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You just beat me to it - I don't have a hot plate for uniformly warming the PCB with but if you have a hot-air wand of the sort that you would typically use for SMD rework, toasting the underside of a double sided PCB in a good radius around the work area makes it a lot easier for your...

If I remember correctly the built in 'RS232' port on the +2 just uses two regular parallel I/O port pins (part of the sound chip?) so the RS232 input and output are effectively 'bit-banged' in firmware. It can only really receive RS232 characters or transmit them, but not both at the same time...

Assuming that's an SMPSU, the big RIFA could be part of the start-up chain* although they are more typically low value electrolytics in that position: They are often mounted near hot-running devices and evetually dry out as they don't have a lot of electrolyte to lose. Maybe someone decided, in...

My then friend over the road had both a BBC B and an Amstrad CPC 6128 (CPC with a disk drive) - his family had a little bit more money to throw around than mine did ;). I do like the Amstrad machines when they aren't masquerading as something else. Fun fact: In the Shetland Islands, Scotland...

I wasn't even aware that +128K upgrade existed - I own two Spectrums, my original 48K rubber-key specimen and also a Spectrum 128K+2 which I bought during the dying months of my long love affair with Sinclair which had begun with the MK14, but I was finally seduced away by the Atari ST not long...

Unfortunately that is what we Brits would consider to be a vast distance (hundreds of miles) away from me, sorry - had she been somewhere up in the north east of England I might have been able to put out feelers for one available locally. It would obviously be too late now anyway. I will say...

Verault, which area in the UK (roughly - which county?) is / was your wife due to be visiting? Not asking for door number / street name, just wondering if it might be possible to find you a BBC B in the area she's coming to, if indeed she is still coming.

I'm wondering if the original 5-pin socket broke at some point in the unit's history and was replaced with what the repairer had handy (a 7-pin PCB mount socket) - pins 1-5 would still be in the correct places and the extra two socket holes wouldn't prevent a 5-DIN plug from being plugged in. I...

Add to this, gadgets which insist you install a smartphone app in order to configure / connect them - smart speakers, smart house controllers, things like that, rarely if ever offer a PC-based version of their configuration 'app'. It's not just apps, though, it's the 'Mobilisation' of websites...

Looking in from the UK here - there are a quite a few retro computer people in the 'vintage computing' subsection of the UK Vintage Wireless forum here:- https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/index.php I've alerted them to your thread but so far this system is as much a mystery to us as it is to...

Mine has worked ever since it was repaired back in 1986 (... I shouldn't really jinx it by saying that, should I?) but that is something worth my writing down on the circuit diagram for the future. Well done to all concerned.

Forgot to add. When I bought my (seemingly identical) Philips CM8524 back in around 1986, I found that it did not work in RGB mode, only in composite mode. As it was under warranty I took it back, it was repaired by the retailer's off site repair shop and came back working. As I wasn't involved...

Bear in mind that Arn_K said in the initial post that while the 1081 does not work with his Amiga, it does work with his Nintendo so it would be useful to know whether the connection from the Nintendo to the SCART connector is: -Composite only Or -Composite + RGB, with the composite signal in...

My first question would be whether your lead / cable which works with the 1084 is wired for composite video only or for RGB and composite video, or for RGB + composite sync only? The effect you have on screen looks, potentially, as though the monitor is expecting an RGB signal -only- but is...

I interpret this as meaning that he has substituted the original 901887-01 ROM with an EPROM + Adaptor, but is now seeking an actual replacement ROM. The problem is that these devices weren't programmable, the masked-ROM program code was 'baked in' at the point of manufacture of the chip so...

Did you mean R752 / R753? If those resistors have failed it is not a bad idea to also replace C753 even if replacing the two resistors (only) does get the monitor back up and running. I saw a recent case where the resistors soon failed again due to C753 breaking down under 'realistic' operating...

That seems very close to what Divarin is looking for...

The initial line-translator / line enterer, once got working, could then be the core subroutine in a program which reads multiple lines from a text file and parses them one after the other. A 'soft' translator from 'English' ZX81 code to Tokenized ZX81 code sounds to me like a job for some PC...

Yep, I was at work then and only glanced at the OP's post at the time. That obviously was what he meant. I think the problem is that you would ideally want an intelligent editor which does the same sort of real time syntax checking as the ZX81's own editor so you can't enter a syntaxially...

I didn't follow the above link but there are several ZX81 emulators available, all of which obviously run on PCs. Being ZX81 emulators they will obviously emulate the tortuous single-key keyword entry of the original machine whereas I'm wondering if what you really want is something which lets...