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Retrocomputing is a hobby It is probably not a hobby you should have unless you have lots of space and an unusual love for the smell of blue smoke and offgassing ABS plastic. It also has significant crossover with retrogaming, but that's not required. Plenty of people have collections that feature computers known for being almost unusable for games, such as nearly every word processor, the Apollo guidance computer, and the Commodore Plus/4. But why?  It's really neat to preserve pieces of computing history and save these devices that were designed to last maybe 5 years at most from meeting their end in a burning pile of trash at a gold recycler somewhere in China. As a bonus, a lot of these systems still have some utility today, whether it's for retrogaming, word processing, image editing and printmaking, data recovery or even just as a spotify frontend. Where can I learn more? Vintage Computer Federation (VCF) - probably the easiest place to find info on retrocomputing in general, it's an organization devoted to the preservation of historical computers. They hold several large gatherings a year where people can show off their collections, swap gear, and more. VOGONS - A discussion forum that is like VCF's forum but focused on retrogaming specifically. In addition there are tons of forums and mailing lists for specific platforms, be it Commodore, Atari, Apple, IBM PC, or anything else you could imagine. So, show off your collections of dusty old circuit boards and computers. I can't wait to see! corgski fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Oct 18, 2021 |
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Oct 17, 2021 22:39
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Here's a non-exhaustive look at my collection. I focus primarily on old Apple Macintosh computers, although I also have 3x Apple IIgs in storage as well a couple late 90s-mid 2000s PCs for retrogaming purposes. Oh and all the photos were taken with a Sony Digital Mavica camera, the one with the floppy disk drive. The (mostly) Apple Products:  Left to right: 1984 Macintosh, Macintosh Plus, Macintosh Classic The first two are non-working but repairable, the Classic is only good for spare parts.  In the foreground is a Macintosh 512k with a memory expansion and the Macintosh Plus ROM upgrade, in the background is a Performa 637CD with a matching monitor - this is the system I play most of my early mac games on.  And an iMac G3 for later mac games. (at least ones that don't require 3D acceleration)  And on top of that desk, I have a PowerMac G5 with dual water-cooled 2.5GHz processors, a Power Macintosh 7300/200, and some old Dell Optiplex with an early Pentium 4 which I use to play windows 98 and XP games, all connected to a KVM.  The most aesthetic part of my collection is this G4 Cube with the matching CRT monitor. It works, but I have nowhere to display it while we're renovating our house so it lives in the attic instead of the living room.  The non-apple:  Who doesn't love a good ol HP Touchpad running the original WebOS?  And my trusty LaserJet 4+ with the optional Postscript ROM. corgski fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Oct 18, 2021 |
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Oct 17, 2021 22:57
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Here's my current setup. Sadly I will need to move soon, so gotta start packing it up The main vintage computer desk. The top has my home network setup, as well as an Apple II Composite Colour monitor and a Commodore 1084 monitor. Sitting on the desk is an Atari 1050 floppy drive, Atari 1040STe playing a demo on a Samsung TV which has SCART input and a B&W PowerMac G3  Under the desk is my PII Win98SE box.  From top to bottom: - Sega MegaDrive series 1 - Atari 7800 - Apple Quicktake 200 - Amiga 1200 - Commodore 64C - Atari 800XL - Atari 520STFM - Amiga A500 Plus - Apple //e Platinum  Storage, mainly media, consoles, console games and parts. Commodore 486SLC lives down the bottom  Big box PC game, application and OS collection. Covers Atari ST, Amiga, IBM PC and Commodore 64. Atari 8 bit games are stored in another room  Old CRT with Wii, PS2, MegaDrive II and SNES connected to it
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Oct 18, 2021 03:11
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You Am I posted:
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Oct 18, 2021 07:58
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You Am I posted:- Amiga A500 Plus Is that a European SNES? I always hated the American body (I bought a Super Famicom back in the day) and was always envious that Europe got that body style.
