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Ben's Hobbies - Selling nice stuff on eBay
Selling nice stuff on eBay 
Sunday, January 22, 2012, 07:24 AM
Keep an eye on my eBay channel: http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/quantit/m.html

I am offering lot's of rare sets the coming weeks.
On right now: a very complete boxed ZX81 set!

These are some of the items you can expect the coming weeks:
- Boxed 128K heatsink ZX Spectrums (yes, more than one)
- Opus Discovery disk systems (again, more than one)
- Disciple disk interfaces (unbelievable, even more than one of these)
- Lot's of 48K ZX Spectrums
- Interface 1 + Microdrive sets
- Original ROM game-cartridges
- ZX81 sets
- And much more....

So, put my eBay channel in your browsers favorites to not miss one of these incredible offers!

Hires Opus Discovery board pictures 
Thursday, December 1, 2011, 12:38 PM
As I had the rare and awesome opportunity to be able to buy 5 or 6 Opus Discovery interfaces this year, and because I couldn't find hires pics of the board on Google, I thought it was time to upload some myself.

Here's a video in which I'm dissassembling a floppydrive from an Opus because I forgot to set the driveselect correctly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjvzLBlzDgY

Here they are pics (click for hires):









Some problems I had to repair with these Opus Discovery interfaces were:
- defective rectifier
- defective ROM
- one didn't have a 6116 ram chip, don't know if it is needed, but I ordered one anyway
- one had a defective WD1770 floppy controller; replaced it with a WD1772 from an Atari ST: another model but pincompatible, and that worked great!
- one floppydrive failed, but luckally that Opus had two! Only needed to make a bracket to cover the space
- the soldered wires on the 'flying' LM317's come off easily with some movement: very frustrating when you are repairing an interface...

I encountered these interesting things:
- two had a rom v2.2 (one even had a paper with rom changes, but I didn't scan it, sorry!); the lowest rom version I found was 2.1, probably the default factory-rom
- I had one large filled floppybox with about 40 floppies filled with data; very rare to have owned as all others had only one or two or no floppies at all
- there are some different ways of how the voltage regulators are mounted
- there are some different board versions, haven't checked for numbers

This seems a lot of trouble, but believe me: ZX Spectrums fail a lot more and at a lot of more parts.

All together the Opus Discovery is a very solid system, which still works after so many years!
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Playing the ZX Spectrum laserharp at a retrocomputer fair 
Saturday, November 5, 2011, 10:43 AM
I visited the Dutch C64 fair where also fanatics of MSX, Sinclair, Atari and other brands were present.

I brought my laserharp, here's a video (click on pic):




Stereo sound enhancement for any 128K ZX Spectrum model available 
Thursday, September 22, 2011, 08:16 PM
I just opened a new topic on World of Spectrum (click here) with info about ordering the new stereo sound enhancement.

It's a complete kit including stereo audio output socket and switch to choose between ABC and ACB sound.
All is explained in this manual (click here).



Yamaha DB60XG wavetable card on my ZX Spectrum  
Sunday, August 21, 2011, 01:03 PM
I managed to connect a DB60XG wavetable card to my 'Laserharp' ZX
Spectrum.
So that is also the function: to create sound for my
laserharp (look at my Youtube videos).

It took some hours to get this working as the DB60XG somehow needs a reset after it's powered on.
Then the second thing it needs is a GM initialisation.

I'm trying out different sounds in this video. The setup was for prototyping only. I will build the electronics into a case together with the DB60XG.

Here's a video of the setup working:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zGFNfNAVXw

Some pics:










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