ve so far used the excellent Netpbm package. The steps have involved converting my image in GIMP to use a colormap of suitable size, save the image as a .

Atari · Code · English · Retro · Uncategorized

1 minute