Well, I just placed orders for boards and parts to build a new Lisa 2/5 around my existing Lisa CPU card, the only part of a Lisa I’ve ever owned.
I would never have thought this was possible if it weren’t for the work of @DosFox who recently built the first new Lisa since 1986! Thanks for the inspiration!
I’ll continue this thread as parts roll in. I may ask (beg) if folks have some parts in your bins! 😀
Dug out my two Sony Mavica digital cameras. It’s still bonkers to me that they use floppy drives for storage. It’s an alternate universe that I could live in honestly.
In her delightful forward to "Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium," Lori Emerson describes people visiting he Media Archaeology Lab. She describes the delight - even for people too young to possibly have nostalgia for using floppies - of using those computers and disks.
I have an Inspiron 8100 with similar specs that I've showcased here and there running Windows XP...and like Colin, I want to see if I can get 98 running on it.
If you watch Colin's video, he ran into performance issues due to the machine's software and drivers being tuned towards Windows XP. I noticed a couple of missed steps during the video that might fix the hiccups he was having with his 8200, and I want to try them out to see if it rectifies the problems he was having.
I'll be tinkering with it here and there today. I'll share as I go along. :)
Switched to the Jessie Beige 500 PLA to print a PBI port cover for the machine that @GedgeHead sent me. Having a 3D printer has really been wonderful for my vintage computer hobby. Mine is a Prusa Mini+
I'm still getting very visible printing lines in the flat surfaces. I feel like I've got the Z axis pretty close to the bed already. Maybe too close? Or something else? It's not terrible, and I won't mind on this print, but I'd love to know how some folks get prints that look smoother.
Successfully converted the #Atari65XE to an #Atari130XE. The (getting more unobtainable by the minute) original Atari EMMU is implemented with a 16V8 GAL, a 74LS95B got added and capacitors and 4164 RAM were populated in the unpopulated footprints. Easy. #RetroComputing#VintageComputing#Atari
Finally got some time to start working on my next #RetroComputing project - the Mac SE! My plan of attack is as follows:
Disassemble everything and give it a good cleaning
Recap the analogue board
Replace the squirrel-cage fan with a new fan
Recap the power supply
Recap the logic board
Service the floppy drive to the best of my ability
Install a BlueSCSI!
Credit where credit is due - I’m not doing this alone, I’m doing it under the supervision of my dad who is an experienced electronics engineer and is making sure I don’t do anything really dumb (especially when working around high voltage stuff)
Something "new" to explore on the workbench today: a 1995 #Apple#Macintosh#Performa 630 in the "DOS Compatible" variant. It’s a bit of an oddball machine from Apple‘s otherwise quite bland (in my opinion) beige era. It has both a regular 68040 Mac and a full 486/DX2-66 PC inside. Should even be capable of running Windows 95 alongside MacOS 8! Thanks to a very generous donation from @markuspooch I’m going to get to play with it. Thank you! #InTheLabDoingStuff#RetroComputing#VintageComputing
Finally cleaned the corner of my desk, which has the vintage computer corner of the desk, which consists of a Power Mac G4 Mirror Drive Door from 2022, a Macintosh 8100/100AV, to run older Mac OS games that won't run on Mac OS 9 or run too fast, and a custom Wintel (eww) Pentium III games to run older PC games.
The 8100 restoration is in it's early stages. I have a Wombat ADB to USB adapter to allow the use of a USB KVM switch, which allow me to switch between these three vintage computers seamlessly and switch the source on the monitor. The 8100 now sports an external BlueSCSI to boot from flash media with an AAUI Ethernet adapter to get new software over the network. There is no need to burn discs or use floppy disks to get software on there.
I'm not complete with the 8100 yet, Need to repair some stuff, upgrade it to a Newer Tech G3 Accelerator, and probably max out the RAM.
The custom Pentium III machine is not plugged in yet, need a DVI to HDMI adapter or DVI to Displayport adapter, but it will happen in the future.
I'm using a Sabrent USB peripheral sharing switch to share the keyboard and mouse between all three computers.