What 8bit / 16bit / workstation do You own?

[troj]

Apple

Apply //c I bought new in 1984 - fully working, including the lovely green screen monitor

Apple //c my inlaws bought in 1985 - fully working, including the RGB monitor

A pair of Apple ][+; I know one works, I haven't tried the other (yet)

Apple //e - needs keyboard repair, at the very least

I had a //gs, but I gave it away to someone who will better appreciate it



Radio Shack

Model 102

A pair of Model 4s; one NGA, one GA - the GA model is almost immaculate and still has the factory warranty seal intact. Sadly, I need to break that seal so I can fix drive 1.

A pair of Model 1s, one of which works, one of which does not. I also have a working EI, as well as an EI board that doesn't work.

I'm on the hunt for a Model III that's in reasonably good shape.

The fun thing about the TRS-80 line is the FreHD, which is a hard drive emulator that uses an SD card. Makes it super easy to get software for the systems, if you have the boot ROM installed.

[EMwhite]

On 10/30/2020 at 1:03 AM, EMwhite said:

It's killing me too.  Unreliable-tracking.com says it was transferred from Royal Mail to USPS.  Guessing another week until I get them.  Of course there is a chance that it's a RAM problem or something else but I rolled the dice on this pair of TEDs.  I also just bought a C16 from Hungary board minus the TED and CPU.  And I was wrong about my comment above, there are a few maniacs out there that retrofit a C16 (specifically) [Adrian's Basement] with a 6502 and other videos that address the TED problems.  That's next.



I've got a Firepower Pinball machine (80's) that I'm restoring, working full time, and taking a Python class so this is just another project running in time-sliced fashion but I'm eager to get it working.  The Plus 4 is a nice piece of history and I'm proud to own one despite it being a massive loss for Commodore back in the day.



Maybe another week or two.  Will inform.

C16 arrived from Hungary.  One good thing, one not so good. 

The good is that it actually works; taking the TED and CPU from the +4 (which you can see in the background), the Commodore 16 actually powered up.  The not-so-good news is that as received it did not work, despite the listing saying that it did.  I think this was made in Germany back in the day but maybe it was South America; I'd have to check into the history.

I can tell by examining the board that majority of the components were wave soldered or something consistent and high quality.  But a number of components like jacks, switches and few parts here and there are faulty/corroded and had to be carefully removed (probably hand soldered, during assembly).  You'll note in the pic below, I've soldered a .156 header between two board points.

I've also ordered one of the dead-test carts which I will use to further troubleshoot the +4.  Still no TED chips; still en route.  If I had to guess, I've got an address line issue on the +4 or a ram problem.  Was walking my 11 yr. old through a bit map graphics demo on the +4 and noticed a seemingly random (but probably repeating) pattern of random bits/pixels on.  More later.

[Ffin72]

My collection currently consists of:

 

C64 (Breadbin) with Turbo Chameleon 64 V2

C64C with SD2IEC and Easyflash 3

C128 with 1541 Ultimate II

Atari 130XE currently waiting for a SOFIA 2, SIO2SD, Ultimate 1MB and SIDE 3

 

I'm a bit 6502 heavy, I'd really like to get a Amstrad CPC 6128 to balance things out.

[kelli217]

Somewhere around this house I have a TI-99/4A and the cables to hook it up to a TV, but nothing else.

I have three Apple IIgs machines. One of them is mostly set up, with a monitor, ADB keyboard and mouse, a 3.5" drive, and a 5.25" drive. The other two are just the main system boxes and nothing else. I might have another ADB keyboard somewhere. I do have a CFFA3000 card that I intend to install in the machine that's all set up, and a copy of the latest version of GS/OS on a CF card.

I have a TRS-80 Model 4P currently in an inaccessible location behind a bunch of other stuff. I haven't used it in well over a decade, probably closer to 2. It was working when I last put it away. I also have the shell and some of the wiring for a Model III, but none of the internal hardware.

