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What is your retro computing most "irrational want?"


rpiguy9907

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3 minutes ago, Keatah said:

All this talk reminds me of the discussions about pushing a console's hardware.

 

When the Disk II came out it was a fantastic relief from cassettes. But over the years it was fun to watch its speed increase through improved DOS routines. Same with capacity, though indirectly via compression utilities like DDD and AXEpacker. But most exciting of all were the new commands from DOSes like ProDOS, Diversi-DOS, David-DOS, HyperDOS, and Pronto-DOS.

 

While not intrinsic to the Disk II mechanism in any way, shape, or form, us kids at the time thought it magical that the chips on the controller card and inside the drive could learn new things.

And it's really just a matter of the original code being unoptimized in the first place.   Something similar happened on the ST when coders started releasing products like Quick ST, Turbo ST, etc.   These provided new screen drawing routines that were much more efficient than the ones included in TOS.   Running with one of these patches made the whole computer feel faster because all the screen updates were much faster.

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Early on we were just happy to have the (un-optimized) code working at all. But us kids didn't know or care or think in that way. We considered DOS 3.3 the standard. Especially because it came from Apple itself. Anything new and improved was groundbreaking. Real frontier work. Revealing new magic at every version. Every new product.

 

We blindly assumed the manufacturer knew best and automatically always made stuff perform the best.

Edited by Keatah
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  • 2 weeks later...

For me it is basically anything vintage. It doesn't matter if it's the Atari 2600 heavy sixer I wanted for so long, the 1200XL I drooled over for years, the mint condition NES I finally found at Goodwill, my Intellivision, TI-99/4A, the 486 DX/2 computer I built a few years ago, etc. All of these are things I spent years looking at pictures of online, searching eBay day after day, thinking how badly I wanted them. What happened when I got them though? I played with them for a few days and then they went in a shelf to gather dust or packed up in their box and shoved under the bed or in a closet. I keep wondering why I wanted these things so much when once I got them I never even look at them let alone turn them on. Just yesterday I was on eBay looking at a Kaypro II thinking "If only I had that..." I think I enjoy wanting things and trying to find them more than actually owning them. ?

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4 hours ago, Banquo said:

For me it is basically anything vintage. It doesn't matter if it's the Atari 2600 heavy sixer I wanted for so long, the 1200XL I drooled over for years, the mint condition NES I finally found at Goodwill, my Intellivision, TI-99/4A, the 486 DX/2 computer I built a few years ago, etc. All of these are things I spent years looking at pictures of online, searching eBay day after day, thinking how badly I wanted them. What happened when I got them though? I played with them for a few days and then they went in a shelf to gather dust or packed up in their box and shoved under the bed or in a closet. I keep wondering why I wanted these things so much when once I got them I never even look at them let alone turn them on. Just yesterday I was on eBay looking at a Kaypro II thinking "If only I had that..." I think I enjoy wanting things and trying to find them more than actually owning them. ?

Lot of truth in this.  For some reason I just HAD to have a Commodore 1551 disk drive.  Wound up dropping $250 on one in 2016.  Mostly it sits in a shelf I have, dust it off once in a while basically to test that it works, then back on the shelf for months at a time.  

 

And yet I can't see myself giving it up anytime soon.  Somehow it is a comfort that I have it.

 

It was probably my most irrational retro computer want.  Occasionally I find myself wanting a Tandy Color Computer 2, but I had one and sold it (for now what seems to have been a ridiculously cheap price) and kinda wish I had it back; I find myself occasionally coveting a 1200XL, though it is not as nice in many ways as the 800XL I do have; I discover things all the time that I kind of want, like a Compaq C140, which I only discovered existed this very morning, which by definition makes the want irrational;

 

But my most irrational want of all is the effectively unusable if you had one, which would likely set you back $50K, Commodore 65 I guess.  I will never have one, so in substitute I would love a "Mega" 65, whenever it enjoys its official release: https://mega65.org

 

Not sure what on Earth I will really do with it if/once I get one, but boy, I want one.

Edited by mozartpc27
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While not an irrational want - those VT100 terms are really nice looking. You could put one of these in there: https://www.hackster.io/mad-resistor/diy-vt100-a-miniature-hardware-terminal-041931

 

And you could also make the R-Pi play vintage games!

 

The actual electronics in these old things are becoming more bothersome and irritable as time passes. But no need to trash the beautifully unique cases they come in. Not only that, you're improving and increasing their original functionality. Put it this way, no one is going to be using a real VT100 for anything serious anymore. So why not gut it and put useful modern stuff in it?

