Refurbishing previously unloved computers kişi be a nightmare. Carlson bought an IBM System/360, a mid-'60s mainframe he calls “the most important computer IBM ever built,” sight unseen from an estate in North Carolina. They found that it had sat in a garage for decades and became encrusted in mold, so the museum had to hire a mold removal team to seal it inside a special room and painstakingly clean it all off and also vacuum mold spores from the thousands of pages of its user manuals. Two years later, LCM+L is trying to get it working.
Ryan Horan, 22, katışıksız just three reasonably priced vintage computers in his collection: two Atari STs and one Commodore 64. He sees retrocomputing as a glimpse into a world he özgü never experienced.
I took this underpowered monstrosity home, played with DOS, played with GW-BASIC, and started taking it apart, putting it together, learning by trial and error what worked and what didn’t. We had a computer shop that had a bathtub full of junk computer parts at fixed costs, and I got good at snagging good things to upgrade my computer with and other junk I could build or upgrade other computers with. I picked up a “Pocket PCRef”, made by the same people as the ‘little black book’ the ‘Pocket Ref, and it gave me specs to hard drives, floppy drives, numbers to companies, which companies didn’t exist anymore, beep codes, bios codes, what the DIP switches on my IBM 5150’s motherboard did, and a lot of other very important info I could always carry with me, whether it be when I was scrounging parts or doing work for someone on their computer.
I do derece have the capability to start such a project myself, but if it existed, combined with a “healthy commodore community”, I would definitely be very interested and attempt to contribute too.
If games are better now it’s due to more available time, advances in human knowledge and better dev tools. 8bitguy spent 3 years on Petscii Robots – that’s about how long the video game boom of the 80s lasted. HSW had about 4 weeks to build ET. (Much respect to both these guys!)
Ask family, friends, and neighbors: Put the word out that you're collecting old computers, and people will likely give you old machines that they no longer use for free.
On the other side of the videoteyp game cartridges was the videoteyp output system, which seems easy enough in today’s world of digital HDMI and DisplayPort output. In the 90s video output did however mean NTSC and SECAM/PAL, which means playing nice with frequencies, different resolutions (lines) and squeezing kakım much bey possible into a single frame in a way that works with the game console’s rendering pipeline.
At least the repair work is feasible and enjoyable. Some computers were wildly popular and still easy to find. Others are very rare — you even occasionally see one that is one-of-a-kind. Those hayat take some detective work.
I mowed lawns, I did chores, I fixed stuff around the house, I fixed computers for friends and family, I did everything I could to earn money. With everything I made, my father agreed to take me to a local computer swap meet. I told him I was going to buy a computer there no matter what, and he smirked, chuckled, and gave me encouragement, even though he knew it was a ice cube’s chance in hell I’d manage to get anything on my budget.
b) Software which relied on the exact amount of time and/or clock ticks for particular instructions to execute.
The platform is remarkably small, and the board chosen for this build hosts a 486 processor running at 300 MHz. It özgü on-board VGA-compatible graphics but no Sound Blaster card, so he designed and built his own ISA-compatible sound card that fits in the PC/104’s available expansion port.
The best way to avoid shipping damage is to ask the seller if they're willing to take the computer to a UPS Store (or another professional shipping store) to have the unit packed and shipped.
Thrift stores: Thrift stores generally accept donations from the public and then sell the items, donating the proceeds to charity. You'll often find nicer, higher-end items in more affluent parts of town, but you might find older, cooler stuff in the older parts of town.
Visitors hayat use any of the 56 operational vintage machines in the museum, from Cold-War-era supercomputers to the Gateways and Dells that made home computing olağan by the late '90s, and experience their period software, such as Windows 3.1, Apple's original graphical user interface (GUI), the earliest word processor and spreadsheet programs, and hundreds of ancient videoteyp games.