Resurrecting the Philips G7200: Repairing a Hybrid Console–CRT Oddity

The Philips G7200 is one of the stranger relics of early home gaming: a Videopac/Odyssey2 console with a built-in 9" black-and-white CRT monitor. It’s a charming hybrid—part game console, part mini arcade cabinet—and it’s also tricky to repair due to the combination of digital logic, analog video circuitry, and switch-mode power supply (SMPS). I found one on eBay in excellent cosmetic condition. Internally, however, it was anything but healthy. ...

November 14, 2025 · 4 min

Archiving Dozens of ZX Spectrum Tapes: Building a Zero-Effort Preservation Pipeline

TL;DR: https://gitlab.com/markotka/zx-spectrum-tape-archiver For years, I’ve been slowly digitising my vintage computer collection — taking photographs, cataloguing machines, and preserving software. But one category always intimidated me more than the others: cassette tapes for the ZX Spectrum. Unlike floppy disks (which you can usually image in a few minutes), cassettes are slow, noisy, mechanical, and—above all—time-consuming. A single 30-minute game tape loads at roughly the speed of geological processes. When you have dozens or even hundreds of tapes to archive, the task becomes overwhelming. ...

September 16, 2025 · 6 min

Amiga 1081 Monitor Repair: A Step-by-Step Guide

In this blog, I’ll walk you through my repair process for the Amiga 1081 monitor, a classic CRT display from the retro computing era. These monitors were commonly paired with Commodore 64 and Amiga systems, and they’re known for their bright displays and durability. However, like all electronics, they eventually need maintenance or repair. I was fortunate enough to be gifted a Amiga 1084 monitor (more details about the different Commodore monitor models can be found here), but it wasn’t working—there was no response when I switched it on. Here’s how I diagnosed and eventually repaired it. ...

September 30, 2024 · 5 min