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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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.
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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.
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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.
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