Hello from Chesterfield

[Lardo Boffin]

Hello all

I’m new to the world of the MTX (but have various add ons for my ZX81) - back in the day we had Sinclairs and then a BBC Model B which we managed to persuade the folks to get based on its educational value. And to be honest I owe my IT career to my beeb.

I recently saw a reasonably priced 512 on a popular auction site and having lusted over them in magazine adverts BITD (somehow they just looked like ‘proper’ serious computers) I decided to go for it. It was untested but luckily worked pretty much straight out of the box, well, poly inserts, no sleeve.

Thanks to advice from Mark on Stardot I have changed the three main caps that may need doing and also changed the link on the video board so I now have a lovely colour composite picture - it was black and white when I got it and the RF is a bit dodgy.

I wasn’t actually going to register on here straight away as given the lack of freely available mass storage devices I didn’t think I would be using it much initially but a REMEOriser has just ‘fallen into my lap’ so here I am! Doubtless with a million questions to follow once I am set up...

My main interest at the mo is programming - currently I am learning Hisoft C on my Tatung Einstein but this has a number of issues:

The keyboard is a little flaky, especially the CTRL key, which is a nightmare for control code driven development.
The 80 column card is great but only has 20 or so rows which makes writing stuff on it difficult.
Its huge. It takes up most of my desk!

It looks like a combo of the MTX and REMOMORiser may solve many or all of these problems, especially with the 80 by 48 VGA output.

[Dave]

HI,

welcome to the forum.

I'm sure that you'll enjoy the MTX and REMEMORizer, but it's not true to say that there is a "lack of freely available mass storage devices" - it's not free, but CFX is readily available

Feel free to ask any questions as you start to get to grips with the MTX.

On the keyboard, the keys can very often be recovered with a bit of "exercise" - i.e., vigorous "bashing" to clear off years of accumulated grime on the leaf spring contacts. If that doesn't work, it is relatively easy to change a key or two . . . .

http://primrosebank.net/computers/mtx/r ... yboard.htm

regards
Dave

[gunrock]

Hi there!

Welcome to the boards.

Interestingly, I was reading some of your posts over on a Tatung Einstein board, just recently, as being a Memotech owner has sparked my interest in other Z80 + TMS99xx systems.

This is an excellent community and a great machine.

Steve

[1024MAK]

Hah! Welcome Lardo to the forum of the best looking 1980s home computer

Glad you could make it

Now you can ask all your Memotech questions where there are various members who can help you, rather than just me

Mark

[Lardo Boffin]

Hah! Welcome Lardo to the forum of the best looking 1980s home computer


Mark

Not just the 80’s I would have said. Very few manufacturers put any effort into looks even now.

[Martin A]

Welcome

Andy's put an extra 48 row mode support in Rememorizor, and supplies a patched newword (N48.COM) to use it. Useful for editing files, though I'd be the first to admit developing mostly on more modern systems, and then pushing it to the CFX for testing on the MTX.

From Andy's site:

ACRT is the 80 column card driver. This has been modified so that it knows that the REMEMOrizer screen buffer has 4096 character cells (rather than the 2048 in a normal card). It also supports a new 80x48 mode as well as the 80x24 mode. It provides new escape codes ^[Y and ^[Z to switch into 80x24 or 80x48 mode

Dave will hate me for mentioning this, but I put the design for a DIY CF interface here:
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=386

Of course being the bare minimum it lacks features compared to just about any other "disc" system.

[Dave]

Dave will hate me for mentioning this, but I put the design for a DIY CF interface here:
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=386

Of course being the bare minimum it lacks features compared to just about any other "disc" system.

I don't hate you for mentioning it - well, not too much anyway

It's not quite as "readily available" as CFX though !

[Lardo Boffin]

Looks like I’m in business!

8D33D904-2D67-4CBE-A132-1C01340C2741.jpeg (3.04 MiB) Viewed 29160 times

[gunrock]

Yay-hey, way to go. Congrats.

[Lardo Boffin]

Well, nearly in business. In spite of being careful the keyboard ribbon has given up so I will have to replace that. Time to order some DuPont leads I guess.