Open Hardware/Modding/Retro: Pong, Commodore, Pi
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Another weird MOS Pong console: 1976 Allied Leisure Name of the Game II
Hialeah, Florida-based Allied Leisure was Atari's first arcade Pong licensee in 1973 (which they badged as Paddle Battle), but they had been producing games since at least 1968, making electromechanical attractions and eventually broadening into pinball. Some of this work was contracted to Universal Research Labs (unhappily for later Google searches abbreviated to URL) who fabricated the Paddle Battle circuit boards and produced their own paddle game, the similarly odd octagonal Video Action table. In 1974 Allied Leisure's production facility suffered a massive fire and the financial hit they sustained left URL with warehouses full of unsold components. URL turned these into the Video Action-II, which in 1975 was one of the earliest Pong systems to hit the home market.
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That elusive Commodore 128 80-column mode
The 80-column mode on my Commodore 128 from the imitable Screenbeard continues to produce no output, regardless of whether its involed with the 40/80 switch, or using GRAPHIC 5 in the functional 40-column mode. But I think I’ve made progress since blogging about it last year.
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Scanntronik manuals for Commodore 64 now available #Commodore #VintageComputing @pagetable
The German company “Scanntronik” offered a lot of high-quality hardware and software for the Commodore 64 series computers, most in the space of graphics and desktop publishing. They are well-known for their Pagefox and Printfox software as well as their Handyscanner 64 hardware.
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Get a Raspberry Pi Pico pinout on the command line #PiDay #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi @RPiSpy
Displaying the pinout of a Raspberry Pi Pico is possible using Matt’s “picopins” Linux bash script. The script displays the pinout in a color coded format showing the location of power, ground and GPIO pins.
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Pi Pico Pinout Display on the Command Line
Displaying the pinout of a Raspberry Pi Pico is possible using my “picopins” script. The script displays the pinout in a colour coded format showing the location of power, ground and GPIO pins. I find it useful if I’m coding Pico projects on my laptop or Pi 400 and need to check the location of a GPIO pin.
The bash script runs from the Linux command line and I’ve tested it on Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu.