Welcome on NCoT Tech

I feel like over the past year I’ve swapped more broken drives from my NAS than any other bit of gear I own.

I’m starting a graphics based project, and decided to use SDL2 in Windows.

Let’s look at one of the world’s first mobile phones – the Motorola 8500x – released in the mid 1980s for £3,000.

I think I’ve managed to make Home assistant tell me how much money the solar power I’m generating would be worth from the grid, and how much running things off solar/battery instead of the grid is saving me.

My workshed is mess, I can barely get into it and I have a bunch of projects that need starting.

I’ve got an IBM Model M keyboard and like using it on my PC, but one of its problems is the lack of Windows keys.

After a week of testing and tweaking, my DIY solar shed upgrade is complete.

What do you do when you’re trying to debug code, but your debugging isn’t working, and you need to debug your debugger?

I have aspirations of actually making a game for my Spectrum Next.

How clever engineers made a cheap computer powerful

How do you get more than 64K of RAM in an 8 bit computer?

Let’s explore how 8bit computers worked, looking at their memory, interrupts and DMA.

How to set up Z88DK to develop C programs for the ZX Spectrum Next in about 20 minutes

How to make Amiga like effects on an 8 bit Spectrum

I have a load of smart devices in my house that all have ESP8266 microcontrollers inside them.

How was 2021 for you?

I think I’ve just had a bit of a revelation… USB-C is the best thing ever.

How to program keyboards and joysticks on the Spectrum Next

I found my 25 year old A-Level programming project, is it any good?

Meet the world’s worse mouse design ever.

An overview of the Spectrum Next’s hardware sprites

So how exactly do you learn programming?

How to import your exported Facebook data into a WordPress blog

I upgrade my Atari STFM to 4MB of RAM using a Marpet XTra RAM Deluxe board

So just how bad is a nearly 30 year old power supply?

Yesterday I recapped my ST’s PSU which went well, nothing exploded.

I’m not a web designer, I find the creative part quite interesting but buggering about with templating languages and having to learn far moreJavaScript and CSS than is healthy really puts me off.

I wanted a mechanical keyboard with Windows keys.

Come with me for a nostalgic trip around my Atari ST that I had has a child that has been sat unopened for the past 10 years.

An overview of the Spectrum Next’s Layer 2 bitmap display

How to get started programming the ZX Spectrum Next

I found a real bitmap display for the RC2014 and here’s how I made it work.

I’ve bought a new 3D printer, I thought it’d be fun to take the old one apart!

I turned a Raspberry Pi 400 into a C devkit for the RC2014.

How I wrote a game in a week using just my web browser.

Writing more optimised assembly to improve the speed of the Conway’s Life algorithm

Upgrading my BBC Micro to use a Gotek floppy emulator, 1770 disk controller and a Raspberry Pi co-processor.

How writing code for a 40 year old computer made me a better computer science teacher.

Now I’ve gained an understanding of assembly programming, let’s look at how they tried to teach us computer science in the 1980s…

Programming the popular cellular automaton using Z80 Assembler

Here is how I fixed the drift on my Nintendo Switch Joy-Con.

Converting a 1980s BASIC type-in game into Z80 Assembly.

Building and programming a joystick interface for the RC2014 Z80 computer.

Get comfy and watch as I try to figure out how to write a really simple program the hard way.

Let’s draw a lit 3D scene without defining any 3D objects.

Today I figured out how to draw a line, and then make it wiggle using some basic maths.

Let’s spend this week learning about GLSL and making fancy images from code.

Let’s hook an Arduino up to a 1980s CPU and see what happens!

Writing fractals on a 7MHz computer with 64K of RAM

Turns out my £20 soldering station does indeed work, but its claims of ESD safety are lies.