Updates are going to be a bit less frequent here for the next few weeks due to some pretty heavy work commitments. It looks as though I am not going to have much spare time at all during this summer, so my old skool computing hobby will have to take a back seat until things cool down a bit. 
Update…
December 9th, 2006D’oh!
November 27th, 2006I really should start checking rarity lists before bidding on items on eBay. Recently a couple of old consoles were listed on eBay as an auction with a “buy it now” price. I didn’t think the consoles would attract too many bids (they weren’t particularly rare) but the BIN price was a worry – it was (IMHO) too much for the pair, but not so high that someone wouldn’t snatch the items before the auction ended. Normally I don’t bid too early in auctions, instead preferring to watch and wait so I can snipe at the last minute, but in this case I decided to put in a minimal place-holder bid to remove the BIN option. Bad move!
When I checked the auction in the dying hours, I saw that the bids had skyrocketed to more than twice the initial BIN price. At first I thought it was a case of newbies experiencing a sudden rush of blood to the head, but had a closer look at the photos attached to the auction. One of the included cartridges looked a bit different to normal, so I did what I should have done on day one – I Googled for a rarity guide and checked up on the cartridge. It turns out the cartridge in question is an extremely rare item which I could have snatched for a steal if only I had done my research up front.
Moral of the story: Do your research before bidding on auctions and look closely at any photos to determine just what is on offer.
eBay
November 25th, 2006I remember the first old computer I purchased was a Sinclair ZX81 which I discovered at a ‘Trash and Treasure’ market probably around 1988. I think I paid $15 or so for the ZX81 and a power supply (no box or manuals) and the machine is still in good working order. That find started me on an “on again, off again” affair with collecting old computers that has become more of an obsession today. 
In the early days there was no eBay to buy and sell old skool computers. Instead you had to trawl through market stalls, thrift/second-hand shops, pawn brokers, classified ads and so on. Finding old computers was more about the hunt than the acquisition – you had to live in an area with plenty of good thrift stores (unfortunately for me there weren’t many around where I lived) and you had to get in quick with the classifieds in the papers. My main source in those days was a paper called the Trading Post. Each week I would get the Trading Post early on a Thursday morning and scour the computer listings for interesting looking finds. Then I would start making calls and if I was lucky I would be able to score a bargain. Due to my location I had to arrange to have the computers delivered by post or courier and payment would be by mailing a cheque. Turnaround times would be in the order of 1-2 weeks. These days I can win an eBay auction, pay via PayPal and have the items in my hands within 2-3 days. Quite an improvement!
I quite enjoyed the hunt back then – not that I actually purchased much. My PET 2001 came from the Trading Post, as did the Commodore 128D (which I foolishly sold for next to nothing years ago) and a few other odds and ends. Pickings were slim however, which made the few rare finds all the more enjoyable.
A couple of years later, 1989 or 1990, I started dialling bulletin boards and ended up running my own for a while. That is when I discovered FidoNet and the various “Echo Conferences” including a couple of “for sale” groups. These opened up a few more possibilities for finds, but still, pickings were slim. A couple more years on and I finally had access to the internet and Usenet newsgroups. This was where I really started to realise that collecting old computers was a hobby that a small group of enthusiasts were really exploring. I can remember reading posts describing how to find rare games in thrift stores, what days were best to go hunting, tricks to get cheaper prices, and lists describing the rarity of different systems and game cartridges. Many of the posters were collecting Atari 2600 systems and games and the hobby was just starting to become more popular.
Then along came eBay and things started to really take off. My first eBay purchase was in 1997 when I won an auction for a collection of 10-12 Atari 2600 cartridges. I made a couple more purchases then left the hobby for a few years. Nowdays old skool computing is a thriving scene and there is more and more equipment available to be had. Just look at the number of auctions in the vintage computing categories of eBay! Thanks to eBay, I now have a large collection containing computers that I would never have been able to find locally. I can buy a computer from a guy in the US and it will be shipped here in a week or so. I can then buy some software for that computer from a seller in the UK. Then, using the web, I can find technical details, schematics, scans of manuals and all manner of information about my new acquisitions. It has certainly made collecting a lot easier.
However, the growth in the old skool computer market has come at a cost. With more and more people getting into the hobby, prices have predictably risen. While my first ZX81 only cost me $15, today you would have to pay many times that to secure one on eBay. Then, should a newspaper or tv show do a story on collecting, people look in their attics and dust off their old computers and think they will become rich by selling off these ***ULTRA RARE*** computers on eBay and list their goods at unrealistically high starting prices. So it is starting to get harder to find good quality gear at bargain prices. Where a seller may have listed a single auction for a computer, software and manuals, these days he will list 25 auctions – one for each individual item, all starting at $19.99 (or some other outrageously high figure). With luck they will relist their auctions at lower starting prices when they fail to get any bids, but it does make it awkward to score a complete set of manuals or software especially if you have to bid against another collector.
