iKarith

I'm likely to never have a PEB (where would I put it?) so I guess I'll have to wait for a mythical nanoPEB II that has more than 32K of RAM in it.

I've thought about this for the TI-99/4A. The first problem I see is that a stereo cassette player is likely to pick up noise a mono cassette recorder would not. So for archiving cassette data from a retrocomputer, I would insist on playing it on an oldskool mono cassette recorder, albeit in as "new" or restored a condition as I could get it. Next, I'd assume the audio needs to be as clean as I can get it. 70% volume and midpoint on tone control (unless your computer needs different tone control setting.) I'd also never record into a computer's internal audio device--though a cheap external USB dongle should suffice. However I assume it's going to need a stereo plug, if not stereo line-in data. So I'd use a 3.5mm TS phone to RCA adapter to RCA splitter to L/R RCA to 3.5mm TRS phone cable (computer to stereo receiver cable) to get audio in to the computer. On the computer I'd probably throw away one of the audio channels in an editor if I couldn't conveniently record mono. The key to making life sane I think would be a custom cassette cable for the PC that wires the two mic channels together as above, but only routes the left channel in to the input. Generally okay to tie two inputs together, but don't tie two outputs like that. I haven't gotten around to trying it out, but that's what I've got in terms of ideas for what to do with it.

What're you looking to spend? I know a guy who repairs the things from eBait.

Sounds like your ANSI isn't real VT100/102/220/whatever compatible.

I understand correctly that these require a PEB?

Do you have a recommendation for one Omega?

Try a little contact cleaner sprayed into the key. Failing that, resolder it. Failing that, find someone with a parts machine and get them to send you a key.

I am still poking at the n00b docs. I need to upload some more about the hardware stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-S-BmJCV_c Probably the best getting started guide I've found so far. Plus, VectrexRoli reads and posts here now and then.

But crap on the screen when you turn on the machine with any disk in the drive, before the disk loads, suggests bad hardware. Like I said, sounds clearly like a RAM chip is bad, especially if the inverse characters are the same character, and often if that character is @.

I've never been a fan of the 7 layer cake thing. It just isn't really ideal. TCP/IP functions really as a four layer system, and it won out for a reason.

That's the game, only on the Apple //, with less color and debatably cleaner audio than that.

I didn't say they shouldn't be able to make a few bucks here and there. I'm at least fundamentally a capitalist. We're talking about irrational wants. My irrational want is for their costs to drop enough that it becomes worthwhile to make and sell stuff cheaper.

I KNEW IT! It's actually true that plbyrd is part of the secret conspiracy of the Bliderberg group and the Illuminati, working with the Freemasons against the Scientologists to establish a one-world government New World Order using the World Bank and vintage Commodore and PC computers! But fear not, my fellow compatriots! We can still resist the evil oppression! We have Apple //, and WorldBank does not yet have MouseText support! :D

I'll also echo the wishes for good luck on the sale--I always prefer to see hardware go into the hands of someone who wants to use it when it's no longer needed.

eBait often has them. I just bought one for its keyboard (I'm legally blind, so I would really appreciate the key caps off the C64CR model...) But that means that I'll have two machines and I really only need one. The machine will probably from the description come with a power supply I don't recommend anyone use, but I'll see if it tests out well and let you know if you haven't found one sooner.

Maybe someone with an electronics background can comment... Is switching the common an acceptable way to do a power switch for this setup?

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't pay $200 for a TI console by itself no matter what condition it was in, so the eBait seller has got to be joking. I paid $20 for my console in box. Not complete in box, and the box has a fair amount of wear, but it was in a box and clean. I imagine a console in the condition mine is in might sell for more than I paid (and possibly even a good bit more), but I wouldn't have paid more than $40 for even this one. Partly because I'm poor, and partly because I am less interested in how it looks and more in how it works. And I know these things routinely go for $20-30 in working condition.

Sounds like you may have a couple of bad RAM chips. Or perhaps things need to be resocketed? Anyway, this sounds like a bad RAM, and possibly just one bad RAM. That's a cheap repair, but you need to diagnose the problem.

I want a free Atari 800XL. I've never heard of the Harlequin--pics?

True enough, but for example the Uthernet II for the Apple // series sells for about $70 and it's mostly just some buffering, an Ethernet jack, and a Wiznet W5100. I question whether or not it's a real W5100, but you can get an Arduino shield that claims to have the same chipset for $10 on eBay. Less if you don't mind it coming via the slow boat from China or just want a breakout of the W5100 not in shield form factor with microSD socket. So where does the $60 come from? It comes from the fact that the guy who's selling it has to make them in small batches with some assembly required (the Ethernet jack mostly) to make it affordable to make them in quantity less than 10,000. He makes a little on them, but not a lot. The CFFA 1.2 was cloned and sold for around $100 which cut Rich out of a little cash on each one sold. Possibly his margins on those aren't incredibly tiny, but I doubt he could make the current CFFA3000 with microcontroller, CPLD, USB, and CF sockets for under $100 in batches of 4-500 at a time. So it's irrational to want to see that board for $50 unless there was reason to make 10,000 of them at once. That'd pretty much guarantee eBait prices go way, way up if it ever made sense again to make that many.

I don't think it'd drop in performance until such time as it fails entirely. Just about all of the major ROM types are susceptible to some form of bit rot. Mask ROMs probably the least so, but even they'll fail eventually. We have new memory devices that will give another 40-50 years of life to these old machines, and that's all we really need for obviously decades to come, but we need to have the chips' data when it becomes necessary to start replacing them, and in the case of oddball formats that just weren't used a lot of places like GROMs, we have to have to have a way to map the data into the physical carrier package. It has been (and is being) done for lots of machines, but we can't currently just pull the GROMs on the TI motherboard and replace them with a nice little GROM emulator. At least, not yet we can't.

I've bought a TI-99/4A. A guy some of you might recognize from a Facebook group sold me a C64 for peanuts. And somehow I just got a 128 freebie. Then there's the investment in Raspberry Pis--I always have those around because I am developing Raspple II (and looking to branch out to doing cool things for the TI and C64 and possibly C128 now as well.) I don't have any Atari or Tandy, but I'd like to go there someday if I can figure out how to pay for the necessary stuff to load software from memory cards and the aforementioned RPi. Space is a major issue, so even if I'm offered systems for free, I don't really want a bunch of disk drives at this point. I find they're almost not necessary on the Apple, and while they currently are on Commodore, I hope that will change at some point.

I want modern upgrades for my retro machines to cost what the Arduino and similar things cost. Those are made for a much larger audience, and they tend to use small boards with few components, so it's easy to make them $5-50 each or less in quantity, depending on what they do. But even a small board with half a dozen chips for retro machines cost in the neighborhood of $60-200 or even $300, even if the chips themselves are often nowadays the same ones you see in other low-cost devices. I understand the economies of scale, but still.

The one I remember was a cracked version on the Apple // that would offer you unlimited shields, phasers, etc. Didn't have a manual for it for some reason, so never really played it.

You can put the CFFA in a slot other than slot 7. That means it won't boot with autoscan, but it can be done. If you don't have any software you care to use on 3.5" disks, I'd put it there. You can switch Slot 5 to built in disk controller if you need a boot floppy. I personally don't have any physical drives connected to my IIgs at this point.