Re: Past Blast - "Wonder Woman 1984" - Corp Guy Using PET

On Sat, 5 Apr 2025 04:21:51 -0400, c186282 wrote:

   Haven't had an eprom programmer in a long time alas ...

It should be easy to build one with a Pico or Arduino. I built one using
the parallel port on my Osborne 1 CP/M box. It was very disappointing when
the i386 came out and made tweaking the hardware a PITA.

   At THIS point, I'd rather fool with a Z80/clone board, something that
   will run CP/M-80. Alas even a floppy interface - or FDDs for that
   matter - are getting hard to come by. Boards may have to have a trick
   for using thumb drives and PRETENDING they're floppies .... not
   strictly purist, but, these days, you've gotta use what you've gotta
   use. There isn't a huge retro market, the world is orientated for the
   newest/latest whiz-bang stuff.

I'd go that way too since the Z80 was what I worked with, along with
8080s, 8085s and Intel uCs. 6502s and 680Xs seemed a little strange to me.

   And just THIS week ... if in the USA you may not want to buy anything
   that comes from China. Expect a "Bolivian re-sell/brand market" soon,
   but not THIS week.

That will be interesting. I read an article last week that Raspberries are
not affected by the tariffs. However I believe Espressif will be. The
ESP32 has been very popular since it has WiFi and BLE out of the box, is
cheap, and performs well. Elegoo is also Chinese and is a source of
Arduino clones. SunFounder is also Chinese. Those two are hobbyist
oriented but the ESP32 is used in a lot of commercial applications.

I don't know about STMicro.  This may do good things for Microchip.

They may be communists but they're no dummies; Vietnam is talking about
dropping all tariffs on US goods.