Episode: 1669
Title: HPR1669: New Retro Computing
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1669/hpr1669.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:42:46

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This is HPR episode 1669 entitled New Retro Computing.
It is hosted by Nibble and is about 18 minutes long.
The summary is Nibble talks about building a micro-might companion.
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Hello, this is NY Bill and today I thought I'd talk to you guys about a kit I recently
built.
It's an electronics kit and it is called the micro-might companion.
And what it is is it's a little bit bigger than an R pi.
It runs for a peller chip and a pick chip and what it is is a basic computer.
Yes, basic, like 10 print HPR20 go to 10, that kind of basic.
I heard about this kit on the Retro Bits podcast.
If anybody doesn't know, it's a podcast about Retro Computing and the good old days.
Some episodes I really enjoy are they will interview some of the forefathers and the people
that created everything back in the day.
One that comes to mind that I really enjoyed was with Chuck Peddle, who was an engineer
for Commodore.
That was fun to hear him talk about his days.
The recent show, show 147, he interviewed Jeff Ledger who created this micro-might.
And by the end of the episode I was, they had me convinced I need to get one of these
and fool about with it.
It doesn't come out very often, I guess he does one when he can or when he has some content.
But I leave it in beyond pod and every once in a while I'm surprised that there's a new
Retro Bits to listen to, so it's just fun to hear about the old days.
I started with a VIC-20 that I got for Christmas and maybe a year or so later I got a
Commodore 64 and that was back in the good old days of getting on your BMX bike, throwing
your disk drive in your backpack, drive over to friends houses and, you know, well, I guess
that was like the sneaker net, I guess it was wears, but yeah, yeah, copy some disks.
I still have a Commodore 64 and all the goodies down in the basement, I don't know why, I just
kept it all these years and all those disks are still down there with, you know, you take
some scissors and cut a notch in your five and a quarter floppies and then you can use
the B side that the good old days.
Anyways, I heard about this on Retro Bits, check it out if you're into it, I'll put a
link in the show notes.
So after listening to that Retro Bits episode, I ordered one of these boards just for fun,
something to do, see what I can do with it, it'll, it was fun getting the soldering pin
out again.
I told some of the guys in the lug that, oh, I showed it to them, some of them said neat,
oh, cool, and some of them said, what the heck are you going to do with basic, they were
basically laughing at me, but the fun of this is putting it together for me, I'll see
what I can do with it after, could be some fun things.
I heard that it even does a Commodore 64 emulation mode, so that would be neat to see if I
could somehow get the 1541 drive hooked into it and then load programs off those old
floppies.
So, building this thing, it's just a bare board and a bag full of parts, this would be a
good kit for anybody that's somewhat new to soldering because it's all through all stuff,
there's no really tiny surface mount stuff, all the resistors and capacitors are through
all, they look, I guess they're quarter-watt, they're fairly small, but I mean, it's all,
you can just all do it by hand, you don't need, well, actually I did get them like magnifying
glass out a few times, maybe I'm getting old, but just, you know, you got to read the stripes
on the side of the resistors and there are some really tiny capacitors, one of them you
do have to get a magnifying glass out to see which side is plus.
Okay, putting this thing together.
I'll put in the show notes, well, I'll put a show, in the show notes a link to the board
where you can get it if you care to get one.
And then there are instructions on how to put it together.
It's easy to follow along, don't do what I did, one of the first instructions says, don't
put in the 28 pin dip socket until instructed to do so.
There are three dip sockets, there's a small one, that's an 8 pin, there's a 28 pin,
and there's a 40 pin.
I don't know why, I did read the warning, but when I went over, I didn't count the pins
and for some reason I grabbed the 8 pin socket and the 28 pin socket.
The one I was not supposed to put in and I'll tell you why you shouldn't put it in yet
because I did and I ran it to the problem.
So it kind of goes step by step from the top of the board, you got power in, 7.5 volts,
I had a, it doesn't come with a power brick, but I had in the basement one of those wall
work power bricks where it has a little selector switch on the bottom.
You can get these things at electronic stores, this one does from 3 volts, 4.5 volts, 6
volts, 7.5 volts, and 9 volts.
So that was perfect for the 7.5.
I don't know why they're specifying 7.5 because you put in two voltage regulators while
you're building it and you put in a 5 volt regulator and a 3.3 volt regulator.
So I don't know why they needed the extra power, it's possible this can run off 5 volts,
I haven't tried it.
So sidering away and following the steps, you put in a whole series of resistors, there's
a, that's interesting, oh that is strange, I kept hitting the microphone cable and it was
putting all kinds of static up, I'll chop all this out, but I don't know if it's getting
interference from something around the bench here or that was strange, anyways let me
go back to what I was saying.