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Oct 18, 2021 18:04
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Karl Rove posted:This PC game collection is so good! Original Lucasarts games, AvP 2000 (a shamefully underrated game), and is that both Strike Commander and the expansion box? GATOS Y VATOS posted:Is that a European SNES? I always hated the American body (I bought a Super Famicom back in the day) and was always envious that Europe got that body style. Yep, PAL SNES, since I am in Aussieland  I do have a North American SNES that hasn't yellowed.
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Oct 19, 2021 00:44
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I want an Apple SE, but I have to come up with a use case before I can really justify getting one. What can be done with one in this millennium?
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Oct 19, 2021 02:19
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The SE could be used for word processing, retro graphics, some really early mac games like brickle, cannon fodder, a variety of infocom ports, and glider, and with a compatible network adapter and a raspberry pi, email, IRC, discord (via bitlbee,) telnet, and possibly even some light text-only web browsing. If you upgrade to the SE/30 you could run a graphical browser with something like Web Rendering Proxy running on the Pi. And of course you could always come up with a RetroChallenge project! corgski fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Oct 19, 2021 |
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Oct 19, 2021 02:54
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corgski posted:The SE could be used for word processing, retro graphics, some really early mac games like brickle, cannon fodder, a variety of infocom ports, and glider, and with a compatible network adapter and a raspberry pi, email, IRC, discord (via bitlbee,) telnet, and possibly even some light text-only web browsing. You can also get a serial-to-MIDI controller, and use it to control MIDI audio devices. (Keyboards, synths, etc). A lot of modern musical applications got started on 68k macs.
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Oct 19, 2021 22:40
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Thank you for this useful info. I also just realized I could use it for some light business tasks - inventory spreadsheet, stuff like that
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Oct 19, 2021 22:43
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I've been collecting MSX computers & games for maybe 10-15 yikes years. My MSX1 is a Toshiba HX-10D, you see these everywhere usually in black or silver. I think it looks cool as heck and it has nice clunky keys. Usually describe this one as "kind of a Japanese Commodore 64."  My 'daily driver' is an MSX2, the Sony HB-F900. Mine is a little finnicky due to the disk drive being PC replacement; MSX drives have a 'ready' signal that you can fudge on some PC drives, but it gets really messy if you try and have multiples. At release, the HB-F900 was originally a business/editing model, coming with 256k main RAM, 2 disk drives, a mechanical keyboard, PC Speaker, and interconnects for video titling machines  Panasonic MSX2s, the FS-A1MkII and FS-A1F. The FS-A1F is a FS-A1MkII but boosted to include an underslung disk drive.    This was my first MSX, a Sony F1XDJ MSX2+. The disk drive was long gone when I bought it, so I eventually frankenstein'd a ribbon cable and power connector to a Lotharek disk drive emulator.  Here's a Panasonic FA-A1WX MSX2+ and FS-A1ST TurboR. Panasonic was the only company that made TurboRs, essentially an MSX2+ with a pseudo-16-bit R800 CPU replacing the 8-bit Z80. The R800 can be downclocked to match Z80 speeds and is theoretically (but not really) backwards compatible with the Z80 instruction set. These were released in 1990 and sold incredibly poorly due to the huge array of way more powerful machines for businesses and growing console scene. During it's lifetime, there were maybe 10 Turbo-R programs and games, but a lot of indie games take advantage of the faster speed either natively or with a CPU mode toggle.  Games are organized mostly by company with a couple leftover shelves that I need to get around to sorting. MSX has a ton of Konami, Falcom, and early arcade ports if you're into that sort of thing.  I have a thing for collecting ports & I'm 4 games short of a cRPG port full house. Only missing Ultima 1&2, the 'real' Ultima 3, and Wizardry 3.  Some of the weirder things I have are this port of the last part of Snatcher. Snatcher on MSX2 ends earlier than other versions, so Delta Soft digitized and ported the last bit from the SegaCD version and put it on 5 floppies because ???  Ports of some popular C64/CPC/ZX Spectrum games. Druid and Knight Lore are contemporary Japanese releases, Head Over Heels and Batman are indie ports from a Spanish company.  This is a MSX1 tape to MSX2 disk upscale port of a UK adventure game called Zakil Wood. Came in a weird bespoke box that got little fake grass everywhere.  And a few expansion cards with a slot expander to let you plug more than 2 things in. The OPL4 Shockwave is a soundcard, the PowerGraph Light is a video card, and the CF640 is a CF-HDD thing. The Playsoniq lets me play Sega Master System games in theory, but I've not had a chance to test it as I need to build the video cable for it.  Money shotz Boot screen  Unlike other 8-bits, programs on MSX tend to auto-boot, often including an MSX-DOS kernel and autoexec.bat if they're fancy enough.  This is Graph Saurus, a drawing program that lets you select different MSX screen modes to draw in. Each has different properties and color specs, Screen 5 was apparently used in most games due to sprite and scrolling capability.  It features really zippy fill and circle tools for an 8-bit, as well as adjustable windows.   Don't know where I got this MSX game, but she's really good at waiting for treats. 
Nancy fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Oct 21, 2021 |
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Oct 21, 2021 01:34
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Impressive collection! MSXs are rare in Australia, usually see the Yamaha ones with the music keyboard, otherwise you have to get them in from Japan. Always liked the look of the MSX game boxes as well
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Oct 22, 2021 02:47
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That Yamaha setup with the keyboard is on my list of stuff I'd like to have, but doesn't seem reasonable from a space or cost perspective. I think I'm pretty close to "done" collecting for MSX, really only interested in stuff I'd play or use and I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze to fill in those gaps. I like the VHS-style boxes a lot, but most of the later library is just the PC-98 or PC-88 box & manual with different disks and a paper insert titled "MSX version." The most egregious one I've seen is a space 4x game where the insert details all of the features gutted for the MSX port.
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Oct 22, 2021 15:29
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it's an apple extended keyboard II. i got one of these guys so i can use it on my PC, which works great. https://www.drakware.com/shop/p/adb2usb
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Oct 22, 2021 18:16
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Nice, I use an AEKII through a Griffin iMate ADB-USB converter on my work MacBook
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Oct 23, 2021 06:35
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You Am I posted:Here's my current setup. Sadly I will need to move soon, so gotta start packing it up That collection is  The Commodore 1084 monitor, wow. I don't think I've so much as seen a picture of one since I got rid of mine in 1998. That thing was amazing back in the day.
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Oct 24, 2021 15:58
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Odd question but... was that plastic always that shade of yellow or was it white / light gray when originally manufactured? If it's discoloration, how much more will it discolor in 10 years? 50 years? Are there any organizations preserving the hardware in a cool, dark, dry space?
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Oct 24, 2021 16:20
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You Am I posted:Impressive collection! MSXs are rare in Australia, usually see the Yamaha ones with the music keyboard, otherwise you have to get them in from Japan. Always liked the look of the MSX game boxes as well  The Yamaha MSX is one of the only two retrocomputers I have, the other being an Atari 800XL that I got for $10 including the 1050 disk drive at a thrift store. As you can probably tell by the dust, they don’t get much use but I’d like to get a proper setup going. I don’t have the keyboard for the Yamaha, there were two revisions of the FM synth module and the later one actually supports any MIDI device but mine has the earlier revision unfortunately. Still really cool and someday I’ll get that keyboard lol
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Oct 24, 2021 16:22
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Dignity Van Houten posted:Odd question but... was that plastic always that shade of yellow or was it white / light gray when originally manufactured? If it's discoloration, how much more will it discolor in 10 years? 50 years? Are there any organizations preserving the hardware in a cool, dark, dry space? Western computer stuff was usually off-white/gray, Apple included. Most old plastic used in retro computers and consoles will discolor like this to some extent, gray or white makes this more noticeable. It seems to have to do with heat and UV light, but it's not consistent, e.g. in 10 years it may or may not have gotten more yellow. A lot of people have gotten into "retrobrighting" discolored plastic, which is a term for a huge number of ways to smear hydrogen peroxide on the plastic and expose it to UV light for a period of time. Depending on the time of day, products used, astrological sign, windspeed, dew point, and/or whether Hecate smiles on you, this can move the color back towards it's original shade. Consensus is that the plastic will usually re-yellow after some indefinite period of time. Adrian's Digital Basement uses a couple methods in this video with differing results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtH8IhudWMI Pablo Nergigante posted:
MSX computers just have that je ne sais quoi to me. I see the giant big box version with the keyboard in auctions occasionally, but always for quite a bit. Get your setup going! Play some Penguin Adventure!
