2021 Vintage plans, and 2020 lessons learned.

[lowen]

One of the neat things about being a member of this group, is to read the huge variety of projects being worked on by so many various people. Reading the progress of various projects for vintage systems of every stripe is rewarding in its own way to me. And so I'd like to read more about what people have planned for 2021, and the lessons learned from the train wreck that was 2020.

I'll seed this: I have downsized my list of things I want to work on significantly, thanks to the lessons of 2020:

1. Hard disk booting for LS-DOS 6.3.1 on the Model II/12
2. Z280 speedup experiments, using ZZRCC as a base
3. Z380 TRS-80 Model 4P compatible board, with as close to 100% compatibility as possible.
4. Build up a TRS-80 Model 12 with 68000 card and new design RAM card.
5. See if I can help get FreHD for Eight (F48) working with Xenix.

I'm setting a hard limit of five items in my list; things that I had previously worked on (an eZ80 'super TRS-80' is the big one; this one would be really fun but the users want 100% Model III/4 compatibility, and that's never going to happen with eZ80).

Lessons learned from 2020:

1. Always leave time headroom in your plans; down the overcommit trail lies pain, and you never know when a pandemic may put your whole life in a tailspin.
2. Don't overcommit.
3. Don't overcommit. (see a pattern there?)
4. Listen to what people actually want, and state more clearly what you're not just willing but actually have time and ability to do, and leave nothing to assumption; assumptions and misunderstandings of timelines and obligations can rupture friendships and other relationships.
5. Zilog made some really weird moves with the Z80 line; it's the same lesson about not overcommitting that they should have heeded, as Z800 (which became the semi-successful but very late Z280) was an epic fail because of overcommit. Overcommitting is easy to do! But the mystery of why eZ80 is so tantalizingly close to Z80 upward-compatible except in the ways that really matter to using eZ80 as a 'super-Z80' - but then again, maybe they just didn't want that market. Others learned this lesson about Zilog long ago; my foray into trying to engineer an eZ80 system that would be upwardly-compatible with the TRS-80 III/4 line was very disappointing; the eZ80F91, the chip chosen, is a great chip that's FAST and has lots of great features, but has what I consider to be a severe bug in the handling of internal I/O devices that could 'accidentally' get used instead of an external device if the programmer isn't super careful and pays attention to the eZ80 behavior, which means existing programs may not run, which is the point of the whole exercise; and I've invested $$$$ in eZ80 development items for that project; $ and time down the drain I guess, other than the lessons learned.

Looking forward to reading others experiences, especially on the lessons of 2020 and how it's impacted your hobby.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

So, my list for 2021 shakes out something like this:

1. Build a complete "working" computer based on the video dingus I've been futzing around with the last couple months. I've never built a computer *completely* from the ground-up before, I'm overdue.
2. Make at least a token effort to actually write some software for the resulting computer and/or, super-optimistically, see if I can interest anyone else in making their own copies of it.
3. Having scratched that itch try to complete at least one of these two tasks:
   • See if it's actually possible to building an XTIDE card for the kind-of-basket-case PC Convertible. (It needs a fair amount of love as a prerequisite) or
   • Restore the Northstar that got me running off to make my own low-fi video card to the point that it boots and runs, at least in some capacity.
4. In the "maybe" bucket is possibly seeing if there's any value in leveraging the stuff I cooked up for my goofy Tandy 1000 EX/HX expansion cards for... something? I'm kind of proud of some of the stuff I came up with, like the HX ROM override thing, but... I also have only limited bandwidth in my life and maybe Tandy 1000 expansion cards are totally last year now.

As for lessons from 2020, I dunno.

1. You'd think that being trapped in the house more than usual would give you more hobby time. No. Being trapped at home in a pandemic with a thousand worries might mean less hobby time, at least when your hobby is something like this, because stuff is going down and brain is often too done dealing with it all to think complex thoughts.
2. (A complex soul-searching thing that I can't seem to find the right words for so I'll skip it. Musings on what the "fun parts" are and how keeping inside the borders occasionally requires some deep breaths and attitude adjustments.)
3. If you can buy a chip new at a reasonable price don't get it from Aliexpress, those are the fake ones. But if it's obsolete then their tinned-up pimped-out refurb chips are probably fine.
4. If you keep buying things in lots of 10 or 20 because that costs hardly more than buying the one or two you actually need just for *you* you're going to end up with a cabinet full of extra things unless you're a way better salesman than I am. (You could hardly be worse, I guess.)