Binary Dinosaurs

@binarydinosaurs.co.uk

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Collecting, repairing and preserving vintage machines since 1998. W: https://binarydinosaurs.co.uk F: https://Facebook.com/binarydinosaurs M: @binarydinosaurs.oldbytes.space "The king of old weird stuff" - Fuzzweed.co.uk, Nov '25

An 8 inch disk in a fancy retail pack of ZORK 1 which is THE adventure game to play on your CP/M machine. It's a version of the original 'Colossal Cave' adventure from the early 70s.
The SOS1.2 Utilities showing the results of verifying the profile. Same 3 bad blocks as yesterday, but are they in the directory area?
A screenshot of WordStar running on CP/M on the Commodore 128D. I’ve written’Z80 at 50’ in large text.
Screenshot of the directory/catalog of the ProFile attached to the Apple ///. I don’t think the formatting I was doing yesterday fully worked if you look at those file names and dates 😆
The Microsoft Softcard /// clone by Joe’s Computer Museum. Hopefully next week I can get it running - the ROM adapter board is still in Heathrow Airport but clear of customs.
My Z80 at 50 table, containing an STM Pied Piper prototype, H||H Tiger (Z80/6809/D7220/TMS9916), C128D (Z80/6510) and Apple /// (6502/Z80). Behind is a Tandy Trs80 Model 4P (Z80) and just out of sight is a Multitech Microprofessor.
Apple /// PSU showing the 2 caps I replaced with slightly higher equivalents from Rubycon. This makes the machine a bit more stable at 4.6V.
Video test of the Apple /// which shows a picture of Churchill (not the dog) with the words ‘if you can read this, and the test patterns above are clear, press space bar. Otherwise, press return. *presses space bar*
An Apple /// with Monitor /// (yes, they really did that) running the SOS Utilities. Nice to see it running again after so long! Now where did I put the demo disk.
Monster CPT8520 along with a CST Thor, Sinclair QL with Schön keyboard, Apple Lisa and Commodore P500 on show at RetroFest 2025 in Swindon UK.
Two bags of fresh components in anti-static bags. The reason for the box being as big as it is was the long tube of sockets which I hope are at least two orders smashed together.
A large square box on the floor containing lots of packets and digikey’s famous packing which is all recyclable. Not sure about the packets but I hope they are.
A Tandon TM848-2 double sided 8" floppy drive imaging some DEC RX02 disks onto a laptop using a Greaseweazle flux reader.
An external SCSI CDrom drive containing a boot disk to reload my new toy. I had to find a working cd writer and actual blank CDs like some sort of peasant.
A gif from Monty Python & The Holy Grail full of sarcasm with the caption 'and there was much rejoicing'
The CP/M game Ladder running on the Camputers Lynx 128. It’s not Donkey Kong. Honest.
Photo of my table, Camputers Lynx 128 plus original Camputers Cub monitor, Commodore 128D with 1084S monitor, H||H Tiger with no screen because when I took this picture I didn't directly know anyone who had one. That changed during the day!
My table at RetroFest 26 containing a Camputers Lynx 128k, commodore 128D and the almost mythical H||H Tiger.
WordStar running on the C128D, with a nice white-text-on-blue-background thing going on. I’ve typed ‘RETROFEST 2026’ in big letters because why not.
Dbc128 file copier progressing an image write to disk very progressively.
Pic of a formerly C64-only SD2IEC Frankenstein’d into working with the C128. I’ve cunningly desoldered the cassette plug which is only used for 5v, and added flying wires to allow it to still work for 5v. Now I just need to change its device number from 8 to 9.
An external 1571 sat atop the internal 1571 of the C128D, next to a long box of floppies. I wondered why they were so chonky next to 1541-II drives and found out yesterday - not only are they double sided, but there’s also a WD1770 floppy controller in there too for MS-DOS compatibility. Yep, these things can read/write DOS disks.
A new-looking Commodore 128D ready to get set up for the weekend. Fingers crossed it still works!
Title screen for Catchum, the game that definitely isn't Pacman. Definitely. It's not quick, and strangely the 'level of difficulty' button does nothing.
A screenshot of the Lynx 128 in CP/M mode, big text saying RETROFEST 2026 May 30/31 @STEAM IN Swindon UK
Screenshot of the opening words of ZORK. West of house You are standing in an open field west of a White House, with a door. There is a small mailbox here. I’ve typed WOO! But obvs that isn’t a recognised command.
PCB of the Microvitec Cub back on the bench for remedial work after frame collapse for the second time. The tall blue cap almost in the centre forms part of the power supply for the TDA1170S vertical timing chip, and it’s usually the first thing you replace.
Screenshot of a much happier Lynx 128 showing a CP/M directory and the line ‘I’ve been stable for the last hour, yay!’ Previously it would lock up after 10-15 mins.
Screenshot of the Lynx showing the ‘file’ I’d sent down to it, literally just the text ‘hello from macos’ followed by a CTRL-Z to close the file. This was sent from minicom running on the workshop Mac. The cursor is blue because I’d somehow activated colour mode. Usually this is [ESC]Q.
A pair of chonky 12v fans thieved from an HPE storage unit PSU. They can’t half shift some air so will be handy to lower the temp (and hopefully therefore increase reliability) of the notoriously hot Lynx PSU.
