I have no idea how long this surge of motivation will last, so I'm capitalizing while I still can.
I tracked down my old 8-bit sound card, which happens to be in storage down in Florida. So until I manage to make a road trip that direction to retrieve it, I'll have to continue my plans for legacy gaming bliss via other means. I've got a couple of leads on potential candidates, though, so that's not a major setback.
The big sticking point right now is finding a hard drive. I was originally thinking of going for one that's smaller than 2GB (so DOS can recognize it) but now I'm pondering an alternate approach. I've got a spare hard drive from an Xbox that should work; if I partition it right, I can have several DOS drives plus a bootable Windows/Linux partition that I can use for heavy-duty stuff. For instance, a Linux install would let me easily take advantage of a network card for installing games and such via the LAN rather than floppy disk, which would be pure bliss.
I just have to get around to doing all of that.
The homebrew console is moving forward apace; the Molex ribbon connectors for the LCD should arrive tomorrow, and a voltage regulator IC on Monday. I've also got an RCA composite video jack on the way in the same bundle, so sometime early next week I should be able to get the panel powered up and receiving a video signal. That'll pass my first major milestone and let me move on to the really fun bit - playing with microcontrollers.
The other thing I need to do today is pick up another cheap-o 15" monitor. This will let me hook up all these headless machines I have floating around. Most importantly, it'll give me a way to finally look at Milton and figure out why it isn't responding to the network anymore.
Milton, you see, is the server that runs the Epoch web site. And once I get Milton fixed, I can ditch the POS wiki software that's on there and install MediaWiki, which means the Epoch project can finally get moving again.
I could get used to all this getting-stuff-done business.