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Oct 24, 2021 16:49
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Vampire Panties posted:That collection is I was using it up until recently on most of my retro gear. Since then I have been using a 19" Samsung LCD TV which has a ton of input connections like SCART, S-Video, Composite, Component, VGA and HDMI
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Oct 25, 2021 01:11
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New addition to my collection, a 13" Magnavox B&W television. Perhaps I'll make a clone Pong board to connect to it. 
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Nov 14, 2021 17:58
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drat that tv takes me back.
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Nov 17, 2021 23:20
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Checking in as a retrocomputer hoarder. My first love was a C64 I got as a hand-me-down. 80's computers after IBM/PCs took over were very cheap. I got a few bit from tag sales, flea markets, way back when.
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Nov 19, 2021 06:01
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GATOS Y VATOS posted:drat that tv takes me back. The thunk of those channel knobs is just the best.
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Nov 20, 2021 21:18
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A retro computer lot popped up on a local classified site today for dirt cheap, including at least 2 Atari 800s, 3 C64s, a VIC-20, at least 1 Commodore monitor, many disk drives, and piles of software. Couldn’t figure out which one from the photos. I’m headed to look at it tomorrow.
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Nov 26, 2021 05:43
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 This is my IBM rig, built to be broadly compatible with as many DOS and older Windows games as possible with the specific stipulation of having a 1GHz+ motherboard, AGP, and fully functional ISA. The heart of this machine is an Abit KT7A motherboard with a 1733 MHz AMD Athlon Thoroughbred, with 1.5 gigs of RAM, an nVidia GeForce FX 5900, and a Sound Blaster AWE64. Most games from the dawn of the IBM era up until the mid-2000s run fine, though Doom 3 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 9 make it struggle at times. The IDE slave hard drive (there are also two SATA hard drives) can boot either Windows 98 SE or Windows XP, and there is also a card reader in the back plugged into IDE master that can take one of three CompactFlash cards that I have, which pre-empt Windows and boot into some flavor of DOS.  Cable management? I'll manage!  I built it over three years ago and it's been dead reliable for as long as I've had it. Some really finicky DOS games (e.g. TIE Fighter) don't like it but it seems about as good as one could expect for "one retrocomputer to play them all". The case is a server case so the computer is super loud (though a dual-slot GeForce FX and three hard drives certainly contribute their share to the noise) but I'm used to it at this point. My external MIDI synth doesn't work in DOS protected mode because of some quirk of Creative's DOS drivers, so I usually run DOS games in AWE32 mode. The PSU is probably complete overkill but I was advised to either get a vintage PSU or an overkill one to feed the Athlon with plenty of 3.3V and +5V, so I decided to go the overkill option because I don't trust old PSUs. Full specs: Chenbro SR209 beige case Corsair RM 750x 750W ATX PSU 1.5GB PC133 SDRAM AMD Athlon XP Thoroughbred @ 1733 MHz StarTech socket A air cooler Abit KT7A KT133A motherboard with modded KT7ASB4 BIOS nVidia GeForce FX 5900 GPU TEAC FD-235 3.5" floppy disk drive TEAC FD-55GR 5.25" floppy disk drive Apple 678T0191 6X IDE DVD-ROM drive PCI CompactFlash rear bracket, 2 swappable 16 GB and one 2 GB CompactFlash cards (boot disks) 40 GB WD Caviar IDE hard drive 2 x 500 GB WD Green SATA hard drives Netgear FA31105 10/100Mbps NIC StarTech USB 2.0 controller card StarTech SATA controller card Sound Blaster AWE64 Value ISA sound card Logitech MX518 optical mouse with PS/2 adapter Dell Bigfoot AT101W PS/2 keyboard (black Alps) Sun Microsystems GDM-5010PT 21" Trinitron CRT monitor Roland SC-55 MkII MIDI synthesizer Windows 98 SE Windows XP Professional FreeDOS 1.2 (boot disk #1) MS-DOS 6.22 (boot disk #2) IBM PC-DOS 7 (boot disk #3)
