German greetings to all retroists
Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 1:05 pm
Hi guys'n'gals, ghosts'n'goblins, hobbyists'n'retroists and procastinatists ?
I am a german end 70s born male with a strong addiction to everything that has buttons and lights.
I started my "career" on a VIC-20 back in 1983 (was 6 then...) and went from BASIC to a C-128 (mostly used in C64-mode...) where I poorly experimented with 6502 Assembler. Leaving 8-bit road for a 386 SX-16 in 1991 and moving over to GW-BASIC and PASCAL, my computers started to add more bits over the years. I used almost any Windows derivate starting from 3.0 to 10 but got an early hang on to alternative systems, so I also bought OS/2 Warp and was a fond linux user since 1993.
Being the nerd I am, I grew into IT and work as an enterprise IT architect where my design level is more complete datacenter infrastructures than tiny small IT components.
My heart and soul being lost in the 80s, I was a retro fan early on and got me a CBM 4032 (now in very poor condition ? ) and a CBM-720 (nice design!) around 2000. At the moment, my C128 is sitting right next to me in my mancave, 80s80s radio running and typically Retro TV (aka all these great, entertaining and informational youtube channels) showing on the second screen.
I started getting into arduino microcontroller stuff some years ago and liked what I saw and could do with this. Being it ATTinys or ESPs, interfacing the real world seemed very cool. My work is typically much more theoretical... (If you want to have a look: https://github.com/highno )
I am eager to learn new/old stuff and experimenting with it. Having a set of restrictions, finding a working and possibly elegant solution is what drives me - so 8-Bit systems are just a wonderful world. To give an example: Ben Eater's work on a Invaders-like console with a 6-Pin ATTiny is simply amazing, but also work of CNLohr, pressing out TV signals, color, framebuffer and 3D-Graphics out of a WiFi interface controller design (the ESP8266) is also just amazing. I love demoscene for being extremely creative in art and technique.
I hope to be able to develop some expansion cards for the X16 - starting with a WiFi network card and possibly an I/O expansion card with BASIC addons so you can tinker Arduino-like with all I/Os, SPI, I2C, etc. interfaces using the card and convenient BASIC commands... (Supporters welcome!)
I hope to learn a lot of all this and have fun doing it. I love the retro scene and hope to interact with it more - especially while supporting the X16 project.