Muzz73

I would get ahold of Best Electronics or B&C Computervisions. They both carry NOS power supplies and in my experience, are both very helpful. A stock (18w) would be fine for a 400, but if you'd like something more heavy duty, you can use the 50w psu from an Atari floppy drive and it'll probably last you forever.

Bingo! I will confirm 1 unit for the 600XL. Thanks for the updates!

Yep. As much as I love the Commodore 64... I currently have seven of them, only one of which is trouble free!

I figured as much... I read it somewhere and it almost seemed too good to be true... and you know what they say about that!

There's also Beaglewrite by Beagle Bros. Been meaning to try that one...

I've read that you can even do it with most single sided disks as well... Because the single-sided Tandy drives used one side of the disk and the Apple ][ wrote to the other side, most companies made double-sided disks and just put single sided labels on them. This way, they didn't have to make platform-specific disks. In short, the differences between SSDD and DSDD was just the labeling and the guarantee. Can anyone verify this?

I have two of them, neither one installed - one from the first run and one from the third. No need to go into why they aren't installed (too complicated), but I may part with one soon. I don't want to put it on ebay and make money off of someone, just break even... I would rather see it go to someone who will use it than to see it sit here, doing nothing (which should almost be criminal). I want to make sure that one of them is installed and running before I part with the other, so please be patient and I ask that no one send me private messages expressing interest just yet, as I have no idea how I am going to "put it out there" when the time comes. I just wanted everyone to have a decent "heads-up", so keep your eyes open.

By the time USB became (for the most part) standardized, 3.5" floppy drives in were not particularly practical and 5.25" drives were long a thing of the past. I think, at least in part, it may also have something to do with modern machines not coming with a floppy disk controller built in. 3.5" USB drives have the control hardware in the drive itself and those probably do not support 5.25" drive mechanisms, so someone would have to design one (custom). While there will never be a big demand for a USB 5.25" FDD, I too am surprised that someone hasn't cooked something up, retro computing and software preservation being as popular as it is and all.

My 800 also came with this mod. I never attempted to use it before switching the board out, but I do still have the old board. I don't have any pics handy either, but it looks to be wired directly to the SIO bus.

You also might need to check the handshaking settings... the 8-pin mini DIN that they started using on the Mac Plus is a non-hardware handshaking serial port, so sometimes a non-hardware handshaking cable might be required for higher speeds. I seem to remember a buddy's girlfriend having an issue with that back in the day. Can anyone confirm this? I haven't had to deal with that issue in over 20 years!

There was a game called "Ninja" that came that way, too. I had it back in the day with my C=64 (before I got my hands on my first A8).

Had I been thinking clearly in 1992, I'd have stocked up!

Off topic here, but have you upgraded it to 4MB RAM? Handy for System 7.1, especially for caching and a RAM disk...

Yes, I read on the web site that others were helping to run it after Rick's passing, I just wasn't sure of the current status. I'll be patient and wait. I'm looking forward to putting a REX into my Model 102 as well! Thanks, all!

Does anyone know if club100.org is still in operation? Their web site is up, but I'm not sure when it was updated last. I sent an e-mail asking if they were still in operation and expressed an interest in making a purchase or two, but never received any response. Any info. you might have will be appreciated. Thanks to all!

Thanks! It's in nice condition, too. My favorite A8! Granted, most of the wear & tear goes on my 800XL... but once the Incognito goes in, it's never leaving my desk again!

OK, my turn... NTSC unit, freshly rebuilt, awaiting installation of my Incognito.

I especially like the idea of shoehorning one into my 600XL...

A VERY used (when I first got it) C=64 w/datasette drive, a 9" or 10" B&W TV and (a few months later) a 1650 MoDem (300 BAUD). Regardless what type of setup I may have at any given moment, I still miss that thing and the days of 40 column ASCII text BBSes in the Santa Cruz, CA area. Then I realize that it's not 1987 anymore...

Yes! I love 68K Macs! I've had, well... too many of them to count, but... On the floppy issue, I have something unrelated that you may need to think about. If you are going to be using a lot of older disks (like if you inherited someone's old library or something to that effect) and have a Superdrive (the 1.44MB DSHD 3.5"), you will probably want to grab a DSDD 880K drive as well, or at least borrow one until you have backed up all of the disks onto more modern media. Superdrives sometimes spat older disks out (especially MFS-formatted), so you needed an older drive to read them properly. It doesn't happen often, but it can be frustrating when it does.

Between my dad, my son and myself, we've owned 6-7 VIC-20's and probably 25-30 C=64's over the last 29 years. We have a habit of rescuing them from swap meets, yard sales and Goodwill's Bargain Barn in Santa Cruz, CA. We can, of course, go into the ups and downs of both of them and come to the determination that, despite their respective quirks, they are both wonderful machines, but... I'm for calling the VIC-20 more robust than the C=64, just based on my own (personal) experience... especially the two-prongers! It also helps that there are modernized, drop-in replacements for both the 6502 & 6522 (both used in the VIC-20) that are still produced today (those account for 3 of the 4 chips in VIC-20's that fail most often), while there are no drop-in replacements for either the 6510 or 6526 (used in the C=64) currently produced. You have to resort to new, 25-30+ year old stock or used pulls. Just some observations from a guy with 4 VIC-20's that still run and 7 C=64's with various combinations of bad PLA's & faulty 6526's.

Oh, wow... Just take my money... NOW!!! Yes, very interested in one. Keep us posted!

Yep! If you can get a Servant 128 chip to drop into the empty ROM socket (if yours is still empty), it has some convenient utility-type features. One of them is a BAM copier that uses the extra VRAM for caching, IIRC. You can do disk-to-disk copying in considerably less time, especially if you only have one floppy drive (fewer disk swaps).

Flat 128's and 128DCRs have somewhat different chipsets. Being that some of the chips are different, I wouldn't cannibalize either one to save the other... I would keep the flat 128 (maybe store it somewhere else) in case the DCR goes kaboom. At least you'd have a backup machine that way. You can always upgrade the VRAM on the flat 128 to 64K and have software compatibility to the DCR. I can sympathize; I have a "short board" 64C that uses some of the newer, 9v chips that the 128DCR uses and I can't find replacements anywhere.

It's already been said (in essence), but my opinion on stock Commodore PSU's: hold the ends of both cords, swing it around like the hammer throw in the Summer Olympics and let go. This provides some physical exercise, it helps with the hand/eye coordination and is more amusing than plugging it in and watching your SID chip slag.