Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Holidays...

Ah well, my holidays almost over, couple of days left now. *sniff* Still, at least Im finally getting a couple of days to actually play with stuff. I hooked up a little LCD screen to one of my 16F628A pic's. It took a little longer than I thought, but I managed to get it initialised and speaking to it. I was being silly and forgetting that one of the instructions wanted a bit number, not the bit value (so 0 to 7, and not 1,2,4,8 etc.) DOH!

Oh well, looks neat - nice little flashing cursor and everything!

On a more Plus/4 related topic...I should get some logic chips tomorrow (NANDs, NORs etc.) and a couple of static RAM chips so I'm itching to have a crack at trying out that hack I thought of to add more RAM via the expansion port. I really have NO idea if its going to work since people like Solder (who's been doing this stuff for years!) says you can't do it, but I'm being optimistic and assuming that I'm thinking as a software coder who uses hardware the way hardware guys never think of. I'm pretty sure as long as the expansion lines do what I think, I should be able to add lots of banked RAM as an external BOX without any mod's internally. If I can, then a full on, RAM+SID+MMC should be possible...man, that would be cool.

Anyway....until I get these logic glue chips, I can't do very much - although I did get a hacksaw so I can cut my 8bitbabys down to size! Stupid things.

I wonder if I can use a Plus/4 keybaord with a PIC....Mmmm...I could have it type on the little screen!

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