What’s Mike Doing?

Latest Updates
May 17, 2026A long, long time ago I had an idea for a silly joke. Exactly when it hard to pin down, but the seeds were planted in the mid 1990s, in a file called bands.txt. This was a collaborative list of random phrases uttered by people we knew, that had been taken out of context on … [Read more …] [...]
February 15, 2025For those who’re just joining us, I’ve dusted off a two-decade-old project idea and have actually started working on it. There’s a working prototype which I’m not going to link in this post, because this text will likely be around long after it’s been and gone, either shelved for another 20 years or thrown online in some kind of working form. [...]

Chinwag Posts

Do you need to replace faulty 4116 RAM chips on your 1980s computer, but you only have 4164s in your parts storage? Well don't lose any more sleep over this common dilemma!

A piece of a resistor leg is all you need!

Two 4116 chips and a 4164 with two of its legs bent back, one soldered to a bit of wire

It's only taken a new keyboard membrane, a fresh set of capacitors, a power regulator, three new RAM chips, an RF modulator bypass and a replacement ULA to get to this point - but now I can finally open the box with the two Microdrives in it and see what I need to fix on those.