I recently picked up a nice boxed Commodore 16 for not too bad a price.
The PLA found in this is a MOS variant of the PLS100 PLA chip. I don’t believe it can natively be dumped as it seems to have its connection on pin 1 severed internally and decapping done some time ago revealed it was neither a PLS100 or 82S100 device either despite the pinout being the same.

I wanted to make a replacement using the NOS PLS100 chips I have because some people like that sort of thing and there doesn’t seem to be anything out there publically already.

I hooked up the PLA to an Arduino MEGA and wrote a small program to count through all combinations of the address pins and log the outputs to a 64KB binary file.
From here I wrote a program that converted the file to a truth table

and finally into equations which I could compile to a PLS100 fusemap using the old easyABEL program.

From here I could program a blank PLS100 and test in a real machine.

Still need to do some testing but early signs are looking good.

My friend was wanting to backup an old BBC Micro cassette tape that he believed had a game on it his grandad had made. The tape was marked up as “The Wizards Mountain”

I’d never backed up a cassette tape before and I didn’t even own a tape player anymore.
I originally tried buying a really cheap and nasty portable tape player

This was a total disaster and I kept getting inconsistent reads on various parts but between several reads I had what looked like a complete good read.
Using the ‘BBCTAPEDISC’ program I was able read the data directly from the ‘line-in’ source and it also gave a live update on each block recovered so I could see what was failing.

I originally tried stitching different parts together to make a good file but I just couldn’t get it to work properly so I asked around to see if I could borrow a better tape player. Fairly quickly I ended up with this

This gave me an almost perfect read first time. I ended up with a disc image instead of a tape image but thats fine with me as it loads faster.
The outcome is a text adventure game that appears to have been made with GAC.

Its actually a nice story which I still need to finish once I get some time but we are both really happy to have this saved.