Tales from four decades in the Sinclair aftermarket: Parts, upgrades and party tricks RWAP Software has been offering parts and upgrades for Sinclair Research computers since the mid-1980s. Owner Rich Mellor talked to El Reg about what got him into the business, what's kept him interested, as well as his new product – which is a very different beast. While Commodore and Atari dominated the US market, in …
I too owe my career to Sinclair, the ZX81. In fact I was saved by it, I was definitely going in the wrong direction before a teacher introduced me to the little black plastic wedge. Forget BBC Micro, they were Apple money for their time, no chance I was getting near one of those.
I recovered and renovated that ZX81. It now works with a replacement tuner for modern monitors and a ZXpand unit for all IO and holds virtually every ZX81 software title that ever existed. Thanks to people who are the subject of this aRegister piece.
The impact of that effort by Clive to get the micro into more hands should not be underestimated.
The QL was hit and miss whether it was reliable - my first one was delivered in 1985, I used it for 12 months then returned it under warranty.
It was replaced (as John Menzies lost the original) and that continued to serve me well into the 90s when I put it into a PC tower complete with ED floppy disk drives (3.2MB storage - wow), a hard disk and 4MB Gold Card expansion.
I only sold that when I decided to upgrade to an Aurora motherboard, which offered higher resolution graphics!
That wizardry with printers and a PI is a very very clever idea. It's going to save companies millions if they know about it. Excellent work!
Sure there's alot more that tech like that could do for old systems that work and cost a lot to replace, thinking CAM machiens etc. Wonder if it's a relatively simple translation it could be done on a PiZero?
Many thanks for your interest - yes, the Raspberry Pi has proved to be a useful tool in many technologies.
It always makes me smile to think that the Printer Emulator I wrote for the Pi is only my second C program - the first one I wrote (in about 1989) was actually a printer driver for the Sinclair QL to provide the hi resolution page dumps which had been added to the ESC/P2 standard.
Talk about a circular economy !
I remember seeing an editorial in Personal Computer World in around 1992 describing something similar to the Retro-Printer - a hardware device that interpreted a well-known set of printer codes and rendered them on a modern device. This was in the days when every DOS program needed its own printer driver.
Are you mental? In school playgrounds across the UK, the fight was C64 or Spectrum, C64 was easily as popular and no-one wanted Spectrum in wider Europe, they wanted C64. Atari and Commodore suggested it out in the US because they could afford disk drives and we could not.
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