I love restoring old computers, don't you?

I love restoring old computers, don't you?

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youtube.com/watch?v=KUbCVJGkrNo
th99.classic-computing.de/
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That computer is way too complicated for neo-Sup Forums to comprehend.

HOL UP, WHERE THA APPS AT?

Sheeeeeeeeiiit.

>8-bit computer with 64k of memory from 1979 and a single tasking OS
>complicated
...

Neo-Sup Forums hates anything that isn't 100% GUI and watered down significantly. They'd freak out if they were required to use the terminal.

If I had that thing, first thing I'd do is replace that 8" floppy monstrosity with an HxC.

youtube.com/watch?v=KUbCVJGkrNo

Model IIs are known to suffer from screen shrink when the disk drive is accessed. This may be due to a marginal power supply or perhaps electrical interference.

Just to be clear

Neo/g/=Sup Forums with hypocrisy

Yeh but it's apparently also a problem with Model 3s and 4s and they have 5.25" drives, not 8" ones. Radio Shack likely slapped in the cheapest power supplies to save munniez.

>Rat Shack

Absolutely not.

I love fucking around with old computers, but having to fix/restore/buy parts, replace old components and dozens and dozens of manhours of work to have a half-working piece of garbage is not part of my hobbies.

What do you do with them? I like the idea of messing around with minimal hardware, but the main thing I use computers for is the internet so past a certain point hardware wise I can't do anything and it seems wasteful to just set one up as a dumb terminal as it would just be a fancy monitor/keyboard for my desktop at that point.

If it's only half working, you obviously suck at fixing shit.

I'll take that bad-ass mechanical keyboard, even if the "E" key is busted.

There's not much software for these things beyond Electric Pencil, Scripsit, CP/M apps, Visicalc, and a couple of programming tools. The Model II really was intended as an office computer.

>you obviously suck at fixing shit.
Actually I'm great at fixing shit, I just don't like doing it. I used to have to fix everything and anything around the house since a teeager and now I'm about to graduate with an engineering degree. Bothering to find (or worse, make) an exact replacement for a 30 year old electronic component for a near-useless machine is not considered fun by me.
Old shit break, they break often and repeatedly.

>an exact replacement for a 30 year old electronic component for a near-useless machine
I agree a TRS-80 is not as useful as a C64 or Apple II. You can't play Jumpman on the TRS-80. ;)

The power supply in a Model II is a switching and not a linear type, but it's an ancient late 70s-early 80s design and not as good as modern PSUs (modern ones don't have the voltage levels vary if there's too much drain on something).

What do you use them for after restoring them?

I rescued one once and cleaned it out. It is a serious bitch to take those things apart. There's hidden bolts everywhere including in places where you wonder how anyone could reach them.

bump

what do i need to get video output from a c128 onto a monitor?

I have this commodore 64 that I got from a friend for $10 and am trying to fix it

HAS NO VIDEO OUTPUT, checked both the 5V and 12V rails they seem good, what would be my next step ?

I do have a oscilloscope

>implying multitasking is complicated
>implying the memory constraints don't make software development far more complicated than the modern era
>implying new hardware is even that much more advanced when all it does is implement the same concepts we were doing on mainframes 50 years ago

>Old shit break, they break often and repeatedly.
if you're frequently breaking solid-state equipment like that I would wager that you either live in a terrible environment, treat your stuff like shit and/or you just suck ass at fixing things

anyone home ?

>replace the video circuit with a known good one
>if that fails replace the whole Commodore 64 with a known good one
Seriously, it could be a problem with any number of parts. Have you tried both video outputs yet?

You're quite possibly the most ignorant person on Sup Forums. It's like you're at the peak of Mount Stupid.

I only tried composite

cant test thru the tuner cause have a non-working TV of that vintage well partly haven't bothered of fixing it yet

Test the output of the tuner with a meter or something.
Also did you check both the S-Video and the Composite out from the A/V Jack?
Is it the 5 pin or the 8 pin?

maybe a scope ?

what do you mean A/V jack it only has a 8 pin din conector labeled "Video" and a rca connector for the TV tuner

if there is no output on the pin 4 composite then its probably something else more likely then the video circuitry

The Video din connector provides both composite and seperate Chrominance/Luminance signals(this is S-Video), look at the pin-out
Just hook every video out up to the scope and see if its actually outputting anything at all.
Test the video outputs directly from the VIC-II chip as well, the pin-out is available with a quick google.

why is this board always super dead? ive never once came on here had a conversation with another human, fucking pur/g/atory

Figuring out old standards is pretty complicated, also /v- I mean neo/g/ can't work on any hardware that isn't plug and play.

Not only restoring, using them too.

Dunno what you're on about, had pretty long convos, pretty much know most the folk who usually post in these threads.

i think he means that you cant browse facebook with it.

