Linux

Batocera and LCDProc

To finish off a retro PC running Batocera, I purchased a second hand Alutek case. There isn’t a lot of information about it online any more, but I did find this page from 2007. The case comes with an Imon VFD which I wanted to utilize but Batocera doesn’t come with LCDProc installed. I’ve not had much experience with Arch Linux, but thankfully the Batocera team have a very helpful page dedicated to recompiling it from source. The source I compiled was from version 38 and after a trial run I had to upgrade the host to Ubuntu 22.04, after that upgrade the guide worked mostly flawlessly. The stock ‘.config’ worked well and installed on the host PC fine. When I made modifications there was issues with drivers – the USB keyboard would be detected… Read More »Batocera and LCDProc

Mystery Auction 2022

After some poor auction bids I ended up with two boxes, one of very old computer cards and one with 4 single board computers – which is what drew me to it. In the box with the cards, most of the interesting ones looked like they had been damaged. The single board computers were four somewhat identical motherboards with TFT LCD’s , 2.5 inch IDE hard drives, GSM modules and some basic I/O ports. After checking the larger and older cards, there was nothing that could be saved, it looked like they had something large dropped on them. From what I can tell they were custom cards that plug into a back plane that acts as a bus between them. The only chip of value I found was an Intel MG80C186XL-20 which was apparently military… Read More »Mystery Auction 2022