On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Seth Morabito <sethm at loomcom.com> wrote: The amiga 600s and 1200s are dying of the same disease. The older models seem to be ok though. brian

On Wed, 2 Dec 2009, Seth Morabito wrote: This is one of my great worries, though I've been thinking of the batteries and not the caps. I finally have my collection out of storage, and into the garage. The problem is, I don't have time to start digging into these machines. My SE/30 would be one of the machines I'm most interested in keeping running. Is this a problem with Commodore computers? I wonder if this is what is wrong with my Amiga 500 (I haven't had time to even look at it). The only 80's computers I've spent time with the past few years are my PDP-11's and my one Commodore 64. I know I need to inspect my Amiga 3000's for leaky batteries. I had to fix that on my Lisa 2/5 when I got it. The sad thing is I *REALLY* do not have time to deal with this, and this is yet another indication that I should get out of the hobby. :-( Zane

On Wed, 2 Dec 2009, Brian Lanning wrote: I actually have a spare motherboard in unknown condition. Thanks for the tip. If I have any spare time this winter, the A500 is high on my list of computer projects. Now that we have a house, everything is out of storage and in the garage. I have a small "lab area", and I really want to setup examples of the different families. My real interest is in the Operating Systems, but I like running on real hardware, as emulators don't give the true feel of an OS (things like speed and keyboards). In the case of the A500, I'll be honest, I have some games I want to be able to play again, and the C-64 versions don't cut it! :-) Still my priorities have changed, and the space this stuff takes up could be better used for other things... The A2000's went to another list member when I was running out of storage room. I might be able to handle surface-mount caps, it's the chips I can't handle. Zane

Blood money! :oD (also, don't forget the obrigatory demos: Jesus on e's, Made in Croatia, Technological Death, Digital Dreams, 9 fingers and State of the Art! :oD This is not so hard. Just a matter of training :)

Andrew Burton wrote: For the curious, you can view most popular Amiga demos with author commentary (covers some of the programming tricks and circumstances under how they were created) on the second MindCandy DVD: http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)

Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote: Didn't want to be seen as spamming the list :-) even though I think I've only mentioned it once in two years. Can never be too safe! As long as the cat's out of the bag, I want to say that the DVD is "purist-safe". I used real Amiga hardware to make the DVD, going so far as to purchase a broadcast scan converter, use the raw RGB output of all Amigas, calibrating levels along the way. Any noise left over as part of the process was corrected digitally in 10-bit space. Since most of the footage was PAL, I converted to NTSC using motion synthesis avisynth scripts that generated new frames based on inbetweens (ie. no stupid frame blending or duplication) and cleaned up conversion errors by hand. I'm really proud of the work and I know it would stand up to the scrutiny of most people here on the list. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

Ethan Dicks wrote: A friend donated a modded A500 with a toggle switch that would switch between 512fast/512chip and 1mbchip which I needed to get two demos running. I also used an A3000 and an A4000 both with and without an '060 accelerator. The A4000 eliminated the need for the A1200 (although I have one of those as well). The NTSC copies are almost gone if not already gone, so you should move now as we're not repressing any. The PAL stuff, which is slightly higher quality anyway, we have some left. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

Err, surely 'purist' video recordings are made on EIAJ reel-to-reel tapes, (compact) Umatic cassettes or V2000 tapes. -tony

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:36, Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> wrote: I think he is. He is also wrong. The REAL purist version would be to ship a real A500 and a stack of blank floppies, and a box containing a embedded computer with some sort of mass-storage device. The box comes with an RS-232 port, and emulates a 9600 baud modem (higher speeds for later demos) and an arcane BBS, where the demos are stored with cryptic filenames and inadequate descriptions. You then have to download the demo you wish to see and write it to a disk, a process that will at a minimum take an afternoon. Finally, you can boot the demo disk only to realise that the speed is all wrong and the bottom 56 lines are cut off. For extra realism, the box will block your phone line while the download is simulated and deduct 1990's long distance rates from your savings account. Joe. -- Joachim Thiemann :: http://www.tsp.ece.mcgill.ca/~jthiem

I was being semi-facetious. I have VCRs for all the formats I mentioned, I do not own a DVD player (is that any suprise?). But there are pletny of 'classic' audio anf video enthusiasts who have nothing to do with digital recording methods... -tony

You really have to ask? OK... The 'why' could apply to either of my statements, so I'll explain both of them The first is the easier one. I am interested in many things other than classic computers. I regard the Philipos V2000 VCR as being a wonderful design that came along too late (but that's not a reason for _me_ not to have one). For those who've never seen one (and certainly not seen _inside_ one, the video heads are mounted on peizo-actuators on the head drum. These are driven by a servo circuit that causes the heads to go along the video tracks on the take. The result is noise-free still-frame (In VHS/betamax/Umatic/... the heads follow a different path on the tape when it's stationary than when it's moving (and of course the speed of tape motion matters too), so you get noise on still frames or slow motion. A digital framestore wil lget round it, but I prefer the Philips solution). And the deck is mechanically very simple. Ther are no drive belts, no backtension band, and so on. Now for the bit I suspect you really were asking, why I don't own a DVD player. It comes down to 2 main reasons : 1) You know, you must kniow, my dislike of anything I don't have a proper service manual for (have you tried to get a service manual for a DVD player), that is not well-made (I've been inside some DVD players, once was enough!), that is not properly documented (try getting data sheets on some of the chips!), and so on Darn it, I've read that part of the HDMI spec is only available under NDA (this being to prevent you getting round the encrypition and making perfect digital copies of copyrighted films). Having a device that's undocumented is bad enough, but having an undocumented interface is something I am not going to tolerate. Period! 2) But why would I want a DVD player? What would I use it for? Unlike background music or a radio, a DVD player (or TV) requires you to watch the output. Whcih means you can't be doing anything else at the same time. I've got quite enough books to read, computers to document and restore, projects to build, cmaeras to fix, skills to improve, related thinsg to learn about, etc that I don't have any interest in waching DVDs . -tony