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Nov 27, 2021 00:21
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I may add pix later but I've had various old things over the years. The current collection includes: Working: * SGI O2 running Irix 5.3 * Commodore 64C "Breadbox" * IBM PS/Valuepoint 486sx/25 * Toshiba Tecra 740CDT laptop (Pentium 166/MMX) Non-working: * DEC AlphaServer 64 circa 1994. Its PSU failed and the case was in such poor condition, to save the contents it was taken apart and the parts retrieved. I was able to image one of the drives but the other failed. The RAM still works and the internal cards are still operational. I'm hopeful that one day the processor boards might live in another machine. The OS was one of the last Ultrixes before they went to Tru64, in fact I'm fairly certain this machine was intended to be upgraded to a Tru64 box, it was a departmental server in the University of Melbourne. But there must have been a better option and it sat in a corner and eventually came to me.
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Oct 4, 2022 13:19
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Yo. I've been bugging the Musician's Lounge Synth thread about trackers and stuff on the Gameboy, might post here about it here too. I am too space and money poor to own any actual machines, for now I'm jut interested in emulation. Right now I'm trying to get Protracker for the Amiga running in WinUAE with my end goal being writing my own demoscene.
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Jan 19, 2023 01:20
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Never saw this thread before, but it looks a little dead. I had quite a commodore collection right up until a few years ago, Plus/4, C16, 64 (of course). I only have a single C64, 1541 and 1702 monitor. I fired it up last year for a couple games and man, sometimes memories are better left as memories lol. I still have a desire for an A500 (or 2000) and 1084, but they seem to be very rare nowdays and when they do come up, stupid expensive. About the only thing other than the C64 that I have left for vintage are some, mostly NIB 90s game machines. I used to have a massive collection of old Jaguar stuff but I sold it all. I think I paid $20 for each console after Atari went belly-up and bought something like 12 of them from a liquidator. The Virtual boy is nib and I also have another one in a beautiful hard shell custom case from Blockbuster that was a "rental" unit with an AC adapter, that I am pretty sure was never rented.
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Jan 19, 2023 19:37
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If you’re willing to pick up a ram cart and an sd2iec, the C64 has a lot of new stuff being made for it.
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Jan 19, 2023 23:12
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Fresh estate sale garage find from today  I know basically nothing about computers/this hobby. Half the reason I bought this was because I want to use the keyboard as my daily driver. I already tested it with a ADB to USB converter and it works beautifully on my PC. The computer, though, powers on but (what I believe is the hard drive) makes a horrible noise and the monitor only displays a frowning disk. Not sure if I can boot from a floppy disk on these? Apparently removing the battery on these is a priority because they are prone to leaking, but I need to get an extra long torx screwdriver to access the screws, so I guess I’ll do that in the meantime.
