Haha, you must have shivered when you read the topic title! ;)

Well, not any piece of Commodore equipment is going to enter my front door, but last saturday at the Bonami retro gamecomputer fair I talk to some dude who invited me for another yearly show with many retro-systems.
He's an organizer of the Commodore user community, so if I'm going to visit that event, I am sort of joining Commodore, you see...

Well, Bonami was lot's of fun last saturday.
Anyone who likes any kind of retro computer should have been there, although most people having rent some tables were just selling cartridges (Nintendo, Sega, you know).

But the special aspect of this day was that many consoles and computers were playable, even my beloved transperent Spectrum-in-a-plexiglass-case with Kempston Mouse Turbo, PC Keyboard interface and DivIDE.

Here are some pictures:













Here's my table with left a small TV with Spectrum +2, MB02 and KMT attached, running some demos.
In the middle my laptop (well, my boss's) showing some video's and emulators.
And of course the transparent case at the right with 20" TFT ;)

I'm not on any picture :(

So, tonight I'm packing my bags, or flightcases to be precise, to take of early in the morning to Harderwijk here in Holland, where the Bonami Retro-gamecomputer fair will be held.

I'm told there are 95 tables where lot's of different brands will be represented.
Of course I will tell everyone the ZX Spectrum is the best computer in the world!

I've created some flyers with info about the MB02, PCKI and KMT, and links to Raww.org, WoS and Pouet.net.
Anyone else want to be listed there?

My camera will accompany me, so tomorrow you will see if the fair was more than a nerd-only place to be ;)

Offtopic:

I just opened as new website about solid state drive s, or: ssd's.
The site will be filled with a list of all ssd's on the market, including their specs, but will also contain lot's of links to reviews, benchmarks and price lists.

Click here to visit www.SsdWorld.Net!

If you like it or not: I'm going to create a new website that will be dedicated to everything that's happening around the MB02.

There's such a lot of information on the web, but mostly on the most exotic places or corners of websites, that I believe it's very nice to have a collection site with links to all of them and have information about all the developments going on at the moment.

It will not be a copy of sites, forums etc, but more a start place to be able to connect information on different site together.

Also I have received hundreds of emails in the past about the MB02, with info I'm sure of is nowhere on the web.

So, start clicking to:

The new MB02 website

After some discussing with Ingo, Miguel and others I did some modifications on the PC keyboard interface.
Here's the result:


Another way of handling /IORQ
The resistor R1 is removed which used /IORQ on a 'dirty' way to enable the 541.
A second BC337 transistor is added with it's base connected to the /IORQ signal (left pin of the removed R1), with collector and emitter connected to the collector and emitter of the other BC337 already present.
Then a pull-down resistor is added to emitter of both transistors.

Lowering the load on D0..D5
Also 5 smd resistors are added to the outputs of the 541, so the interface does not do a high load; I saw this was also done on the Kempston Mouse Turbo. Don't know if it will ever make a difference.

I must have the new logic described in words somewhere, but hey, it works ;)

By the way, I'm not ready experimenting with the MB02 + PCKI compatibility problem yet.
It seems the PCKI is not the main cause, but the distance between Spectrum and MB02 causes a lot of problems.
Especially with the 128K heatsink model which has a very poor clock signal, according to Ingo.