I suspect such players are too expenice _new_ for me even to consider buying, and contain suffieicently complex custom ICs that it's a bad idea to buy one for which manufacuters spares are no longer available. And how detailed are these service manuals? Any real details on the internals of the chips (at least one of my old VCR service manuals includes transisotr-level schematics of all the ICs). No, I've got nothing to feed HDMI into either, but it would still worry me that there's undocuemtned ciorcuity in the DVD player driving an undocumetned (to me) interface And there are some even more excellent books about said subjects. Books don't crash, don't have undocuemtned interfaces, don't needme to produce service mnauls for them, and so on. And I can read a book anywhere, including at my workbench. I've yet to se a DVD (as opposed to a DVD-ROM, which is not useable on DVD player normally) about the technical side of classic computing. -tony

Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote: No market for that (yet). You have to glean a lot of info from a lot of different documentaries. The Machine That Changed The World was pretty fascinating, though. Shame there's no proper release of that for sale. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

Given that the TV programmes we get over here are so dumbed-down as to be useless, and the information is very unreliable, I'd rather spend the time with good books (and even better documention on the classic computers themselves). -tony

Andrew Burton <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> writes: It's not completely off-topic: my father was working as an electronic engineer at LWT in the 1970s when ORACLE (the original ITA Teletext service) first started, and he has fond memories of coming in early to boot up the PDP-11 that generated the Teletext signal... Teletext Ltd. took over from ORACLE at the end of 1992, and ORACLE decided to go out with a bang: http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/oracle/end-gone.shtml This week's farewell messages were rather disappointing in comparison, with no mention of ORACLE having actually done all the hard work before Teletext Ltd. got there: http://offog.org/stuff/goodbye-teletext/g/ Maybe we'll see something more interesting when analogue TV finally goes off the air and the remaining few pages disappear -- but I doubt it! An idea that's come up a few times on the bbc-micro list is building something to generate a Teletext signal at home, since there's a variety of interesting hardware for decoding Teletext on various machines (e.g. the Acorn and Morley Teletext adapters for the BBC), and it'd be nice to be able to demonstrate things like Telesoftware. This should be reasonably easy given a fast-enough microcontroller... and when it happens, I've now got a dump of a couple of hours of ITV/C4's pre-shutdown Teletext stream from Monday night to play back through it. -- Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org> <http://offog.org/>

Zog.. So the metal box behind me is pretty useless now (a homebrew teletext decoder using the Philips SAA5231 and SAA5243) that links to one of my PCs (I2C interface of course, bit-banged on the parallel port). I must give serious though to making a teletext _encoder_. As far as I can see it would be legal to trasnmit teletext on the amateur bands that lalow television (it's not a secret code or cipher -- the protoocol is fully docuemtned, amd so on). Has anyone ever done that I wonder. To make this marginally on-topic, at one time the BBC (TV company) transmitted programs for the BBC micro (computer) on teletext pages IIRC. You could either type them in by hand or buy a teletxt decoder that plugged into the BBC micro and download them automatically. Alas when this was being done I had neither a teletext decoder or a BBC micro. -tony

THe obvious thing (this being classiccmp) is telesoftware for the BBC micro :-) Oh, I certainly couldn't trasnmit it on the TV band. The solutions are either to simply use it as a demonstration of the BBC decoder and feed the output of the encoder into an RF modulator that is then cabled to the BBC decoder, or to trasnmit on an amateur band and use a special receiver. Of course you're not allowed to roadcast on amatuer bands, rather you have to communicate with a particular other ham, but there's nothing to stop others listening in, of course. -tony

Is there a PAL-output version? Where would I be likely to find one in the UK? No, I wouldn't really expect that. But some data on the ICs (proper pinout diagrams, detailed block diagrams, etc) would be useful. I am not sure I understand that. -tony

Tony Duell wrote: It *is* a bit of a surprise, actually, since DVDs offer so much (length and quality of footage, lines of resolution, tons of output options, media space savings, etc.) for so little. It's one of the few no-brainer's out there for consumer technology. I am anticipating a response of "well, the laserdisc/VHS copy of Movie X has much better quality than the DVD release", similar to the "my LPs sound better than my CDs" debate. To both arguments, I say that whatever digital copy you experienced was not produced properly, and should not reflect as a limitation of the format. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

See my other message... AS I said there it comes dopwn to 2 things : (1) DVD players do not meet my criteria for documention, repairability, etc [1] and (2) what would I use it for. FWIW there are many, many, things that most people own and that I don't simply because I have no use for them. If you do, that's fine. [1] Those VCRs I mentioned arevery well documented (the service manuals give internal schemaitcs of the ICs and hybrids, you get waveform data, and so on). -tony

Pontus wrote: This is OT for this list, but yes, working on modern content on Blu-ray with an included DVD for those who don't want to upgrade yet. http://www.mindcandydvd.com/3 has details. Should be ready in March. I'd be happy to talk about it more off-list; email me directly if you like. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

On Dec 2, 2009, at 1:54 PM, Seth Morabito wrote: I do surface-mount soldering all the time. I wouldn't mind setting up a little side business doing this type of rework for people. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL