The Shop > Electronics & IC Programing
Adventures in old 80s computers.
S. Heslop:
I've been taking taking a look at the MaxYMiser music tracker for the Atari. I know a little bit about trackers but the instrument editor in this one is taking a bit of getting used to. But at least it has a relatively nice GUI compared to the nightmares that await me with the C64.
I took apart the C64C to measure the bits I want to keep.
Kinda interesting that the thing is held together with tabs. Even the keyboard is held in with tabs. Only the motherboard is held down with screws.
The whole thing is shielded.
No surface mount in sight.
And here's the famous SID chip. The lower number gives you the date, the chip was made in 1992, which is fairly late (they stopped making them in 93). Later is better with SID chips since the earlier revisions were fairly buggy, and some didn't have things like fully working filters or waveform combining.
Drawn up the keyboard and the motherboard.
I'm planning to make this thing reasonably compact, but i'm still not sure what i'm exactly going for. I could make something like this but imagining it with half an inch of dust settled on top and between the keys, it might be better to make something that folds or has a lid.
AdeV:
--- Quote from: S. Heslop on August 02, 2014, 11:17:15 AM ---
--- Quote from: AdeV on August 02, 2014, 06:36:19 AM ---Of course, I never USE any of the damn things, I probably ought to move most of them on... the QLs and Sharps I'll keep for sure, and the Ozzy... and the CBM, er, bugger.
--- End quote ---
How did you come into possession of such a collection? Two SX-64s is insane!
--- End quote ---
Ah, well, too much time & money on eBay mostly.... It's the usual thing, my old QL had died & I was feeling a bit nostalgic one night, some beer had been consumed, and I ended up purchasing another one. One thing led to another & before you know it I'm buying "any computer I ever used in the 1980s", then "any computer from the 1970s/1980s"... I must have had 30-40 machines at one point. That got whittled down quite a bit when the ex persuaded me to sell a bunch of them off (I think she wanted access to the garage), and has slowly grown again since she became an ex...
The ZX81 was kindly donated to me by the late AndyF of this parish; like everything of Andy's it was a study in neatness, being attached to a small baseboard with all of the leads & power pack attached "just so" with it; even the wobbly RAM pack is firmly affixed to the board to prevent the dreaded wobble... Sadly, the tape deck has died, but the ZX81 soldiers on...
Edit to add: The height of the madness was owning 2 HP1000 mini computers, each with separate tape & IO units, and each with 2 disk drives, and an HP A700. Each HP1000 had its own 6ft tall rack unit, the tape decks were a 2nd 6ft rack unit, the disk drives were about the size of a washing machine each, and the A700 came in its own 6ft cab which, I'm sure, was milled out of cast iron, it was massively heavy. I eventually sold them off as I couldn't do a damn thing with them, one went to a mainframe museum, the other spent some time in someone's kitchen before being moved on again to unknown pastures. I can't remember who got the A700. Crazy days...
awemawson:
I really hanker after an Ampex TM7 or TM9 reel to reel tape backing store. I used to work on them in my callow youth.
They had three servo systems, one for each reel, and one for the capstan. Between the capstan and each reel was a vacuum column with a U shaped loop of tape that acted as a buffer to give the reel servos a bit of lee way, so for short back and forth reads or writes just the loops moved and the reels stayed still. Each loop had a photo sensor at each end, and when triggered the appropriate reel would kick in and wind a bit of tape. Lovely to see working when properly set up, and remarkably trouble free.
Biggest problem was carbon dust from the vacuum motors (that looked like a domestic cleaner motor) getting onto the electronics. There was a filter on it but they used to fall off! Followed by failure of the 'pea' bulbs in the photo sensors. If well used the heads would wear, increasing the head gap and reducing the output signal. (Complex heads - head per track (7 or 9), with a read after write head and an all track erase head)
vtsteam:
:coffee: :coffee: :coffee:
S. Heslop:
Here's one idea i'm looking at. It's a breadbin! Geddit?!
Looks kind of ridiculous, but i'm tempted to roll with it for the pun. It'd also keep the dust off the keys, but i'd prefer to go for a flat top for when this thing inevitably ends up in storage, or to rest stuff on top of in general.
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