Once again, you got power in on the left top of the board, PS2 keyboard, which I only
have one left in the house, but I did dig that out of the basement, so I was okay there,
it's got audio out which I haven't tried yet, I suppose I could throw some headphones
in there, and then VGA out.
So while you're soldering up, underneath the VGA is a whole series of resistors, you've
got a crystal under that.
Where underneath that is the 40 pin dip socket, which should go in in the beginning.
So if you build this kit, put the small one in, put the big one in, and hold the medium
one for last, then they have you put in the voltage regulators, you're kind of working your
way down the board, then you get to the lower left hand corner where you have to put on the
SD card reader.
This is why you didn't want to put the 28 pin socket in because the SD card reader is the
only surface mount component on the board, you can still do it with a normal tip soldering
pin, I'm sure, but the problem is if you put that 28 pin dip socket in, you can't really
reach in to the surface mount pins on the back of the SD card, and what I had to do was
get out my skinny tip and go down in between the SD card and the 28 pin dip socket, and
it kind of made for some messy soldering down there, and it kind of melted the side of
the 28 pin dip socket.
You'll be warned by the instructions, and you're just warned by me, don't put in this 28
pin socket until you're told to.
After putting in the SD card, you're ready for your first boot up, so you get a two gig
or under SD card, which that was another thing I had trouble finding.
The smallest ones I really have are four gigs here, and I got eight gigs, and you know,
two two gig and under cards, but I asked my wife what was in her small camera, and it
was an old two gig card, so I gave her one of my four gigs, and I took that two gig.
You plug that in, plug in a monitor, a keyboard, boot it up, and you see kind of like a basic
image.
I think I took a picture, I'll put some pictures in the show notes and things.
That just tells you it's ready to accept that pick chip, which will do all the computing.
The rest of it is just kind of input and output.
After you see that that's good, they just have you put on a few more components in the
bottom, you do put in that 28 pin dip socket, you put the pick chip in there, and then
along the bottom right is a breadboard, and three 16 socket pin outs, so you can get into
some micro-controlling things with this.
I haven't gotten too far into what I can do with this, I'm talking, I just finish actually
soldering this, so maybe I can follow this up if I do anything interesting, software-wise
with it, or build anything with this pin out and micro-controlling capability.
There also seems to be a lot of, well not a lot, one, two, three, four, five, six spaces
on the circuit board that are not populated, now I'm not sure, okay, they're marked.
One says terminal, jb8, I don't know if they are like some type of j-tag interface.
I did see mentioned, oh IR, here's, so it looks like I can get some extra parts and sticking
here's an infrared port, I think this one, there's a j4, that, j4 and j8, they are probably
joysticks, is there eight pin headers that aren't populated, so it looks like with some
other, you know, parts you can just get off the shelf, you can do more with this thing.
Oh, and there's, they did mention Wii, and there is a Wii mode connection, I don't have
a Wii or a Wii mode, but yeah, somehow you can use that to control this thing.
So after it was soldered it up, I plugged it all in and boom, it came up a basic prompt,
it is very retro, the instructions point you to a drop box folder where you can download
like binary bin files and I have to stop going because I have to, I realized doing
HPRs that when I start talking a lot, I click, I don't know why, I just did it again,
yeah, so a drop box, they'll send you to a folder where you can pull down binary files,
they have some things you can run, I saw a Zork 1 in there, anybody remember text adventures,
Zork 1 was in there, I saw a Frogger, I don't know how I would play Frogger unless I'd
have to get these joy ports working.
The other thing I might do with it is in one of my old, in my old HTPC case, which I don't
really use anymore, but I ran Mythbox for quite a long time, it has a 7 inch VGA screen
in it, it's touch screen, I won't be able to use the touch with this, but I could use
that little screen and come out of this VGA port and build a very small like little enclosure
for this and have a little tiny basic computer, that might be, might have to get into a little
woodworking with that, that would be interesting, I'll click, in case this in some nice curly
maple or something, a little rosewood, fancy retro computing, so there you have it, it's
just a, I'm just jumping in quick to tell you guys about this kit, if anybody's interested
in building one, there's links in the show notes, if you're listening to this and you
haven't done an HPR this year, do one, because I hear the Q is like low or down to nothing.
Alright, here's a new rule, do one HPR a year, if we do hit zero shows, you got to do two
HPR zero, sorry, new rule, okay guys, maybe I'll come back in and talk about this micromite
companion a little more from a software perspective, but until then, I'll talk to you guys later.
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