Adding more functionality to my USB -> IR RP2040 firmware to support Apricot wired mice as well, I was able to explore Apricot Activity on the Apricot PC!  

https://forgejo.crashtest.dev/jasonalexander-ja/apridapter

#aprilcot #apricot #apricotpc #actapricot #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing

That was a lot of work nothing; but in my defence, I, nor clearly anyone else in the Apricot community could not find ANY prior reference to LibDsk or dskconv in reference to Apricot/Apridisk on the internet apart from on the LibDsk website

https://www.seasip.info/Unix/LibDsk/

The source tree for LibDsk also contained a HTML file describing the Apridisk format, it turns it's just RAW, but every sector has a header, and there can be comment records, and some sectors can be RLE encoded, that makes converting them actually pretty easy

Using that as a reference, I was able to add support for Apridisk file formats directly into the Greaseweazle CLI client, meaning, you can now directly write out Apridisk formatted files (and thus, all on actapricot.org archive) using Greaseweazle using the flag `--format=apricot.single` or `apricot.double`

https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/pull/626

A far cry from spinning up a whole other DOS PC that was the Internet's generally accepted method previously  

And ofc, my Apricot PC is booting off of both drives without issue, and I got DR's GSX working which meant I was able to load Apricot's very own Activity GUI shell!

Now, I just need a mouse...

#aprilcot #apricot #apricotpc #actapricot #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing

I better continue this threat for #aprilcot

Full capacitor replacement later, I did a power on of the PSU and and the high pitched rhythmic clicking noise returned - ANNOYING

After checking and ruling out basically all of the active components, I was stumped, until prompted to try it under load, not wanting to hook the main board up just yet, I sourced some high power resistors, and bingo, clicking gone and voltage all normal

I had heard legends of PSUs that need to be under load, just managed to avoid them until now

Reassembling the machine and powering everything on, it works! And now on to boot disks...

So @elithebearded suggested I search through IA's Magazine Rack, which was a great idea. I found sources and one I hadn't seen before!

The first two I found in Byte Magazine, May and June 1985.
https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-byte-magazine-21533/1985%2005%20BYTE%2010-05%20Multiproces%20-%20Byte%20Magazine_21698/page/12/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/198506_Byte_Magazine_Vol_10-06_Programming_Techniques/page/202/mode/2up

The third I found in Creative Computing, May 1985.
https://archive.org/details/Creative_Computing_1985-05/page/n73/mode/2up

#Aprilcot

What's on tap this month? Well, I really want to get some larger storage on this thing. The original Rodime hard drive smoked the last time I plugged it in, and the chances of it lasting long are very small, even if I could get it working. I think it might be nice to learn how MFM actually works, and maybe even begin to design a cheap MFM emulator for all these old machines with broken hard drives, so I think I'm going in that direction.

But I have to be honest with y'all, available energy is limited lately on account of our ongoing descent into fascism. So it might be a more sparse #Aprilcot this year. But I hope we can still learn some things. :)

Windows 3 was a no-go, though. Doesn't work on 512K, apparently.

So definitely some goals for next #Aprilcot. Need a mouse, need more RAM, and still need some kind of hard drive emulation.