Why?

Why do I do this to myself?

I've been meaning to start on the ZX Spectrum Compact Flash project for a while now. This site has some great stuff. Pera Putnik is a bit of a star in my humble opinion.

First things first - the terror inducing removal of the incumbent spectrum ROM with a Dremel cut-off disk. No pictures of this process exist as it's so fraught that taking a snap is all but impossible even with the most advanced image stabilisation techniques. The process is thus: (I'm shaking jut thinking about writing it..)

Cut through legs at top of ROM with Dremel. Remove remainder of legs with iron, wick and sucker. Solder in socket. Insert ROM. Relax.



The wire here is A14, I've used a 32k EPROM with 2 images burned in; the regular ROM and PP's CF OS. There's a splendid video that shows the thing in action. I can swap between the 2 with a simple flick of a switch.

Pictured below is a SparkFun CF Breakout board connected to some protoboard with pin headers. The edge connector there is soldered on one side, and I made connections to the second, floating row of pins using some 90 degree header. Click the pictures for the full resolution horror.





This hangs off the back of the spectrum. Now all I have to do is wire it.



Blisters aside, it's getting harder to do stuff like this as my old eyes are gradually losing their ability to focus at close range. It was fun though. And I've had an idea about a soldering station with built-in magnifier...

Now all I have to do is get it to work!

...

Cult of Done

Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.

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