Kevin MacWhinnie

Ahhh, the grocery store was so busy this morning. I guess the thanksgiving rush has started

Tried out some new C64 games. Really digging Krakout and Uridium!

New power supply arrived for my Commodore machines today. I was finally able to try out the Vic 20 motherboard I got a few months back – it works! Still need to get a keyboard and case for it heh

Got a set of drawers and tidied up my retro corner. Still a work in progress, but most of my collection is now in one easy to access place. Thinking I need some theme appropriate stuff on the walls next 🤔

Decidedly not the most aesthetically pleasing mod, but now I don’t have to deal with flaky double density floppies to use the ST

Floppy extension cable arrived in the mail today, looks like I should be able to finish installing the gotek into my ST this weekend

Finally got around to trying out the flashfloppy hacked gotek I ordered for my ST. It works! However the pin header is mounted upside-down, which means I won’t be able to finish installing it until I get an extension cable

This USB-C dongle is only about four times bigger than a 16GB thumb drive. The future is great.

I’ve been thinking it might be a good idea to proactively replace the hard drive in my PowerBook 2400 with a solid state drive. I finally got around to looking at the repair manual, and nope – not going to happen until it absolutely has to! I’m very glad it’s the only moving part inside the machine

I have 4 double density floppy disks. It seems that only two work reliably. One is questionable, and the last is completely broken. This will make getting software on the Atari ST challenging…

Now that I have a permanent setup for retro computing, I think I will cycle through my wedges so that I can get quality time with each. I’ve put the Commodore 128 away for now, let’s see what interesting software the Atari ST has

Ack! I know I haven’t really played since I was a kid, but I don’t remember being this bad at Q*BERT

Thanks to Jan Beta’s YouTube series on repairing a C128, I was able to finally put the power LED back correctly after disassembling my machine to clean it several months ago. The light no longer intermittently goes out, and is flush with the case once again

Reopened the ST, and managed to get the RF shield off this time. Turns out you just need to slide the board out. I opened it thinking I’d remove the Tweety stereo mod since there was some nasty feedback on the audio out. Turns out the mod is glued to the board! I found the source of the feedback at least, the cable that taps into the sound chip was falling off. Everything else looks good, so I think I won’t have to take it apart again until the floppy drive needs service

There’s something very cathartic about cleaning old hardware at the end of a work week

It’s amazing how different an experience gaming on a CRT monitor. It feels so much more nostalgic – like what it felt like to play video games growing up

My Commodore setup is complete: it now has an authentic (1802) monitor. The picture is amazing, and best of all: no input lag!

Welp. I think the 1040STF tops the metal TI 99/4a for my personal record of least serviceable machine. I couldn’t get the RF shield off the main board

Great. The Atari ST’s monochrome output is compatible with the TV’s VGA input. No upscaler required for basic operation. Need to find a mouse though, a joystick barely moves the cursor

Hello, Atari ST. You’re going to be an adventure

After a relative searched through their old disks, a Discman driver has been found! If anyone happens to need a Mac driver for their Sony Discman, drop me a line 😆

I am rather sad that Adventure Time is over

Does a machine with modern networking, but a dead architecture count as retro in any sense yet? 🤔

Friday night? Time for some old school AppleTalk networking