So I had a small space on one of my units where a speaker used to sit. It wasn’t a big space so fitting a full-size computer in there wasn’t an option. The space was also longer than it was deep. So the solution? Fill it with a C64 Mini!
The fact I had some space, along with a £37 price tag on Amazon meant I couldn’t resist adding this one. Even though I have a real C64 and also a raspberry pi powered conversion, this thing just looked so cute.
I will do a full write up sometime in the future but it’s actually a really nice little device and comes as standard with the ability to load games direct from USB so no hacking required.
I’m not a collector of software usually as with the number of systems I own that would become a very expensive hobby. But there was no way I could pass on grabbing these original Sam Coupé titles. With not much Sam software being released I hopefully won’t go bankrupt trying to get a complete set! I already have a selection of games including Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings so these are a nice addition.
My old Shuttle xPC Windows XP PC has needed a little more grunt for a while. The motherboard has an 8x AGP slot so my choice of cards was slightly limited. After a bit of research I found the best AGP 8x card available and then discovered they fetch £150+ on eBay. So i started reducing my specification until I found some cards for a reasonable price. However, even at that point I came across an issue which I haven’t had for a long time, the Shuttle xPC only has a 230w power supply and this was no where near enough for the higher end AGP cards of the time.
I eventually settled for this little beauty. The GeForce 4 MX440. With a staggering 64mb of RAM and both VGA and DVI ports it’s an amazing piece of hardware for £15. Well maybe not amazing but it runs the orignal GTA at a frame rate that is far too fast to be playable so I have to turn the frame limiter on.
This PC is never really going to be used as a gaming machine, but it’s nice that it can run the old classics of which some don’t work very nicely, or at all in Windows 10 on modern hardware. Time to run up some of those old talkie editions of point and click adventures like Simon the Sorcerer and Day of the Tentacle.
Another small delivery today. Since I only had a few zip disks I figured it would be best to have a little bit of stock. They seem pretty easy to obtain still at the moment but the same could be said about 720k Double Density floppy disks a few years back and now they are a pig to get hold of (luckily I purchased 5 sealed boxes of those a while back too)
So here we have 13 zip 100 disks, a few of them used, some “new” and some still sealed in their plastic wrapper. Should keep me going for a while!
The Atari ST has been on obvious omission from my collection for a while and it was time to address that issue. I’ve been looking around for one for some time but wasn’t really in any rush as I don’t have a space to set it up at the moment and building a new display unit has been delayed due to covid (Wickes for some reason have stopped selling oak effect wood at the moment).
But over the weekend I saw an auction for an ST on eBay with no bids. The photos looked ok but the description was simply “Powers on, mouse works” not exactly the greatest of adverts. The seller also only had a feedback rating of 3 so I guess this put most people off. However, the item didn’t say it was un-tested or spares or repair or anything so I figured it was worth a shot and the buyer protection would almost certainly cover me if it was a lemon.
So £78+p&p later, the guy sent it our via parcel force and today I took ownership of a good condition fully working (including the floppy drive) Atari 520STFM.
So what are the next steps? It needs a good clean and the case is a bit discoloured so it will be going for a hydrogen peroxide bath within the next week or so.
I have also ordered another gotek drive to flash with the flashfloppy software so I can load the software from USB pen drive rather than having to deal with floppy disks all the time.
I will document these processes when I do them so if you want to see how it works out, be sure to subscribe for email notifications 🙂
So since having the Iomega Zip drive I’ve had one missing component. A PC with a parallel port! Nothing modern comes with them anymore and it appears that PCI-E parallel cards just don’t like the Zip Drive. I have tried running VM’s etc but no matter what I did I couldn’t get it working.
I did have one hope, and that is an old Shuttle XPC computer I have running an AMD Sempron processor. This PC is my Retro PC which I keep around since it has a floppy drive too. Unfortunatly although the motherboard does have a parallel port, it was an optional extra connector which can no longer be purchased. Looking inside it looks like an IDC connector but has a smaller pin pitch. After much browsing on eBay I found a Lenovo PC which seemed to use the same connecter so I gave it a shot.
And the result is!!!
IT WORKS 🙂
Now I can get on and stick all my Atari Portfolio software onto a zip disk rather than having to send it across serial cables!
If you want to keep informed about what retro related stuff I am buying or playing with then I have added the option to subscribe for e-mail alerts.
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Note: Subscription option should not be used by my wife for monitoring how much I spend on retro goodness each month!
So I remember wanting one of these so badly when I was younger but couldn’t afford it. I am fully aware now that the game is most likely terrible, but the advert at the time was awesome!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqfv4f-G-Ro
Anyway someone offered me one of them fully boxed and complete so I just couldn’t resist. It’s finally time to discover how bad (or good?) the game actually is 🙂