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5 hours ago, Keatah said:

While not an irrational want - those VT100 terms are really nice looking. You could put one of these in there: https://www.hackster.io/mad-resistor/diy-vt100-a-miniature-hardware-terminal-041931

 

And you could also make the R-Pi play vintage games!

 

The actual electronics in these old things are becoming more bothersome and irritable as time passes. But no need to trash the beautifully unique cases they come in. Not only that, you're improving and increasing their original functionality. Put it this way, no one is going to be using a real VT100 for anything serious anymore. So why not gut it and put useful modern stuff in it?

Mainly because there most likely isn't a way to keep the CRT while having the RPi in it. I don't like LCDs, especially inside machines like the PET, Mac, TRS-80, and any old terminal that had CRTs build in. They just look awful.

Besides, there most likely isn't an easy way to have a RPi installed in the thing, especially if I want it to be well done. I'd rather leave the guts inside because it's less of an hassle. I can gut it when it actually breaks beyond repair; until then I'd leave it as is. I don't see the point in purposely taking apart a working system just to put something else inside of it.

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  • 1 month later...

I sooooo badly want a Commodore 128 w/1571 and 1581 to run CP/M on even though I have absolutely no use for it and honestly would probably just stick it in a corner after the first couple hours of playing with it.  The good news is that prices are so insane on them (if you can find one) that it's well above my impulse buy threshold. 

 

I felt the same way about a CoCo2 running OS-9 and once I had it, well, barely touched it.

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On 1/24/2021 at 10:58 PM, bluejay said:

Mainly because there most likely isn't a way to keep the CRT while having the RPi in it. I don't like LCDs, especially inside machines like the PET, Mac, TRS-80, and any old terminal that had CRTs build in. They just look awful.

The 70's and 80's styles rigs should have a rounded CRT. Especially anything monochrome. But there were a few terminals and the Model II that looked good with glarescreen/filter covering the CRT. If done right I suppose it would look ok. And if the LCD is IPS, then you get a residual glow too. Which is nice.

 

I tried Star Raiders on a $1300 gaming IPS monitor and it was simply spectacular and gorgeous all around. Had some artifacting and blooming, 10% scanlines, and saturated colors. Looked even more retro when I set the phosphor to that blue'ish tint - but then it was monochrome.

 

On 1/24/2021 at 10:58 PM, bluejay said:

Besides, there most likely isn't an easy way to have a RPi installed in the thing, especially if I want it to be well done. I'd rather leave the guts inside because it's less of an hassle. I can gut it when it actually breaks beyond repair; until then I'd leave it as is. I don't see the point in purposely taking apart a working system just to put something else inside of it.

I generally only do real hardware for Apple II and vintage 486 & PIII era PCs. I've gotten away from repairing other systems because of the time and aging parts. More than just 1 or 2 parts are now being needed to restore a vintage system.

 

I generally won't take apart a working system. But I will part out or strip down something that I feel needs more than an hour or two on the bench to get running. And most TRS-80 Model II and III units fall into this category. And that helps create a parts market for other hobbyists!

 

It's all easy stuff, but tedious stuff. And I don't like tedium much at the present time.

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2 hours ago, Keatah said:

 And that helps create a parts market for other hobbyists!

Thought you said you were gonna toss the guts, since they are just useless old heaps of outdated technology?

 

Regardless, gutting working systems, especially those that are rare and valuable will never be understood by me, but I won’t criticize people who like doing stuff like this. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I must be really an oddball..

 

I have recently been interested in how you can abuse EEPROMs as logic circuits. (To the point where you can build entirely ROM based computers, without an actual dedicated CPU.)

Some part of me wants to demo taking some small-ish FPGA based solution, dissecting its VHDL, and then implementing it with TTL using EEPROMs. Just Because.

 

As for me, (when I was a kid), I was enamored of how you could arbitrarily instruct a computer to perform a task.  That was so much more interesting than anything else about a computer.

 

Edited by wierd_w
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7 minutes ago, wierd_w said:

I have recently been interested in how you can abuse EEPROMs as logic circuits. (To the point where you can build entirely ROM based computers, without an actual dedicated CPU.)

That is extremely interesting; I’d love to know what exactly makes this possible. 
 

From that perspective, I always wanted to build a computer using no ICs, just transistors, resistors, capacitors, etc. God knows how slow the thing would be but it would most certainly be very interesting. 

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You can conceive of a ROM chip as being a programmable gate array.  That's how.

 

Depending on what address lines you raise (inputs), you get values on the output lines-- based on what you programmed on the chip.