I'm in the middle of putting together a Pentium I system, just need to source all the damn peripherals now that the actual PC is on its way.

I've found a serial mouse that has a scroll wheel on ebay - worth getting, or will DOS/3.11 programs not really know what to do with a scroll wheel?

There's a scroll wheel driver for that.
Also if you're planning on building a DOS/3.11 box then a 486 would have been a better idea.
A Pentium would be great for Windows 98 and Voodoo.

Fuck who remembers that thread where OP's mom through away his prototye IBM computer.
That shit fucking made me mad.

The one that hes grandpa gave him?

Yes :( Sad fucking story. Also threw* made a typing error.

Yeah it's sad. I'm not mad though, what's done is done.

I am man, what a fucking cunt. I hate when people mess with my shit so I know how he feels.

Either a Commodore video cable (40 column text) or the 80 column output uses a CGA TTL RGB signal. You can connect this to VGA with just a line doubler although it won't deal with intensity and you're limited to 8 colors.

>implying the memory constraints don't make software development far more complicated than the modern era

Most 8-bit software had 1-3 guys working on it. Software today can have 20-30 people on it.

Good to know you're a man.

I was planning on using DOS/3.11 because I assumed it would have less overhead than running Win98.

>owned a 486 DX2 computer as a kid
>treated it badly, spilled shit on the keyboard
>found out about overclocking
>managed to hit 80 MHz by fucking around with the jumper pins
>it blew up a day later

I also ruined my old Ericson T28 trying to fix the clock battery. God I wish I could backhand my younger self and take all those good electronics from him.

Most 8-bit software was developed by a single person, that was a good thing, they knew how their own code worked, they did clever tricks and clean code so it would take the most out of the machine, back then code really was art.

Overclocking is and always has been a scam. Don't do it, man.

Lol

Damn haha, you would have had some nice pieces.

But only on 8-bit machines. There was a Bill Gates interview from 1982 where he talks about the IBM PC and how you had to write super-tight, efficient code on 8-bit hardware, but on 16-bit ones it wasn't as needed.

That's nothing
>two Amiga 500's
>one Macintosh Classic
>one 486SX and one 486DX
>one 8088 laptop
>one PowerMac G4
>whole bunch of newer hardware like Pentium 1's to 3's destroyed on purpose for parts

Most of them just died on me and probably would have died anyways, some I was still too young and stupid to take care of.

I wonder how many anons using this term (neo-Sup Forums) are actually Sup Forumsermin themselves. Not accusing anybody but the thought is frustrating.

Have you replied with that Bill Gates interview before? Because a few user's have told me exactly the same thing as response for a related discussion.
Also it's not like code wasn't still tight, it was just less tight than 8-bit code for obvious reasons, like more memory, but look at Macintosh or Amiga programs for example, they were written to work as tight as possible, because shitty code could have bought the whole system down or slowed it down and your software would just not sell.

the fuck is going on

Why am I getting boot Error, i have a diskette in the floppy it doesn't even try to read it ,but the computer detects floppy drives

Have you opened it up? Does the floppy light even light up once?

And yes I cleaned the floppy drives and heads, although the computer wasn't in use for like almost 2 decades

its a 8088xt philips P3105/NMS 9100

>Does the floppy light even light up once?

Yes both drives light up and you can hear the stepper motor moving the heads up and down when light is lit and it does it when the computers hardware is booting, just after you turn the thing on

most of these faggots use bash anyways you pretentious retard

Is it a 720KB floppy with DOS?
Checked jumpers, floppy cable, tried disconnecting the 5.25inch drive and trying then?
Does it have a onboard floppy controller or on a card?

Im probably gonna have to unsold-er each chip and test it separately out of circuit for the c64

are there any chips that never go bad (very reliable) where there is zero chance of them failing and which are the most common fault for black screen, no video output ?

so I can save myself some of the hassle

dont know what floopy but and old one

there is only a MDA video-card in it so its a on-board controller, gonna check some of the DIPP swithces

It'd be fun
I went to our company's main campus one day (I work in Chicago normally) and they had a really old terminal in our NOC/SOC, I think for controlling phones or some shit. I would have wanted to mess with it, but I'd get in some deep shit ;_;

>dont know what floopy but and old one
You need a floppy formatted as DD 720KB and have DOS on it.
You know that, right?

Care to share a picture of the motherboard?

maybe tommorow I can post the motherboard, make sure thread is still alive cause I have to open the thing and completelly dissasemble it like taking the psu out and such to get the full view if the motherboard

th99.classic-computing.de/

Might help you.

Oh, damn. I remember I had an old Toshiba laptop that was one of the early ultraportables - 12" screen, a couple of USB ports, and some special ports to plug in external floppy and CD drives.

I think it had something like a 650 MHz PIII and 192 MB of RAM (64 on board, 128 upgraded) along with a 12 GB hard drive. I used that through some of high school, usually whenever I knew I'd need battery - my Inspiron 4000 was my main laptop but the battery was never working, couldn't afford a new one.

