Lardo buys another zeddy

[Lardo Boffin]

A nice shiny issue one. How late did the issue one go? This has a 8233 ULA.

[Lardo Boffin]

Forgot to post a picture of the cool manual from the previous zeddy!

[Lardo Boffin]

The nice shiny ULA is now sat in a socket in preparation of a vLA81 arriving. First time I have been brave enough to remove a working ULA. And it still works!

[Moggy]

Removing one, that's the easy bit.

Soldering one back in when you have no sockets to hand however......

[Lardo Boffin]

Removing one, that's the easy bit.

Easy? Easy! And, at the risk of sounding like Shirley Crabtree, easy!?!

Actually it was a lot easier than I expected. RAM chips always seem to be hard work but it was pretty straight forward.

[Moggy]

Shirley Crabtree! That's everybody under 55 and the overseas members stumped then.

I met that bugger once at a local athletic institute (long since gone) and he kindly asked me to shift out of the way in a manner far removed from his ring persona, so from the safety of my car I told him where to get off.

You're right about certain chips being easier than others. I find the ZX80 very easy as it has bigger pads and seemingly very soft solder and I soldered the CPU direct in that no problem. ZX81's I find a bit harder and Speccies forget it as they seem to be the most fragile track lifting-hole destroying things on the planet.

But then I do use a red hot poker for a fine tip!!

[Lardo Boffin]

It was either Shirley (who apparently had anger management issues) or Killed By Death lyrics. Maybe the latter would have been more multinational?

And not just over 55s!

Rubber key Spectrums have always seemed hard work. Just finished a +2A and that was really nice to work with. Even the tape player was easy to recap! And having just bought a Vectrex I need to do a lot of computers to pay for it. Don’t tell Mrs Boffin... Its just a spare TV dear!

[Moggy]

Hee hee !

Why are you replacing that ULA Lardo? I always liked the look of those later Ferranti jobbies.

The Vectrex now there's a strange beast. I have it on Pi emulation but cannot get to grips with it at all.


Moggy furiously scribbles letter to Mrs Lardo

[Lardo Boffin]

Hee hee !

Why are you replacing that ULA Lardo? I always liked the look of those later Ferranti jobbies.

I managed to buy a couple of vLA81s so it will end up as a 32K zeddy with composite mod the easy way.

It will then either be a spare for when I can get ZX8-CCBs again or if times are hard I could sell it.

[Moggy]

Sensible thinking.

I hope Karl can make some more of his boards soon because the home made thing is ok but you need the later back porch ULA and I find they never work well on modern LCD TV's.

Just as a side issue. When using those video boards I recently thought I'd try them with a switch wired in for the inverse video thing and was pleasantly surprised to see that it also turns the border inverse too and it makes quite a pleasant display with a hint of mock full screen inverse if you follow me, so might be something you may want to try your self.

It looks a bit crude and no doubt you could fashion something better but I just wanted to try a "proof of concept" on my workshop zeddy,which is fan cooled(thanks to your suggestion) with a X2 EPROM and can run happily all day without going tits up.