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Paul Rickards

@paulrickards.bsky.social

3.4K followers 160 following 410 posts

Artist exploring vintage pen plotters with modern code. Retrocomputing repair and collecting. Mixes the best of new and old. He/him #penplotter #c64 🏳️‍🌈 My blog: https://biosrhythm.com/ My shop: https://shop.paulrickards.com/

biosrhythm.com

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Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · 23d

🐖 Start pig-mode?

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Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · 24d

Today's plotter weather 🌧️

#PenPlotter

A tiny pen plotter in a colorful plastic case with receipt paper drawing the current and forecast weather with weather icons and temperatures in black ink.

A plotted page of current and forecast weather on 2.25" wide receipt paper in black ink.

A plotted page of current and forecast weather on 2.25" wide receipt paper in black ink on top of a wide tractor feed green bar paper with an ASCII Snoopy and a part of the 2025 calendar.

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Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · 25d

Check out my Only Fans page! 😏

#PenPlotter

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Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · 26d

Did you know the Amiga Kickstart boot screen is stored as vector data? It uses 412 bytes. 💾

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Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · 28d

It’s plain paper, not thermal so all good.

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · 29d

It's my Lisa Clone 😊

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · 29d

Over the past week, I built a new tiny #PenPlotter with a vintage ALPS 2.25" mechanism! It sports a 3D printed snap-fit case, receipt paper holder, speaks GRBL over WiFi, 18650 battery w USB-C recharge, and a color scheme borrowed from the JLPGA PowerBook 170.

A tiny pen plotter housed in three increasingly sized plastic boxes of red, blue, and yellow. A white top with buttons and paper coming out show the text Hello, World and a differential growth pattern drawn on it.

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Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Sep 4

In my own research, I think it was simply a batch script that type'd two text files, pausing with "ask.com" in between. Ask uses the prompt "Strike any key when ready ..." which is seen in the movie.

ceis.be/wp-content/u...

ceis.be

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Sep 4

Someone comes along later to look for a leaflet.

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Sep 4

Later we'll hack some ATMs.. easy money..

An Atari Portfolio showing the infamous "PIN IDENTIFICATION" program from Terminator 2.

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Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Sep 4

Putting Zork 1 on my Atari Portfolio for some gaming on the go.

An Atari Portfolio computer with a serial interface. On the screen is a terminal program XTerm downloading "zork1.dat" showing progress as dots.

An Atari Portfolio running Zork 1. On the monochrome screen it says "West of House. You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here." There's a > prompt and a flashing cursor at the bottom of the screen.

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Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Sep 3

A gift from a friend. ❤️ My friends know me all too well.

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Sep 1

Logic probe or scope and see if there’s a clock and the CPU is running code? Can you burn the original firmware that came with it back onto the ERPROMs?

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Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Sep 1

Interesting. Your motherboard seems to be a different revision. I’ve only seen 5 EPROMs in a row and only 5 sockets.

Bottom of a DisplayPhone with the trap door off showing the circuit board and ICs.

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Sep 1

Can you take a picture of the bottom where the firmware ROMs are located?

Have you tried verifying the EPROMs?

Does it work when you put the original EPROMs back in?

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Aug 30

My #AppleLisaClone has a new front panel! I got one of the new Lisa 1+2 hybrid panels from Mac Effects, courtesy of @rectapete.bsky.social

I moved the iPad LCD panel over to it and added some custom 3D printed CRT bezel gap fillers to fit the curve.

Close up of the Lisa screen showing the iPad 1 LCD screen with a black 3D printed bezel CRT curve gap filler. The screen is showing the Lisa POST.

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Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Aug 25

I’ve got 7 of them right next to me

A stack and of rainbow color 3D printed floppy cassettes which are obviously neither.

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Aug 24

This might be what you're looking for.

github.com/TheMiniDrive...

GitHub - TheMiniDriver/mac-plus-mouse-usb

Contribute to TheMiniDriver/mac-plus-mouse-usb development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Aug 21

Lots of IO. Audio is all built in. Video inputs from 3 card slots. I have two SD cards and a PC/VGA card. There were also HD capable cards.

Each SD card has three 1394/400 ports: two for DV input and one for HD. You can playback or record PGM and both inputs from the card simultaneously as AVI/DV.

Photo of the rear of the Anycast showing lots of audio and video input and output ports including XLR, RCA, BNC, VGA, S-Video, and 1394.

A single SD video input card on a table.

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Aug 20

Rate my battlestation!

This is a Sony Anycast Station AWS-G500HD from 2007. It's essentially a Sony luggable PIII 933Mhz PC that runs Linux 2.4.20 with a ton of FPGAs to do the heavy lifting of a video switcher. Plus glorious physical buttons, faders, dials, and removable keyboard. And a jog wheel.

A Sony laptop-style computer cosplaying as a video production switcher with keyboard, buttons, sliders, and dials on the bottom and a LCD on the top showing several windows of different video sources including "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles, Look Around You: Maths, a Lisa sales pitch video, and a rotating cube.

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Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Aug 20

Interesting! I'm not sure how that would work since that seems like it would map things into different locations in memory unless its more clever than that. Look forward to you powering it up.

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Aug 18

Moody disjointed EA logo in KPT Bryce, MacOS 9

Screenshot from Mac OS 9 showing KPT Bryce software interface with a dim rendering of some mountains and misty purple water with a cube, sphere, and pyramid floating above.

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Aug 17

👀

Screenshot of xeyes looking up to the X windows X mouse pointer.

Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Aug 17

It's an "install an old version of Linux" kind of day. TWM really takes me back..

#RetroComputing

Screenshot of a Linux X-Window session with the Tab Window Manager with several apps open including xterm, Netscape, xcalc, xbiff, and xclock. The color scheme is a simple white, black, and light cyan.

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Paul Rickards @paulrickards.bsky.social · Aug 17

There is a battery— it’s the black rectangle that says Data Sentry. I removed the ones from mine, no leakage.