I wish my parents never discouraged my hoarding behavior, or I'd still have a stack of old stuff lying around.

user here: what do you use them for?

you might say I like it a bit

A black screen on a C64 is usually a sign that the PLA cooked itself (very common failure mode).

>are there any chips that never go bad (very reliable) where there is zero chance of them failing

CPUs and TTLs are among the most reliable ICs because of their simplicity. RAM and graphics processors have a higher failure rate.

I see this is one of the early C64s from '83. The breadbox C64 isn't all that reliable to begin with and the early ones made in 82-83 are particularly trouble-prone.

Games, music, demos. It's all for entertainment purposes.
They still do everything they did back then and thanks to awesome ideas people have they do even more than back then.

C64's like to cook themselves a lot anyways, Commodore used different fabrication technology back then.

They used NMOS, but then everyone did back then. What Commodore did do was cheap, cut-rate approaches to manufacturing. I mean, the Atari POKEY/ANTIC are NMOS as well but don't choke near as often as the VIC-II/SID.

So anyway, I think user is wasting his time testing everything in the computer when a few seconds of Google searching would have told him that a black screen on a C64 is nearly always caused by a blown PLA.

It's also a good idea to heatsink all the NMOS chips on the C64, they will slowly die otherwise no matter what you do.

If you do get another PLA, user, please heat sink it and also heat sink the VIC-II (get rid of the useless RF shield) and SID. They get hot.

lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=50197&sid=f4c0ee51ee0d5aa81dc66fb2b7f2c36b

Also the chips get hotter over time, the more they have been powered on. Being a 30 year old computer you can guess that they ain't in the best shape anymore.

The later ones and the VIC-II use HMOS and run way cooler, but it's still a good idea to heatsink them.

>Also the chips get hotter over time, the more they have been powered on. Being a 30 year old computer you can guess that they ain't in the best shape anymore.
The things ran hot enough to roast weenies on when they were new, but marinating in heat for 30 years can eventually cause them to break down and fail.

So no, that's a myth actually. They don't get hotter with time, but the heat level they've always operated at will result in failure of the IC.

Im just gonna desolder all the chips and solder some sockets in and test every chip

gonna rig up some circuit or something on a breadboard and use arduino/scope to test them all

still not sure if I will sell it, already have enough vintage computers alt-ought im still missing a 486 for my collection

Interesting, everybody always told me they would get hotter over time, in the margin of a few degrees, I never owned a real 64 myself.

Aw fuck, I had that laptop from the far left.

I also forgot to mention I was testing the video outputs with my scope composite and rf

I get constant 4v dc out of them both when the unit is switched on single horizontal line jumps form 0 to 4v if that helps

>So no, that's a myth actually. They don't get hotter with time, but the heat level they've always operated at will result in failure of the IC

He probably read that on Lemon64 which is full of pretty dumb people. Yes, ICs can fail due to electromigration but that's a breakdown of the bonding wires in the chip. It wouldn't make them get hotter.

The thing is, the main ICs in the C64 get hot because of using 12V power. Stuff like an Apple II has only 5V ICs in it so you don't have problems with those going back other than maybe RAM.

I have better more interesting vintage looking stuff

Care to share? Some mofos here have garages full of rare shit stacked ontop of eachother.

What does Sup Forums think of woodgrain?

I'm somewhat tempted to do it myself, maybe with stencil art on the case as well.

Surprised it lasted you a day at all, even DX/2s rated for 80 MHz were total ass.

I think Clint is onto something, but I would not do it personally, maybe yeah for a 486 only, but I'd do it with real wood.

I didn't know any better. I wish I did, I think that my old Celeron computer's PSU exploded because I found out the BIOS would let me set it to 500 MHz. I don't remember what the stock speed was, probably something like 400.

Either way, I'm going to baby the fuck out of all the stuff I'll be collecting now.

Absolutely I do. I love old technology, it gives me the purest nostalgic feeling, and of course the device has to be functioning. A computer that doesn't turn on is just a corpse of a computer.

No way a CPU would make a PSU explode.

>ST
What a lovely toy

Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back, but after trying that new overclock, the PSU went POP and blew out a bunch of smoke.

Digging the luggables, shame about the G5 though.

>tfw literally
I wish there were more fags like you guys local to me, I'd even give some of this shit away if I knew it was going to a good home rather than some craigslist scalper or "maker" fag who just wants to destroy it anyway.

Woodgrain can be nice, but only if the overall aesthetic matches it. I don't really feel it goes well with even '80s PC design trends.

Maybe.

What's a good email client for system 7.2 (I think) that supports secure connections? I'm trying to set up my powerbook 520 to access my email, but dicksinmyan.us won't accept a plaintext login.