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Feb 11, 2023 04:34
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You should be able to boot from a floppy. Chances are the floppy drive needs to be serviced. Mainly just cleaning the drive head and regreasing the drive rails. HD is probably dead. The good news is that SE’s typically don’t have leaky caps on the logic board. The analog board may need work, however. Especially any RIFA caps. The SE is definitely slow, but is one of my favorite classic macs. Replacing the HD with a BlueSCSI goes a long way to making it feel faster. I believe Potato_Fi on Twitter has a 3d-printed mount to put it on the expansion port, which lets you get to the SD card without opening the case.
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Feb 11, 2023 05:46
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That's cool as poo poo.^TheMadMilkman posted:If you’re willing to pick up a ram cart and an sd2iec, the C64 has a lot of new stuff being made for it. Speaking of, anyone have one of the Mini A500s I've seen on Amazon? https://www.amazon.com/A500-Mini-electronic-games/dp/B09CM1C3LX
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Feb 11, 2023 17:10
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TheMadMilkman posted:You should be able to boot from a floppy. Chances are the floppy drive needs to be serviced. Mainly just cleaning the drive head and regreasing the drive rails. HD is probably dead. Just the kind of advice i need, thank you. Would this floppy work? https://www.ebay.com/itm/303913101184. The listing says it's compatible with the Macintosh SE FDHD. Maybe i will invest in a blueSCSI later if the floppy disk works. a few more pictures. i'm pretty happy with the condition of the case. previous owner, thank you for keeping the dust cover in place for all those years.    
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Feb 11, 2023 23:15
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It depends on how much RAM the SE had. System 7 needs 2 MB just to boot. The SE only had 1 MB standard. If the goal is to get something quick just for testing that machine, a 6.0.8 floppy might be the better choice.
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Feb 12, 2023 08:15
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Any leads on where to get a bluescsi/scsi2sd? I can’t seem to find them online. It looks like the chip shortage/supply chain hit them. There does seem to me a newcomer, zuluscsi, that some people say is just as good. I’m also going to get a 6.0.8 800k boot disk. But before I try to use the disk drive, I want to remove it and inspect/service certain failure points like the gears, contacts, and lubrication points. But I can’t get the hard drive out first. This power cord won’t budge. I keep wiggling it but the only thing that flexes is the board. There don’t seem to be any clips holding the connector in. I even took the drive out the chassis for more clearance, but still no luck. Is there a secret to removing these connectors?  At least the board looks clean:  Successfully removed the original battery (which looks like it was never even replaced) and good thing it hasn’t leaked yet (will be replacing with a newer/retrofit one): 
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Feb 16, 2023 04:54
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BlueSCSI was literally just updated to version 2, so stock is a bit of an issue atm. It is a fork of the ZuluSCSI project, and seems to be worth trying to hunt one down. I plan to upgrade just for the easier ways of loading software. I bought my older ones from Joe’s Computer Museum and am very happy with them. I don’t have any hints for the connector, unfortunately. They do suck, but I’ve never had one get completely stuck like that.
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Feb 16, 2023 09:03
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Is anyone here familiar with the concept of a Mystic color classic? I feel kind of conflicted on it, the donor Mac was my first computer and had a really nice 14" Trinitron iirc.
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Feb 18, 2023 16:22
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The Performa used for the mystic classic had exceptionally brittle plastic, and the weight of the screen is enough to cause it to start cracking. Harvesting the logic board from a machine that is crumbling doesn’t bother me at all. But pulling one from a good condition one, which is a very rare sight, is in bad taste.
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Feb 19, 2023 03:35
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TheMadMilkman posted:The Performa used for the mystic classic had exceptionally brittle plastic, and the weight of the screen is enough to cause it to start cracking. Harvesting the logic board from a machine that is crumbling doesn’t bother me at all. But pulling one from a good condition one, which is a very rare sight, is in bad taste. I wish I understood what caused the cracking, I've seen a few in good condition and it just baffles me. I have to wonder if the cracking has been somewhat overstated to justify harvesting, though.
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Feb 19, 2023 19:11
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