The journeys of a Commodore computer collector. A celebration of the products of Commodore Business Machines. And also a blog.
VCF-SW is the Texas version of the Vintage Computer Festival, a yearly celebration of old computing technology that I've been attending for a few years now with other members of the Central Texas Commodore User Group . Our 2023 and 2025 exhibits included a faux-wood grained C64 in an Aussie case, a bare Amiga 2000 board running in a metal frame, the VICTOR VIC-chip replacement by Jon, the SuperPET…
It's not all that often these days that a computer on my Wanted list becomes available, so when a genuine Amiga 2500UX computer appeared on eBay, I absolutely jumped at it. So, what is it? Well, according to lore, the Amiga engineers at Commodore were very interested in the Unix operating system(s), and wanted to bring it to their own machines. Unfortunately, the Motorola 68000 CPU in the Amiga…
Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) in the 1980s are sometimes compared to a primitive version of the internet, and I think there's something to that. Consider the experiences that a typical BBS caller would have when calling around. A user might start their call, for example, by engaging in instant messaging by chatting with the SysOp, then sliding into the message bases for a bit of 'social media'…
I know printing ink onto physical pieces of paper is not exactly as popular as it once was, but I still often find it useful. Printouts are great! Each page is like a tablet screen, only the information doesn't change, it's super light, and doesn't need recharging. When I'm doing some project that requires constantly referencing different pages of information, having it all laid out at once saves…
Although it was a classroom full of PET 4032s that got me interested in Commodore back in the early 80s, the first PET I would ever own myself was the Commodore SuperPET . I was not yet collecting at this point, so I thought this would be the only PET I would ever own. For that reason, I was very careful in which model I picked. I wanted the best. Over the years, the numerous exotic programming…
Around 1983, I got my first modem: the Commodore VICMODEM . It allowed me to discover a world that would enthrall me for the next decade: the world of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). For those who don't know, a BBS was a computer-to-computer service, run by ordinary people on their public phone lines. To the users who called in, BBSs provided message forums, email, file downloads, chat, online…
In 2003, a kind German fellow named Claus Schoenleber helped me get my hands on a pair of prototype Unix machines built by Commodore around 1984-85. One was a server (the Model 1) and the other a workstation/client (the Model 2). Because of the issues I had with them, it would take until very recently to get them working, and require the help of many, using teamwork only the internet could make…
Way back in 2002, I was lucky enough to lay my hands on a beautiful Commodore 256-80 computer, the top dog of the CBM-II line of business machines. It had issues almost from the beginning though. First off, it would only power up occasionally, and when it did, the power supply made a horrible screeching sound for as long as I used it. Second, it had been equipped with the 128K BASIC roms instead…
The last decade or so has seen a bit of a revival in the Commodore 8-bit branch of the retro-gaming and retro-computing realm. Prices have been rising, new hardware and software has exploded, and the chatter in all kinds of social media has multiplied. For me, it's been fantastic. However, I've observed a kind of awareness gap in the prodigal sons who've been returning to the fold. I decided,…
Despite having had copies of the software forever, it wasn't until the early 1990s that I became a true convert to the cult of GEOS. I picked up every accessory, every productivity package, every Thing I could get my hands on that was related to this Mac-like GUI for the Commodore 64 and 128. And this included geoProgrammer, the official symbolic macro assembler, linker, and debugging package from…
In 1985 Commodore brought the Amiga into the world, with its amazing GUI interface, which required a mouse. Also at this time, the GEOS GUI operating system was becoming quite popular for the Commodore 8-bit line of computers, such as the C64 and the brand new Commodore 128, and it also could benefit from a mouse. The control ports that mice plugged into were not identical between the Amiga and…
So, believe it or not, work continues on the C64Net WiFi Modem firmware. Especially since the same firmware is being used in a traditional RS-232 version of the modem based on the ESP32 module. Some of the newer features include: New AT+CONFIG configuration menu Ability to set the hostname X-Modem and Z-Modem downloads AT+SHELL to access an SD-card interface. NTP client with configurable timezone.…