So while eBay has helped to grow this amazing hobby, by making old systems more available to a wider audience, it has also lead to inflated prices in some areas. Still, that won’t stop me regularly checking the new listings in my favourite categories!
More acquisitions
November 11th, 2006(I haven’t had any time recently to update this blog – we are heading into our busy period at work and I’ve barely had time to scratch myself…)
In the past couple of weeks I have made a few additions to the collection, courtesy of eBay. eBay has made collecting old systems remarkably easy, making it a snap to locate systems that I had only ever read about in imported magazines. Unfortunately eBay has also had a negative impact on this hobby, but that is a topic for another post.
The latest goodies that I have added to my collection include:
- An
Oric-1(though it has a dodgy power supply which I can easily replace) - Some
Mattel Aquariuscartridges – a couple of games and an implementation ofLOGOwhich I am dying to try out! - Another
Intellivisionconsole, complete with theIntellivoicemodule,Intellivision Computer Adapterand a bunch of games. - A
Dick Smith Wizzard(akavTech Creativision– this is a very hard to find games console, so I am stoked to have won this auction
- A second
Mattel Aquariussystem, complete in its original box, with the expansion system and game controllers. - and best of all, a working
Vectrexsystem!
The Aquarius and Vectrex systems haven’t arrived here yet and I can’t wait to get my hands on them. The Aquarius turns out to be a really neat, if limited, system. There is something about the system that is intriguing – it is very under-powered, was over-priced when it came out, had a limited life, but it looks good and I find myself drawn to the system. Given the limited life of the Aquarius I am surprised at the number of unopened software which is readily available. Perhaps this shouldn’t be such a surprise though – the
Aquarius was killed very early on, so maybe stores and distributors were left with large stocks of unsaleable merchandise? Hmmm… Either way, it means there is a decent supply of collectible items for this system, which is a good thing IMHO.
The Vectrex has really got me excited though. I remember a friend of mine had a Vectrex in the early 1980s and it was a cool game system – the vector graphics, with an integrated monitor crapped all over my little Pong clone I had. The high price and poor reliability of the systems led to an early demise, which means that working Vectrex units are quite hard to come by and they attract a premium price. Still, I got this one for much less than I expected, so I am happy. Now I will have to start hunting for the games – it looks like there were 29 games released, which is more than I thought, and there are almost as many home-brew titles too.
Online retailer recommendations?
October 29th, 2006After spending way more time than I really would have liked, I managed to get an image from my ZX80 on the LCD TV. Unfortunately, the ZX80 is an NTSC model, while my LCD TV is, naturally, PAL so I get a rolling picture, which is hardly usable. I then dug out my PCI TV tuner card, found a spare slot in my PC and tried to get the card working. However, it appears that the card is dead – I could not for the life of me get anything working with the card. Upon further reflection, using my PC won’t really be a viable long-term solution owing to its location, which just wouldn’t be terribly convenient. So I have decided to get a USB TV tuner for my Mac.
The tuner I have decided on is the Miglia TVMax, which has built-in hardware compression and a nice array of inputs which would make it almost ideal for my needs. Now I need to find a reputable online retailer because the NTSC model is not available here in Australia. So who would you recommend? Preferably someone who ships internationally.
When old skool clashes with current day…
October 19th, 2006The past week or two I have been fighting what seems to be a losing battle. My TV (32″ LCD) just doesn’t want to work with either of my ZX80s. It does work fine with my Commodores, the Aquarius, most of my ZX81s and various game machines – just the ZX80s seem to give it grief. When I try to tune in the channel, “auto-tune” skips right past the channel without even a blip, and “manual tune” will sometimes show a very fuzzy picture but won’t let me stop close enough to fine tune it.
The few, tantalising glimpses I get when using manual tune are enough to convince me that a) the ZX80s work (at least intermittently); and b) theoretically it should be possible to tune a correct channel in.
I have tried bypassing the modulator and just taking a composite signal straight from the circuit board, but even that isn’t getting much success. I can sometimes get a brief flash of the ZX80 screen up, but it just doesn’t seem stable enough.
My next step will be to dig out my old TV from the back room, which has a manual tuning mode which is much easier to control than the modern tuning mechanism on my LCD TV.
