This article showcases some of the work I have done on various Sinclair ZX Spectrum computers. It is part of my ongoing efforts to repair, restore or modify the pieces I have collected over the years.
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I bought this computer from the son of a retired dealer and repairman at my usual market in November 2011. I remember visiting his father’s shop in the late 1980s and buying a copy of GEOS for the Commodore 64. However, I’m still undecided about whether to continue going to the monthly Sunday market, as even the “basement clearance” sellers are now charging eBay prices. A few years ago, given how often I visited, when I asked the price of a Commodore 64, I was told, “15 euros because it’s you”. The last time I was there, I asked the price of some Game Boys on the counter. The answer I received was “The price is on the back”, without so much as a glance in my direction. Between €80 and €120. In the last six months, I’ve only bought a power supply for a Nintendo DS Lite.
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This article covers all three of the 3.5″ external floppy drives produced by Commodore for the Amiga line of computers.
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A few years ago, I experienced a water leak in my basement after several consecutive days of heavy rain. To prevent the moisture from damaging them, I brought a couple of items home. One of these items was the 8050 drive, which is the subject of this article and was given to me by my friend Lorenzo in 2011.
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As I’m now short on space for all my retro stuff, I’m focusing on maintaining and repairing what I already have or looking for small items.
I recently bought a pair of non-working Nintendo DSi XLs with the intention of repairing them; the price obviously reflected the consoles‘ condition. The seller wrote in the ad that both consoles would eventually display a generic error screen prompting the user to turn off the console.
Once I had received the consoles, I verified that the error occurred at different times on the two consoles: on one, it appeared only when launching a game from a cartridge (the internal applications worked fine), while on the other, the error appeared when launching any application or game.
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This console, with a few games, cost me 50,000 Lire in 1998 (before the Euro), which is about 36€ or 41$ today. At that time there were a few classified magazines: in the beginning you had to pay for them, then came the free ones, then came the internet… and all those magazines disappeared like tears in the rain.
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I was familiar with a couple of variants of this console: the original Japanese PC Engine from 1987 and the American version from 1989 called TurboGrafx-16. I have the version intended for the European market, simply called TurboGrafx, from 1990: it was based on the American model, with a few adjustments to make it work with the PAL standard. The launch of the console in Europe was cancelled, and those already produced were sold to various distributors.
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I received the two computers as a gift from Enrico S. in 2011. The inspiration for this article came from a message I received from the contact form:
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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.
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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.
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