A great day today, I feel reborn into a new skin.
I started by fixing some errors in the Radioactive manual, then decided to write a new manual for my first PC game, created as a programming test: Thermonuclear Domination. This was/is effectively the same as my Amiga game Global Thermonuclear Warfare, the precursor to Radioactive. Anyway, it's always been a free game but had an ancient manual from the late 1990s, so I've made a fancy new PDF version.
I started this first thing, then paused at 10:30 because the new drive part arrived from Germany for my Yamaha SY-85 synth. I plugged it all in. The most difficult bit was knowing which way was up because the floppy IDE connector was a perfect rectangle and could seemingly fit either way. I took my best guess. Here is the adaptor:
I screwed it up and switched it on and it seemed to work. I tried formatting a disk...
It got to the end and said 'Format Failed' eek! I tried again and the format worked. I also then saved the current presets to the new disk (which also worked) and loaded the factory presets from Yamaha's original 1990-something disc, and this also worked. When I press the disc section of the controls the synth seems to lock-up/freeze. Not sure if this is a limitation of the new adaptor or a fault with how I have installed it (to be fair, there is not much I can do but plug it in - I could take it out and wobble it or wipe it but this rarely does anything in electronics). When there is a disc in the drive, it all seems to work correctly, and the lock-up can be cured by turning the synth off and on again. Apart from this, everything is completely functional and the drive itself (a 'new' Sony in great condition) is better than the original Yamaha one, which I will keep with the synth anyway.
I want to sell this synth. I didn't want, would never want, to sell something broken, so I repaired it first. The synth is now in great condition, almost as good as new and cleaned and restored inside and out.
Then I went to Deb's, hoping to do some garden work there, but this wasn't possible, so we sat in idyllic sun for an hour or so. It is five years minus one day since the happy moment when we met, when she was a guest on ArtsLab on RedShift Radio.
I walked home and decided to continue work on my paint box so set up the pedestal drill and drilled the 80, 6mm holes, then got the jigsaw out and painstakingly sawed out the slots. Marking and sawing these was the most time consuming part of this project:
Then the anxiously exciting part of slotting everything together... it worked! It was amazingly easy, far more-so than I could have hoped. I had half-imagined needing to sand or shave the edges to perfection, but the whole thing, even cut by hand, worked brilliantly.
Now it's a matter of the sides. I will need to glue these. I will also have to glue the whole 'matrix' to the base, and will use some thin and long screws to hold it. For this, I'll need to draw around the matrix in situ, drill outwards using the drawing as a guide (so that I know where the screws will go) then glue it, then screw in from the outside through those holes. I also need to work on the handle on the front and/or back... it's a standard drawer handle but it will be a commitment to a part that is hard to replace or change. Normally desk drawer handles can be unscrewed and replaced, so this makes me slightly hesitant.
