I have a lot of non working Macintosh computers, and they’ve been sitting on the shelves of my lab room and cellar for too much time; since I’m out of space for “new” computers at the moment, I decided that I must focus on repairing what I got.
Continue readingNintendo Entertainment System / NES (1985)
Last December a friend of mine came back from the UK for a vacation and brought me this NES, with a few cartridges, as a gift. When I saw Zelda and Zelda II I told him that those could sell for a nice price, and after looking for loose cartridges sold in similar conditions, I made him a reasonable offer.
Continue readingApple Macintosh SE motherboards
Before Apple had its own stores, it forced all its network of authorised service providers to keep a minimum stock of spare parts. A few years ago (well… probably a decade) I got some leftover spare parts for free from a shop that was closing. In the past weekend I took some pictures of the two revisions of the Macintosh SE motherboards.
Continue readingSinclair ZX Spectrum +2 (1986)
My first computer back in 1984 was the 48K version of the original Sinclair ZX Spectrum; one year later we sold it to my cousin and bought a Commodore 128 – but that’s for another post.
Continue readingOlivetti Prodest PC 128 (1986)
AKA Thomson MO6
I recently bought this computer at the local flea market. I still wonder why Olivetti put that thing on the market when the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum were selling like hotcakes. And it wasn’t even something Olivetti designed or produced – it was just a rebadged Thomson MO6.
Continue readingNew version of the VIC registry site
In my (very scarce!) free time I have completely rewritten the site that hosts the registry for the VIC 1001 and VIC 20. If you’re interested in the technical details, the previous site was written from scratch in php, while now it’s based on the Laravel framework.
Besides the different “engine”, the new site brings some improvements for the users and under the hood. Here’s what’s new:
- you can (finally!) edit your profile;
- a new page lets you view in a thorough way all the details of a single VIC;
- the registry table is now full width;
- revision of all the texts, some descriptions of the VIC details are more precise;
- rewritten some help text on the “add your VIC” page;
- added a page with some statistics for the data in the registry: VICs location, motherboard type, country of production;
- the filter you choose on the registry page is shown more clearly;
- added some information about privacy;
- added a contact me page;
- registration now needs a confirmation of the email address to avoid mistakes and spam.
The accounts have been migrated on the new site; all the users need to request a password reset (Login › Forgot Your Password?) and click the link in the email.
As for privacy, the summary is: registration data, VIC data and cookies are only used to make the site work; there is no tracking or profiling.
The new site is available at the same address of the previous one: cbmvic.net. If you didn’t already, register and add your VICs! The more, the better :-)
If you have some suggestions, add a comment or contact me.
Commodore Tape Recorders
I’ve finally finished and published a project I’ve been working on in my spare time for the last year: a booklet that presents all the tape recorders used or produced by Commodore for its 8-bit computers.
Continue readingAndrew Colin (1936-2018)
On 25 September 2018 Andrew Colin passed away. He was known to the fans of old Commodore computers as the author of the “An Introduction to BASIC” guides. Continue reading
Sportron (~1978)
I found this console a couple of weeks ago at the usual flea market; usually I don’t look for these items (you need a warehouse to collect all the variants), but I liked it and for 5 euros I decided that it was worth the risk – flea market findings are often cheap but nobody guarantees that what you buy will work. At the end it was working fine. Continue reading
Fenner SPC-800 (1984)
Samsung made only one computer that was compatible with the MSX standard; it was rebranded and sold in Italy by Fenner, keeping the existing model name. There are two revisions of the Samsung SPC-800; the Fenner computer corresponds to the second revision of the South Corean model. Continue reading