Ramtop Retro

@ramtopretro.bsky.social

Compulsive designer of hardware, owner of far too many old computers. www.ramtop-retro.uk

Lots of negativity about the price of the steam machine and PC hardware, but this is like a reversion to how it was 30+ years ago. In 1992 when I bought an Amiga 1200, accelerator/RAM card, and a hard drive it cost £670 or about £1500 today. Maybe cheap hardware was the anomaly, not the norm.

This might not look like much, but it's 149KB of uncompressed VGM data streaming from disk on a BBC Micro with a total of 32KB of memory. Next I'll add the inflate decompression to the streaming and hopefully playback to the SN76489. 🤞

Atari Missile Command for the Acorn Electron + 16k of sideways RAM. Progress remains good, moving as much as possible out of the main memory map into the SWR memory space to get the fastest speed possible. No sound at present, going to be a challenge to emulate a POKEY chip on here.

Multi-part tunes via SWRAM banks are now working on the BBC Micro Music Player & Driver. I can finally play lengthy conversions such as Rob Hubbard's epic Knucklebusters track at nearly 17 minutes. Time to put some new music disks together...