I have 4 Amigas. One is in a box at work, a 4000 with a 2065 Ethernet card and a CGX/3D card, as well as a 2091 SCSI card. The 2091 is hooked to a CD-ROM drive and the onboard IDE is hooked to a 1GB drive. It has a coin cell holder in it instead of a soldered-on battery, too. The other three at home are a 1000, a 1200, and a 2000. The 1000 has a flaky power switch. I used to have a SCSI adapter box for the side of it, but I was never able to get it to work, even once I found the right drivers, so I disposed of it as broken. The 1200 has an internal 3.5" IDE drive where the internal floppy used to be, so I have an old A1010 floppy drive attached to it. (I also have the HD floppy drive that it came with still around in case I ever put a 2.5" HD in it.) I do have another 880K floppy around, a slimline California Arts CA-880, but it stopped working. I think it's something simple, though, so I've kept it around. The 2000 is a nice machine. It has two 3.5" floppies and a 5.25" high-density floppy... and you know what that last bit means. Yep, it has a Bridgeboard. I no longer remember which one, but I remember being impressed when I found out which one it was, so it might be a 2386SX; the 1.2MB floppy only came with the 2286 and the 2386SX. It also has an RF and color composite card in the video slot.

I have a couple of Macs. One is an Intel MacBook with a 32-bit processor, so it can only handle Snow Leopard. I've deleted MacOS and put Ubuntu Studio on it. The other is an Intel iMac that has a 64-bit CPU but is still too old for the latest and greatest. It's running El Capitan, though, and it still supports a lot of modern apps, so I've left it alone to continue running MacOS.



I've got four Raspberry Pis here and one that's on loan to someone else. At home I have an example from every generation so far: a 1B — the first form factor, but with 512MB of RAM; a 2B; a 3B+; and a 4B 8GB model. The one on loan is a 3B.

Lastly, I have several PCs. In addition to my current ASUS Core 2 Quad main desktop machine, I have a 2-in-1 Lenovo Yoga laptop/tablet, and 8 other desktop systems. One of them has VLB slots on the motherboard, and it actually has a VLB graphics card in it as well as an AWE64 sound card. It's a beige box that I got from a recycler/reseller and it seems to have been built to be a multimedia PC. I got another beige box in the same deal but it's much less interesting. The IBM Personal Computer 300GL is also uninteresting, except that it has a Token Ring network adapter that uses an RJ-45 connector, and has a LightScribe CD-ROM drive. The Gateway2000 P5-120 is truly unremarkable. The Compaq Presario is the first system I owned that ran Linux, and it was the first one that had a DVD-ROM drive. It also has a CD-RW drive and a Zip100 drive. There's a Dell Optiplex mini system buried behind some other stuff that has a boot issue with RAM timing, even though I put the RAM back in it that I had taken out to up the specs on it. There's a Compaq Desqpro 386 that's been through a fire and has a partially melted front panel but otherwise works fine and has a combined 3.5/5.25 floppy drive, and a HardCard. The Tandy 1000HX is one that I've been meaning to upgrade with some of the cards that I've seen offered recently for the odd 'PLUS' expansion bus, though it does already have 640K thanks to a card I was able to find on eBay many years ago.

The odd one out is the Sanyo MBC-555 which I didn't include in the list of PCs even though it's an MS-DOS machine with an 8088. It's one of those weird early machines that's only compatible with software that uses proper MS-DOS and BIOS calls, because the underlying hardware isn't the same as a PC. It is such an early machine in the MS-DOS era that its dual single-sided 5.25" floppies only support 160K each instead of the 180K single-sided drives that came later or the 360K double-sided drives that were around soon afterward. It was also clocked at NTSC color burst frequency, 3.58 MHz, rather than the PC's 4.77, and was originally delivered with only 128K of RAM. I don't remember if the one I have has the RAM upgrade card, but it does have the RGB graphics card that had as many as 8 colors available at 640×200 resolution while being sync-compatible with CGA.

[BruceMcF]

Two C64 bread bins, they worked when I picked them up a decade ago, but I am nervous that they might not the next time I try (haven't been stateside for a year and a half, and didn't have a chance at that time to do Kore than get them into storage). At the very least I'll update from a "vintage" to a "retro" power supply, to avoid frying them if their PS's have gone bad.

I do wish I still had the Warp Speed cartridge and 1581 I had when I went off to grad school at the end of the 80s.

[EMwhite]

My 8-bit collection is finally complete.  Picked up this Pet kbd equipped VIC-20 recently.  Does it work?  (not important).  Someday it will...