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.

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 😆

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

Stella sure likes to nap on my 8 bit micros

Got a replacement power cord for the VCR, so I was finally able to check that my 8 bit machines survived the move. They did! But my cheapo modern joystick did not…

I am super pleased to have a complete vintage PowerBook set up. This 2400c came with an Ethernet card, portable(!) SCSI CD-ROM, external floppy drive, 2 spare batteries, and assorted cables

I have never seen rubber feet perish so thoroughly before. They are the consistency of caramel

Good news: it looks like all but one of my antique computers survived moving coast to coast. Not sure that it’s really worth trying to replace the Z88 given how little software there is for it

Here we go, got a VIC-20 mother board. Just need to find a broken donor machine I can harvest a keyboard and case from, and I’ll have a working system!

Slowly replaying Wario Land, a childhood favorite which is just as fun as I remember

It’s more a novelty than anything else, but there is a (sorta functional) Apple I emulator for the C64

Stella is lucky to be a house cat. Yelling at your prey in the wild does not tend to get you dinner