I'M ALIVE!!
We'll its taken a few months but in the words of the Proteus computer in "Demon Seed" - "I'M ALIVE!!!"
My Lynx has been restored to full working order by Dave at Tynemouth Software and his account of the fix is here.
Basically it needed a new Z80 CPU and one new EPROM that had to be flashed with the right software.
Having received the machine a couple of days ago, I have spent sometime trying to load the tapes that still have of course including my very own "Super Air Raid".
To my great joy, after quite a few attempts at adjusting the tone/volume on my cassette player one of my tapes loaded and for the first time in 30+ years the machine was running my game as evidenced in the following pictures.
My Lynx has been restored to full working order by Dave at Tynemouth Software and his account of the fix is here.
Basically it needed a new Z80 CPU and one new EPROM that had to be flashed with the right software.
Having received the machine a couple of days ago, I have spent sometime trying to load the tapes that still have of course including my very own "Super Air Raid".
To my great joy, after quite a few attempts at adjusting the tone/volume on my cassette player one of my tapes loaded and for the first time in 30+ years the machine was running my game as evidenced in the following pictures.
A video show the game running is below.
I also was able to get various other cassettes to load - SIDE A of the intro tape supplied with the machine, REVERSI, SNAKE and NUMERONS
There are plenty more cassettes however that are not loading :-( but I plan to give them the full Audacity treatment and see if I can create the TAP files for use in Jynx and then record WAV copies back to some new tapes having boosted the original recordings.
All in all - Happy Days!
Hi Perry!
ReplyDeleteReally pleased to see you got your lynx working after all this time. Also really pleased to see you managed to get some cassettes into TAP format.
I never put audio tape reading into Jynx because I just felt that PALE covered these bases so well, and - to be honest - it's not as though a right lot of Lynx cassettes remain to be found. As I said on my blog, my tapes went to landfill, including some games that I cannot find online: Quacman, and Level 9's Snowball Adventure.
I consider Jynx to be pretty much feature-complete. However, I would consider a tuning feature for speed if it turns out to be worthwhile. I cannot say if I ever got it right, as I have no real Lynx any more : (
I did do some work, and got ROADER working better, but it still has too many problems with how it pushes boundaries to be releasable. At the moment I have too many work commitments to be able to progress this.
I like your blog, hope you can keep finding things to add to it!
Best wishes
Jonathan.
Hi Perry, Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteI've just converted Roader to a tap file using audacity + my own software - but I haven't been able to get it working well in Jynx (although, it does load/display graphics). The screen update is painfully slow. I suspect it is probably using some weird 6845 tricks. I know it uses vertically scrolling. Anyway, thanks for Super Air Raid and Jynx - I'm going to download and try it now. :-)