You can thus, say-- Get a 38 pin package to act just like a discrete logic chip, if you write the correct binary data on it.

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I find that (it being considered unsafe) a bit dubious, as quite a few TTL based monitors used similar tricks to decode CGA/EGA signals.

 

It depends very much on what the chip is rated to handle in terms of miliamperes passing through it. EEPROMs are are more vulnerable, but you can still use them inside a conversion circuit with a small number of discrete transistors to handle the higher signal output values. (EEPROM data lines are connected to beefier transistor collectors, such that when the ROM goes high, the transistor also does. The transistor then actually provides the output signal, and handles the stress. The EEPROM sits safely behind a few current limiting resistors.)

 

Speed can still be an issue with having to piggy back logic state changes like that, but some of those discrete transistors are quite speedy.

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This hobby of classic gaming and electronics continues to amaze me. Not necessarily because of all the cool stuff. But because of the ideas I thought about as a kid and dismissed as being too radical & different - only to find years later that it is workable and perhaps exceeding what I originally imagined.

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  • 1 month later...
On 1/24/2021 at 2:12 PM, Banquo said:

For me it is basically anything vintage. It doesn't matter if it's the Atari 2600 heavy sixer I wanted for so long, the 1200XL I drooled over for years, the mint condition NES I finally found at Goodwill, my Intellivision, TI-99/4A, the 486 DX/2 computer I built a few years ago, etc. All of these are things I spent years looking at pictures of online, searching eBay day after day, thinking how badly I wanted them. What happened when I got them though? I played with them for a few days and then they went in a shelf to gather dust or packed up in their box and shoved under the bed or in a closet. I keep wondering why I wanted these things so much when once I got them I never even look at them let alone turn them on. Just yesterday I was on eBay looking at a Kaypro II thinking "If only I had that..." I think I enjoy wanting things and trying to find them more than actually owning them. ?

Got to agree.

 

In comparison to modern tech folks may see vintage tech as an irrational want.  However with today's out of control tech, I think vintage is simpler. 

 

Many may forget our early achievements in computing, where just storing and retrieving data from an address, or adding two numbers and having the value returned was an accomplishment.

 

Whilst I have other devices that can perform similarly, I still have this irrational want for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_9100A

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On 1/24/2021 at 7:12 AM, Banquo said:

For me it is basically anything vintage. It doesn't matter if it's the Atari 2600 heavy sixer I wanted for so long, the 1200XL I drooled over for years, the mint condition NES I finally found at Goodwill, my Intellivision, TI-99/4A, the 486 DX/2 computer I built a few years ago, etc. All of these are things I spent years looking at pictures of online, searching eBay day after day, thinking how badly I wanted them. What happened when I got them though? I played with them for a few days and then they went in a shelf to gather dust or packed up in their box and shoved under the bed or in a closet. I keep wondering why I wanted these things so much when once I got them I never even look at them let alone turn them on. Just yesterday I was on eBay looking at a Kaypro II thinking "If only I had that..." I think I enjoy wanting things and trying to find them more than actually owning them. ?

 

Same. I guess some of that comes from having wanted the promise and enjoyment, the futurism, that that stuff exuded early on.

 

I've been able to manage that tug-o-war easily by not going full bore on all of it. Just get the best representations of an era and call it a day.

 

I picked up a USRobotics 3453C external modem for a song & dance. Best of the best. That, conjunction with my original Apple II MicroModem and Apple-Cat II.. Should never have a need for "anything modem" ever again.

 

Same applies to sound cards and graphics cards. There's a few more milestones for those than modems. So correspondingly I have like 5 graphics cards or 3 or 4 soundcards.

 

It also makes good sense to think of a vintage system as a tool, and the whole ecosphere as an idea. After all there were millions upon millions of possible configurations. And usually any one configuration solved a problem as good as the next. The nostalgic stuff, is best represented by a collection of things that have personal meaning. If that makes any sense..? To me, soundcard = SoundBlaster16. Graphics card = Nvidia, Riva128, TNT2, or GTX1080. Modem = Hayes and USRobotics. Pick the best model each company offered.

 

Sure, I keep thinking "IBM5150" or "Packard Bell 286" or no-name 386-40, as popular vintage items. Do I want them? No. Not beyond some photos or a quick look. The 486 I have covers all that early era and more. Binary and hardware compatible. Serial and parallel ports, or ISA slots, didn't change much if any back then.

 

NES is covered in modern-day emulation. So That's good enough. 100% not worth the extreme effort to get all original material when SoftwareEmulation and FPGA simulation carry the flag.

 

The idea is preserved.

 

 

 

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