retrohax.net

… another round of small hax that I did over the past few weeks.

Desoldering station

Some time ago, I’ve bought a cheap desoldering station to conveniently desolder DIP packaged chips from retro computer motherboards.
Here is how it works.

Obviously, I had to add some hax to improve it a bit 😀

The first thing that I had to replace, was a spring inside a solder collection chamber. The original spring was a bit crappy and didn’t work as should – at least for me:)
I’ve installed a new one that is thicker and allowed me to add another hack.



Now, that “another hack” is simply a cut and bent brass coin. When molten solder enters the collection chamber it simply hits that coin and quickly solidifies.

Here is how it looks assembled with a filter made out of a handkerchief 😀

Grey ZX Spectrum +2 ghosting fix

I’ve covered my work on Grey Speccy +2 in one of my previous posts
I did quite a few video improvements there but I was still waiting for the final parts to come. Here is my last mod that fixes the ghosting effect.

Before fix.









After applying a fix.

The fix itself consists of two 22pF ceramic capacitors connected in parallel with a 15uH inductor in series to caps. This serves as a filter and is soldered directly on TEA2000 like on a photo below

3D printed brackets for C64c keyboard

Here is a nice 3D-printed replacement for C64c keyboard brackets. When treated with acetone it becomes quite strong.

C64 FlashROM PLA

I did a PCB for C64 PLA chip replacement.
I’ve figured that flash chips can be used as an alternative to EPROM. It is not a perfect replacement but it works with the most popular software.

C64 Breadbin case fix

Very often, the C64 Breadbin case has broken or missing brackets. Recently, I’ve found a cool solution to it –
brackets made out of a popular paper clip 🙂

Out of a single paper clip, I was able to make four “brackets” – two larger and two smaller.



Here is a closeup on a larger one.

Now the trick is to heat it up with a small blowtorch, quickly push it into place using pliers and align it with other brackets









Here is how the finished “bracket” looks.

That’s it, see you next time 🙂

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