Robin Kay's Web Site

Eben Upton Quotes

29 February, 2024

Sometime last year I read a quote from Eben Upton, one of the creators of the Raspberry Pi, which really intrigued me. Foolishly however, rather than save the URL for future reference, I merely committed to memory the fact that the article contained the phrase quote “Eben Upton told CNN” and trusted that I would be able to find it again via the miracle of search engines1. Upon attempting retrieval, I couldn’t find the quote as I had remembered it.

JMC: Menu of the Future - Part 3

22 January, 2024

This is part 3 in a series about implementing Japanese Military Chess for the BBC Micro. See part 1 here . Menu of the Future A lot of classic games for the BBC Micro adhere to a well established pattern as far as the pre-game experience goes. One or more MODE 7 screens containing instructions and flavour text that you must “press any key to continue” through until the game starts.

JMC: Enter the Tubes - Part 2

3 January, 2024

This is part 2 in a series about implementing Japanese Military Chess for the BBC Micro. See part 1 here . Enter the Tubes On my mind from the start of this project was the potential to support running on the 6502 Second Processor. The BBC Micro has support for connecting to additional processors via a message passing interface called the Tube. A number of different additional processors were supported by the Tube, including the first ARM chips, but the most interesting one, to me, is the ability to add a second 6502 processor clocked at a higher speed.

JMC: Japanese Military Chess for the BBC Micro - Part 1

31 December, 2023

Introduction In the course of acquiring a working BBC Master, I’ve ended up with two working BBC Masters because what can you do with a precious albeit broken piece of computing history other than get it repaired? The sacrilege of people who turn classic Macintoshes into fish tanks aside. Anyway, the only logical thing to do at this point is to network them together with Econet, Acorn’s vintage local area networking technology.

A New Hope: 2024

31 December, 2023

I read somewhere that you’re more likely to savour the passage of time and achieve your goals if you write things down. So, here are my resolutions for 2024: