Retrochallenge 2016/10 has been announced! Go to retrochallenge.org for more details. If you’re not familiar with retrochallenge, it’s basically a month-long excuse to monkey with vintage computers.
I’ve never participated in retrochallenge before. I’ve always been interested in vintage computing, but only recently became more active in the hobby. I figured I’d have to wait until next year to do a retrochallenge, so I was excited to see the announcement. My challenge will most likely revolve around much-needed repairs and upgrades to my Atari 400 and Tandy model 102.
The Atari I’ve had since I was about 6 years old. My dad upgraded it to 48k and built an awesome external 800 keyboard. However, it only had RF video out. I’ve tried in the past to convert it to composite via a drop-dead simple tap of the signal, but I have never gotten good results. I also have a dual-pokey mod to install and a bare SIO2SD to get connected and working.
The Tandy 102 is the most recent addition to my vintage machine collection. It’s a 32k machine, but last month it suffered an unexplained reboot followed by a loss of 8k of RAM. I’ve done a bit of investigating, but I have some soldering ahead to get this unit back to 32k.