Update on the Apricot IR hackerying

Managed to make the USB HID stack library I was using work nicely with USB mice, and now we have a pretty fully functional USB mouse adaptor (which was my end goals )

#apricotportable #apricotpc #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #dos #msdos #vintagelaptops

Update on the Apricot IR work, after flailing around with USB HID host stack on the RP2040 I was able to get a rudimentary USB Keyboard -> Apricot IR adaptor

Needs more work, this is more of a quick PoC I made by editing the example code, but I hope to make this into a full USB KB + Mouse adaptor

https://forgejo.crashtest.dev/jasonalexander-ja/pico-hid-experiments/src/branch/main/cross/rp2040-w5500-rtic2/src/bin/rp2040-usb-hid-boot-keyboard.rs

#apricotportable #apricotpc #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #dos #msdos #vintagelaptops

I have made what I believe to be the worlds first Kempston joystick to Apricot IR keyboard adaptor

#apricotportable #apricotpc #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #dos #msdos #vintagelaptops

Acquired an Apricot Portable a while ago, but sadly ran into an issue, it seems electrically OK, but, the heads were completely broken off in the floppy drive, which caused several problems being that this is a single drive device with no kind of fixed disk.

To compound this, the drive model is an early Sony 3.5 inch drive, OA-D32W, in which broken heads are quite regular due to them being stuck down on the disk when ejecting, and being early drives, they're very irregular and so really need to be replaced like for like, so it took a number of years to finally come across one on eBay in a working state and for a price that I was willing to pay, which thankfully happened on Friday, so as of this morning, I have a working, booting Apricot Portable!

#apricotportable #apricotpc #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #dos #msdos #vintagelaptops