Of course my ultimate solution is going to be to use a TV tuner card which would allow me to take screen grabs (and even create movies) of the old skool machines in action. Unfortunately I don’t currently have a spare slot in my Windows PC and USB tuners for Macs are just ridiculously over-priced, so it may take a while before I can use this option…
Sigh! It never used to be so hard to tune in a channel on your TV. Whatever happened to the rotary tuning dials?
More on the Aquarius…
October 13th, 2006I found a site which has a disassembly of the Aquarius ROM, as well as some other technical info and an emulator. Looks like I have a bit of reading to do!
As I mentioned in the previous post, Mattel disabled PEEKing into the ROM. The author of this disassembly wrote a small machine language routine which copied chunks of the ROM into RAM so he could dump the ROM contents. This was what I was planning on doing, but now I won’t have to.
At least now I have a list of BASIC keywords. Appears to be a reasonably standard set of commands for an 80’s home computer…
PEEKing inside the Mattel Aquarius
October 8th, 2006I’ve been playing with my “new” Mattel Aquarius, trying to find out what it can and can’t do. The BASIC appears to be standard fare for early-80’s Microsoft BASIC, if a little limited. The character set is interesting, containing crude graphics characters which are used by the (few) games – there is no graphics mode apart from the graphic characters, so all games must be written to use the inbuilt character set.
Interestingly I have discovered an interesting restriction built into the BASIC. Certain parts of the memory map are not accessible using the PEEK (and I’d presume POKE) command. One thing I like to do with a new computer is write a small program which will let you interrogate blocks of memory. Doing this you can usually find where the screen memory lives, determine where BASIC programs live, scan the BASIC ROM for keywords (so you know what the language can/can’t do) and maybe even find the character bitmaps. With the Aquarius though, PEEKing some locations give an error message – I am guessing this was intended to hide the BASIC ROM from prying eyes. I guess that means I’ll have to try my hand at writing some Z80 code to do my snooping…
BTW, so far I haven’t been able to figure out how to edit a line of BASIC short of retyping the whole line and on a chicklet keyboard that gets old fast! If anyone reading this has an Aquarius manual they could scan in for me I would be most appreciative.
Another addition to the menagerie
October 5th, 2006A couple of days ago another parcel arrived at ‘Chez arb’, this time containing some Mattel goodies – An Intellivision Intellivoice module plus games and a Mattel Aquarius computer! This was the first Aquarius I have seen on eBay Australia and I managed to win the auction at a very reasonable price for such a rare machine.
Interestingly, the Aquarius was actually designed and built by Radofin, a name which I am familiar with duue to my obsession with the 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System. (The 1292 was an early cartridge-based game console which was manufactured by a number of companies, including Hanimex, Acetronic, Prinztronic, Fountain and Radofin – one day I will get around to writing an article or two about this great system.)
From the information available on the net, only around 20,000 Aquariuses were ever made, with a production run lasting from June 1983 to October 1983 – five months! It seems the Aquarius was underpowered and overpriced and died a quick death.
I’ve only hooked it up to the TV once for a quick looksee, so I really don’t have much to say about it yet. The keyboard is a chicklet-style keyboard, with an overlay containing BASIC keywords over some of the keys. In a fashion similar to Sinclair compters, you can use shortcuts to enter most BASIC keywords, which with a chickllet keyboard is a welcome addition – these things are not made for touch typists! The memory is a whopping 4 kilobytes and the inbuilt BASIC is (naturally) a Microsoft variant. The seller had a single game cartridge for the Aquarius which is a port of an Intellivision game called AstroSmash. The graphics are very primitive, especially compared to the Intellivision which was already a well established system by the time the Aquarius came out. I am sure the poor graphics contributed to the system’s early demise.
Overall the Mattel Aquarius is a nice looking, if severely underpowered computer. I’ll now start to hunt for information on the web and hopefully get a bit of time to play with this interesting piece of computer history…
New acqusition
October 2nd, 2006A new addition to my growing collection of old skool computers arrived last week – a Sinclair ZX80. This is the second ZX80 I have managed to win on eBay, unfortunately both are NTSC models and my TV doesn’t do NTSC, so I am considering modifying one of the ZX80’s to do composite out. It should be possible to grab the video from the modulator’s input – I just hope I don’t blow something up in the process! 
I will try to post some pictures of my new ZX80 as soon as I figure out a way to get it working on my TV. I could have sworn my TV was multi-format, but I must be mistaken…
BTW, sorry for the lack of posts recently, but work and health issues have been piling up and I kinda let this site slide. 
I’ll try to be a bit more regular in future.