A Camputers Lynx 128 in bits being fed electrons by another Meanwell PSU, but hopefully a more stable one than the RQ50B seems to be.
Overview of a 128K Lynx sans case working off floppy disk and being powered by the PSU from a 96K Lynx which skulks under the monitor. . That the 96K machine is perfectly happy with the Meanwell to the left of the 128K in the pic is probably down to load more than anything else. For whatever reason the 128k just doesn’t like it.
A topless Camputers Lynx 128K with a test clip on the Z80 CPU and an awful lot of probes heading to my HP1660a logic analyser so I can hopefully spot the exact point it goes off the rails when loading external ROMs with the XROM command. To the right is an oscilloscope which is what I was using first to watch what the lines for external ROM access were doing.
A bouncing Union Jack flag with a soundtrack that’s not cursed at all. Demo running on the 96k Lynx.
A Camputers Lynx 128, earlier.
This is the Union Jack demo running on the Camputers Lynx 128. I’m not ENTIRELY sure it’s supposed to do that. It’s supposed to look like it’s flapping I think.
A plastic box of Apple spare chips from integer basic, ram chips and others.
A grey Microvitec CUB monitor. It’s grey because it was used by Camputers at trade shows selling the Lynx. When I got it it was suffering frame collapse so the entire picture was a compressed line in the middle of the screen. Text on the screen says ‘Binary Dinosaurs Camputers Lynx and repaired CUB monitor 2026!’ The picture is not centred, dammit.
A Microvitec CUB LCCD03, aka the 1441 displaying the Camputers Lynx power up message for the first time. The picture tube is all over the place so there needs to be a lot of adjustment of trimmer pots to hopefully make it readable. I’ve got 4 weeks 😆
A Microvitec CUB LCCD03, aka the 1441 displaying the Camputers Lynx power up message for the first time. The picture tube is all over the place so there needs to be a lot of adjustment of trimmer pots to hopefully make it readable. I’ve got 4 weeks 😆
4 versions of Chuckie Egg running on the BBC Micro, Acorn Atom, my original ZX Spectrum and the Tatung Einstein. November RetroFest at the Centre For Computing History, Cambridge.
Spike Milligan as ‘Hairy Carpenter’, a pastiche on popular 80s sports correspondent Harry Carpenter. Spike is wearing a wig-based hat full of hair which stays still while his actual head moves for hilarious comedy effect.
Pic of some strange white spooge on the expansion connector of an Acorn A3000. Alien looking fluff.
A pic of components on the CUB video board. Again we have a potentiometer covered in what looks like coconut, a fusible 10ohm resistor that looks like it may have gone pop, and a strange device marked as TL201 which looks like the little spaceship you control in the arcade hit Galaxians.
A pair of black potentiometers on the driver board of the CUB monitor. They’re covered in white flakes and what looks like radioactive deposits in hot turquoise. No, I don’t know either.
A desk containing a huge Positron 9000, an HP1660A logic analyser and a DataPulse ‘Exchequer’ which is also Positron powered.
The Positron 9000 with its associated TV set. These machines were used to create the teletext pages for Channel 4's 4-Tel service in the years after the channel launched. All that space run by a single Motorola 6809 running at a whopping ONE (1) MHz.
A box of formerly sealed floppies now opened. We can see that the labels have been hastily put back for photographic purposes, but the disks are otherwise mint which is splendid.
Some dust on a plastic wrapped box of 8” disks, earlier.
A box of 8" floppy disks for the CPT range of word processors from the early 80s. These disks use a proprietary format for data, and at the time of reviving my machine over xmas 2024 I didn't have a floppy drive that was capable of writing to be able to format any of the 8" disks I have. There are two types of disks for the CPT8500s, 'program' and 'word processing' and you're not supposed to write on the Program disks, but I have been because that's all the images I had. Now I can hopefully create a new blank disk image from one of these. I just hope they haven't gone mouldy like the last couple of NOS boxes of 8" disks I got, which were also sealed like this.
A section of circuit board where the passive components (diodes in this case) have been badly affected by the leaking battery and have simply snapped in half when I started heating them up to desolder and test.
The little Sharp calculator spelling BOOBIES because that’s what you do with a new calculator.
The calculator in question showing the classic SHELLOIL on its lovely green fluorescent display. Nice buttons too!
The Sharp Elsi Mate EL-1185 printing calculator.
An Workbench earlier. On it is a nude Executel 3910 sans keyboard (it’s over by the wall on an extension cable) or PSU because it’s running on my custom Meanwell PSU made specifically for these machines by me.
A Wabash 8” floppy disk that out of 45 source disks was the only one that contained tapcnt.asm, the 8085 assembler source of the tape microcontroller in the STC Executel 3910. Happy days!
Picture of an 8” floppy disk from Microsoft sitting on top of the drive that’s just read it. On the right is the Floppy Exerciser which is a great lights’n’switches box for testing the mechanical parts of floppy drives.