Just realised it has been a while since I’ve come back to this, and much water has passed under the bridge.
I see the last old machine I acquired at the time of last writing was the Classic II…
I did end up getting capacitors and a new soldering iron, and I did recap that board… and the sucker boots now, so I’ve put the board in my original Classic so it’s a little nicer to use. The rest of the Classic II has some issues though so I have that out on the bench to look at… sometime…
The list of vintage machines I now have includes (in random order):
an SE/30 (given to me as dead, and had SimasiMac symptoms - a recap and a new HDD fixed it)
a lime iMac 333 (tray load) with matching peripherals - now with 256MB RAM!
a black 5500/250, now with matching peripherals
a couple of LCIIs in varying condition
a Pentium 133 in bits - minus the sound card
a Cyrix PR133 complete - sold to me as not working but it fired right up!
a few other Windows PCs built between 1998 and 2002
a Sun Ultra 10
Currently on my bench is (along with a lot of crap) an LCIII that doesn’t boot after a recap… so I’m looking into that one.
For those in the Seattle area, the Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest will be held on February 10th & 11th, 10am-5pm both days. Held at Living Computers: Museum+Labs, 2245 First Avenue South, Seattle, WA, 98134
Mac Classic II was my first “personal” computer, in that it lived in my room for quite a while. Making do with the B&W screen was possibly formative: I have a definite tendency to do what little artwork/design work I do in B&W these days, I’ve noticed.
Ah yes, The Project. Basically, we’re making an ARG of such convoluted proportions that if anyone actually works it out we’re considering actual prizes. We’re running off the popularity of Found Footage because why the hell not, and going with an Alternate World theme, “capturing” TV broadcasts from a world that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike ours.
However, spoofing analogue broadcasts, especially over shortwave (because we want to do an actual as-live broadcast at the same time, or slightly before, the YouTube upload) is difficult:- you have to prepare the video, process teletext, interlace, multiplex (even though it’ll be the only channel) and then broadcast using … well we haven’t quite worked out how best to squeeze a PAL TV signal into shortwave yet but we will.
We’re going to need either some original kit (ie, an actual BBC Master for the teletext, an actual Mix Desk, and two VCRs (one of which we already have) as well as breakout cables to be able to write and read from composite video to our editing rig because as it turns out, the easiest way to get VHS artefacts is to actually write to VCR and back. That way with some careful screwdriver work you can make the recording as clean or distorted as you like.
It’s going to be hard work, but it’s going to be amazing.
After several years of not doing anything with it, I finally moved my website with info about Commodore 64/128 and Amiga computers over to a wiki. I’m slowly working on getting it updated and expanded. The new home is at http://cbm-products.fandom.com
I knew the incantation as a child; it was years before I knew what it meant. It’s helpful to remember where I started when I am providing technical assistance to people in need.
The aforementioned Living Computers Museum. I introduced my nieces to Tempest (coin-op) and Zork (on an original Macintosh) on the same day. https://livingcomputers.org/
Having a retro computing cave set up with a C64, Amiga, classic Mac, and Win95 all on separate desks, plus a CRT TV with (S)NES, SMS and Sega Megadrive (Genesis) hooked up to it… now that would be best for a quickie game.
Nightmare: All robots in the factory down. Critical files needed to restore production are on a single floppy disk. Floppy drives were phased out 6+ years ago, and the 2 legacy servers still equipped with floppy drives won’t read the disk.
Greatness: I happen to have a Win95 gaming rig currently set up in my garage, so I screamed home, used the rig’s drive to copy the contents of the floppy to the HDD, then zipped up the directory, transferred the .zip to my NAS and then emailed it via OWA on my home laptop directly to the guys responsible for getting it back up and running.
I can’t remember using a floppy since I got away from administering an old PBX that backed up the database to a floppy. I even got rid of my old Zip disk collection a few years ago.
