Over a (great) number of years I have set up various blogs for various reasons and projects, and mostly these are now hibernating as my attention is SQUIRREL!!!!
Sorry what was I saying?
Anyway I have collected a bunch of stuff here for posterity forming my Mr Gadget Nexus.
“Gigging Arduino” from 2013 relates to a project I started designing to make a device that could be a “patch changer” for multiple keyboards. This went into hibernation when I got an iPad app for set lists and could send MIDI program changes. More recently with one band I have a keyboard with a set list feature, and another I’m starting to try MainStage. Nice idea. Still have a lot of components floating around somewhere.
“Old Code Tricks” was something I thought of in 2015 just to save little tricks from years past (retro computing is more and more mainstream now). It stalled when I could only come up with a couple of ideas. In early 2016 I came up with a couple more and in 2018 a couple more again.
“Mr Gadget Music” was going to be a sort of “auto-biography” of my musical life, commenting on various experiences and the equipment I have used over the years. Started in late 2017 with a few posts and a massive amount of drafts that I just put a few headlines in to write up later. Just before Christmas 2019 had had a little bit of enthusiasm again, then shorty afterwards everyone was thinking of other things.
The three above lived on free WordPress.com hosting.
During 2020 I toyed with idea of making a generic “Adventures in Retro Programming” site, thinking about various computers and processors, making various drafts. Later on I decided a couple of things. Firstly putting “adventuresinretroprogramming” in a WordPress.com URL was not exactly “snappy”, and also I had the crazy idea that with a lot of free time on my hands (still) I would try to get the third uncompleted “Amiga Music Disk” from “The 81st Track” actually working after nearly 30 years of being abandoned. The first half of 2021 was mostly trying to get a development system running and trying to rebuild a bunch of code I knew worked. Well it worked with the tools I had then, not so much now. I got some paid WordPress hosting and “t81t.dev” was born with the “Adventures in Retro Programming” tagline I had the previous year. Ended up re-starting this a couple of times. Also re-starting my “fix and update”. Bit of a gap mid 2022, bit burst of excitement, then the blog hibernated as I had a crazy idea of doing a more complete “remaster” and also I got rather busy in terms of being a performing amateur musician again.
Treat for Z80 lovers – I loved the Z80 instruction table that was on the “ClrHome” site. In 2022 the creator revamped it massively and it lost a few features had Z180 instructions baked in and the design changed. I didn’t like it. I did manage to get a version from archive.org and from the creator’s GitHub repository, and then set about adding a feature of my own, optionally showing Z80N instructions (ZX Spectrum Next and the N-Go clone). It ended up buried in an obscure URL thanks to the level of access I had with only a WordPress hosting site. but here I’ve collected it into my nexus. Enjoy!