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krslam

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Posts posted by krslam

  7. Posted

    4 minutes ago, bluejay said:

    I totally forgot about those! When I had my 1902a I remember it being very annoying as it sometimes didn't engage and lock into the ON position, and it felt like some more scraping plastic. It never worked though, and I ended up throwing it out.

    1902a is a Philips design, isn't it? I always thought those had decent buttons. Daewoo made the 1902 (no 'A') and those switches are forever going bad.

     

    • Like 1

  8. Posted

    17 minutes ago, bluejay said:

    Commodore VIC-20 (2 prong). Maybe it's just my VIC-20, but it takes a crapload of pressure to turn the thing on, and barely any to turn it back off. By "crapload of pressure" I mean "takes-both-hands-to-thrust-both-your-thumbs-onto-the-switch" kind of pressure. It "loosens up" after a few switches back and forth, but after a while it becomes stiff all over again. Even if it didn't have this issue I don't think it would be a terribly pleasing switch to throw.

     

    I've run into this on multiple VICs.  After the 1st, very difficult, throw, it takes no effort at all to turn it on or off, but come back the next day and it's stuck again.  Always wondered what was up with those units.

     

    The Commodore Daewoo monitors (1902, 2002, 1080, 1084) also have switches that feel mushy and tend to go bad.

     

    I generally find slider switches (TI99, Colecovision, Intellivision, Genesis, etc) have a less positive feel than rocker (excluding those crappy VICs) or push button switches, too, and seem more prone to failure. I like a big, clicky switch where I can feel a contact being made.

    • Like 1

  9. Posted

    Don't know if this is true or not, but I heard that whatever equipment was used to pre-format 5.25" PC disks used a stronger magnetic field so the relatively weak heads of Commodore and other home computers couldn't overcome it sufficiently to produce a new format. Bulk erasing was recommended before reformatting.  Wasn't really an MFM vs GCR thing.

    • Like 1

  11. Posted

    Well, it's not hard formatted, but those 1440K diskettes are probably high density media, whereas your 800K Mac probably wants double density disks.  Because of differing magnetic properties and particle sizes, HD media will frequently fail or will lose data quickly when used on DD drives.

    • Like 1

  14. Posted

    59 minutes ago, motrucker said:

    Some where back in this thread it was noted that the C-64 was sold at Toys R Us in the early '90s (with a cost to Commodore of $5.00 per). I wish I could remember what the C-64 sold for from that outlet....

    Toys R Us also sold the C-128 Dcr for $189.97 - until at least 1994. (I bought three at that price).

     

     

    Would be interesting to see the date codes on the chips in those machines, since AFAIK all 128s,  including Dcr's, were no longer being manufactured after 1989. If toys-r-us was selling 5 year old stock in '94 that might have been a blowout price. Any chance they were refurbs?

    • Like 1

  15. Posted

    2 hours ago, D Train said:

    who is it?

    You can find multiple references to happiestsellerever! by searching this site. Mostly he's known for buying up reasonably priced items then relisting them for much more than he paid. He's basically a scalper.

    • Thanks 1

  19. Posted

    There's a bunch of info on the Covox devices here:

    https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-mysterious-covox-pc-sound-devices.html

     

    At first I thought you were describing the LipStick.  I seem to remember that it came with a piece of software that would display a word like UP! on the screen when you responded verbally with UP to the prompt. Later I realized it was just a sound activated joystick button and would display UP! at that point no matter what I said. I remember saying some *bad words* when it wanted me to say FIRE! and it worked just great.

     

    An interesting side note: if you pair a LipStik with an Amiga JoyBoard (which was sort of an early Wii balance board), you could have truly hands free play on an Atari or Commodore.

     

     

  21. Posted

    16 minutes ago, Serguei2 said:

    Ok.

     

    Does CP/M have other use than reading/writing disks on all CP/M computers?

    Well, sure.  CP/M had Wordstar, Perfect Writer, dBase, and a number of other early productivity packages, all of which I thought were superior to whatever was offered in either C64 or C128 native mode.  It had Turbo Pascal, which was a terrific development package.  Several of the early Infocom text adventures exist in that format, though you could also run these in native mode. There's a ton of cp/m software, though not so much games outside of text-based stuff.

     

    Nowadays, the productivity packages have all been surpassed so if the question is 'Why use CP/M today?" then there aren't a lot of reasons.

     

    • Like 1

  23. Posted

    51 minutes ago, R.Cade said:

    I never really understood why they did this. There were no C128 cartridges that I know of... They could have just designed it so that if a cartridge (any cartridge) was inserted, it went into C64 mode. The Z80 and the boot process is needlessly complicated.

     

    The 128 will automatically boot to 64 mode if there's a C64 cart installed that has the proper boot code, though as mentioned the 64's cp/m cart doesn't work (it doesn't even work on many C64s).

     

    There were also a few C128 specific carts: Partner128 and Mach128 come to mind.  There's also an after-market 128 diagnostic cart.

     

  25. Posted

    I can't see that $5 figure as possible, either, unless it's an accounting trick.  Perhaps those last 64's were being assembled from parts that were built and financially accounted for earlier so that very little has to be bought or built to finish them?

     

    That sort of accounting, by the way, partially accounts for why early 128's were cheaper to make than later ones.  128's used some components left over from other products (the VDC came from the cancelled C900, for example) that had already been built and written off, but when the system proved popular thay had to start building those things again.

     

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