Lately I've been recapping Amigas with a fellow from the CTCUG group. That's been going pretty well. I've been practicing on spare Amiga 600 boards, of which I had 3 non-booting boards. All 3 began booting after the recap, which is amazing happiness. Once I've recapped all my spare boards, I'll move on to the computers in my collection. Some lessons I've learned: 1. You can use hot air to remove…
I've had a pair of Commodore KIM-1 computers for at least 15 years now, but never really did anything with them. That all changed over the last few weeks, and now I feel sorry for how much fun I've been missing out on. The KIM-1 is a single board, 1mhz, 1 kilobyte computer (the green thing in the picture above) with a 23 key hexadecimal keypad for input, and a 6 digit LED display for output. It…
For a long time , I've been trying to get my hands on one of the U.S. PET 2001-B 'Business' series computers. And boy are they rare! I've seen at least two go through eBay, but over-confidence and under-estimations caused me to lose them. :( But finally, I struck gold .. well, sorta. A 2001B-16 turned up on eBay, but was advertised as non-functional. It was still an opportunity worth taking, so I…
Well, I hope you aren't tired of news about the CTCUG "C64Net WiFi Modem", because it has remained my development focus. Even as I type this I'm busy adding SSL support to the firmware, and wondering if the feature is really worth the 50k of program space and 5k of global ram it appears to consume. The answer? Probably Yes. My last posting talked about the Telnetd server for the Commodore 64. That…
Of late, I have not been able to get enough of my Commodore user-port wireless Ethernet modems. Yes, the same modem I described before > here <. Since that last blog post, we've added hardware flow control, and gone through two more revisions of the hardware. Changes to the firmware have slowed down at this point, as I focus more of my energy on different applications of my new internet toy. In…
I haven't updated the blog in awhile, but this is not because I've been idle. In fact, I've been so constantly busy on Commodore things that I just never took a breath long enough to talk about it. As a result, you can expect an endless barrage of posts as I try to get you, and my future self, caught up. The Commodore WiFi Modem project has been an effort by our local Commodore users group, and…
. Nestled snug in the corner of my computer room is an Amiga 600. It was put there for one purpose: as a quick and easy game console for classic Amiga titles like Lemmings, Street Fighter II, and whatever else I could find on floppy that worked. This was fine until the day I decided to put one of those pre-configured flash-based IDE drives off eBay inside it. The hard drive came with a program…
I don't really have much exciting to say for this entry, but wanted to let blogspot know that I have been quite busy. This beautiful Amiga 500 was purchased off eBay only because I wanted an earlier motherboard and the "Chicken Head" logo case. The original box was bonus and might have been the best part. It's gorgeous! When it arrived, however, it had two flaws: a missing disk drive ejection…
The longest and most exhausting hardware "project" I've ever embarked on is completed. I'm referring, of course, to the mission of inspecting every Commodore Amiga, PC-compatible, and PC-laptop for leaking or dead batteries, and replacing them. The final computer to receive attention, out of the dozens and dozens, was this plain Jane Amiga 500 with an A501 memory expansion in its "belly". The A501…
Of all the things in my collection, printers and monitors are the strangest. They serve very narrow purposes and tend to all do their tasks in about the same way. Of the two, printers are the strangest. Monitors can often be justified due to the non-standard video output of some computers, especially the RGBI of the C128, the Chroma/Lumina of the C64, and the 15khz signal from the Amigas.…
Commodore PC Desktops are not the only x86 computers with bios batteries I worried over recently. Without power to the BIOS ram, Commodore PC laptops lose their hardware settings and refuse to boot up. Fixing this problem became my next concern. First up was my C286-LT and C386SX-LT. These computers were, in some ways, the easiest to replace the batteries in. The battery was a 3.6V…
Over the last few days I had occasion to go through a bunch of old VIC-20s from the George Page collection. Most of them have scuffed cases, missing keys, boards covered in rust, and didn't boot at all. I figured I would go through some of them to see if I can scrounge some working parts. I also pulled out a few reference working VIC boards to do the testing against. These are pictured below. In…
While perusing the web the other day, I happened upon a beautiful panorama of Yosimite Valley and it made me wonder how those are made. Some quick googling made it seem fairly simple at first. Take lots of pictures, combine them into one huge panorama picture with an editor program, and then, for a video, clip the picture into frames and recombine them as a video. In the end, it took something…