Jason Oakley's blog

Improving nVidia 3090

Posted by Jason Oakley on June 1, 2021 1 comment

I bought a Gigabyte nVidia 3090 card a couple of weeks ago. I know.. I know.. quite expensive, but you see.. nVidia are going to gimp their 3xxx series cards from crypto and I needed to get in as soon as I could.
I went to a dozen or more online computer shops and saw a few cards around. The cheapest was about $2,300.
I decided to sleep on it and the next morning I made my decision. Logged onto many sites and 99% of them had no cards. I ended up getting one from UMart for $2,700AUD! Ack!

Oh well. I know I’ll make it back easily enough.
I’ve been using NiceHash. It’s probably the easiest way to mine and it just works and works well.
NiceHash lets you transfer to CoinBase for free, so that’s also very handy.
Even more handier now I know the website I buy my vaping stuff from The Vape Store supports CoinBase. I can withdraw my Bitcoin from NiceHash to CoinBase for free and pay for my purchases using Bitcoin! Epic! 🙂

TRSE Demo for VZ200

Posted by Jason Oakley on September 5, 2021 No comments

I’ve added in support for non-destructable sprites and fixed a few other things (one with the help of Leslie Ayling on the VZ200 Facebook group, THANKS!) 🙂
You can write text, draw sprites, make sounds, etc using Turbo Rascal Syntax Error.
Next, I need to work out support for joysticks and reading keys held down. (You can currently scan for keyboard presses using ROM Calls but this is not efficient and doesn’t work too well for games).

Turbo Rascal Syntax Error “;” expected but BEGIN

Posted by Jason Oakley on August 29, 2021 No comments

This past week I became interested in this funky development environment called TRSE. They have written a (mostly) Pascal compiler and IDE, etc for 8-bit and 16-bit computers. I noticed they had not covered the Dick Smith VZ200 which was my first love in computers, so I asked how hard it’d be to add another Z80 computer.