Old (Non-IBM!) Computers

So my dearest DW Fellows, who still has an old computer in daily usage?

I have two, first the newer one:
Amiga 2000 (PAL)
68030 turbo board with 16 MB FastRAM
Buddahcontroler with a 10 GB IDE HDD and a 32x/16x/32x CD-R

Then my older one:
Commodore 64 "Breadbin" (PAL)
For that dude i have and use:
MMC64
RR with RR-Net
REU with 1 MB

Jup, many things from Jens Schönfeld. He makes the best retro hardware . ;)

One thing i would still fancy would be a SuperCPU ;)

So, what do you have?
I want to hear from all those still used and running NTSC* Commys!
Or do you use a Speccy frequently? Or even a TRS-80?



* Never The Same Color ;)

Well, I got an old A500 that needs a display cable. I haven't arsed myself to making one yet, but it shouldn't be too hard. Hardest thing is probably getting or making a 23-pin female D-sub connector...
I got it from a dumpster and later found the PSU. It lights up OK and there's some disk drive activity, so I'm guessing it works...

Bastet Furry said:

So my dearest DW Fellows, who still has an old computer in daily usage?

I probably would if I hadn't sold my cousin's old Atari unit :(

I think I spent half my time on that playing Deja Vu.

I have a working C64 with a Commodore monitor, two disk drives, a vast quantity of pirated games, a tape drive, and a dot matrix printer. I have have a working VIC20, and C-16.

Atari 65XE with half of the top keyboard row broken, 1 (pretty much broken) XC12 and 2 CA12 tape drives, 1 of them turbo'ed, 2 Champion 200X joysticks, one in really bad shape, and a QuickJoy SV126 JetFighter. Shitloads of tapes, none of them worked several years ago when I tried using it one last time.

8 years of heavy usage have taken their toll.

I still have my Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, which I recently bought composite cables for. I've been meaning to do some programming on it lately for no other reason than...well, really for no reason.

I've been wanting to try out an Amiga as of late, though. I hear its GUI was pretty spiffy.

@DJ_Haruko:
The Workbench is something to get used to, its the same as going from explorer.exe to "the mac gui" or gnome2 or kde. If you come from the win32 world or somewhere else and use some other graphical shell you will(!) curse it more than once. ;)

@Belial:
Isnt there some 8bit user group near you that you could kindly ask?
If you happen to live near Bochum (Germany) then you might want to visit the Dienstagstreff and ask there. I think Skernsoft or Suschman will be glad to help you for almost free, only the spare parts will be on your account. Some thinks can be done by me too as long as i dont need to desolder any ICs ;)

@Use3D:
Nice to hear, but, no new (post 2000) retro hardware for your breadbox?
Or do you dislike these?

@Lüt:
Atari 800XL?

@jallamann:
You should get these for relative low prices on ebay, so, no need to get your hands dirty if you dont want to.

A friend recently brought 'home' a commodore 64 with all the necessary hardware and a load of games. Nice machine and all but for the price he paid I'd rather have my emu.

Emus just dont feel right.
Nice for deving but for real gaming you need the real thing or its not the same.

DJ_Haruko said:

I still have my Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, which I recently bought composite cables for. I've been meaning to do some programming on it lately for no other reason than...well, really for no reason.

Nice, that was the computer I grew up on. I remember at one point we had a choice between keeping that computer or our Nintendo, and we went for the TI. Some of the games for that are really great, like Parsec and Superfly (I can't find anywhere I can emulate the latter; I guess it wasn't that popular.)

Perfectly working A500, dad got it in December 1991, sold it in 1993 for an A2000 (which was sold in 1994), got it back in 2000, I've had it since. Many good times with it.

Bastet Furry said:

@Lüt:
Atari 800XL?

Heh, I'm not sure, we could never find a model # on the thing, and although we looked through the OS, we really didn't know much about it and couldn't find any further info.

It was just a desktop with the "atari" logo on the front, and a matching monitor/keyboard/mouse. Other games we played were a pick-up truck racing game where right and left turned you right and left no matter what direction you were facing which made it incredibly awkward to control, some racer/shooter combo where you'd have car races (and fights?) on the road then pull over into a building which was a sidescroller/shooter area then back onto the road, and uh... that's really all I remember, we had a box of 50 or so games, but there were only a few we really got into.

[edit]Oh! And Zany Golf. I loved that version. Played the console version (Genesis?) once and thought it was crap by comparison.

I do! In fact, I have two old ass computers I still use. They're REALLY crappy. I am long overdue for a new computer...

My first computer (my main one):

Originally ran Windows 98SE, now upgraded to Windows XP
Made by Compaq
AMD-K6 3D Processor
450 MHz
60MB of RAM
7GB HD Space (Max amount of HD space)
330MB HD Space available

I use this one mostly for writing essays, playing Doom (offline) and the occassional Starcraft game, and listen to music. This is the computer I have my weapons mod for ZDoom on. I also have my Flash stuff too.

My second computer (laptop):

Runs on Windows XP
Intel pentium III processor
697 MHz
256MB of RAM
11.2GB HD Space (Max amount of HD space)
1.22GB HD Space available

I use this one mostly for online gaming.

I have another computer that sometimes gets used and it runs on Windows 98. I use that mostly for playing DOS games like Wolfenstein 3D and play emulated SNES games and Neo Geo games (just the Metal Slug games.)

Fail!
These two are IBM compatible machines and not old.

Oh damn, I didn't see the Non-IBM part.

I do fail... :(

I have a computer older than me, and I'm 16 :D. It's awesome, It has "tanks", and Wolf3d on it.

We have an old Mac Performa PC. It's got a 200 MHZ Processor, and not much else. I used to play Doom and Marathon 2 on it all the time.

Lizardcommando said:
I do! In fact, I have two old ass computers I still use. They're REALLY crappy. I am long overdue for a new computer...

Those aren't old. I've got a nearly-decade-old 266MHz P2 on all the time acting as a file server, but as Bastet Fury said, it's still an IBM-compatible.

None of my pre-1993 systems are run daily, but I do boot the Tandy 1000SX occasionally (again, PC-compatible, but it's not quite 100% as there was software that would run on the PC/XT but not the T1000, and vice-versa). There's also one working (last I tried) TRS-80 Model IV, and a second one that hasn't worked since I smashed the CRT after replacing a disk drive... :-P

And it might not count as a computer since it doesn't run external software, but I have a DEC VT101 terminal (circa 1983) I stole from the dumpster at school that mostly works, too.

CODOR said:

Those aren't old.

Which is why I said this in my last post:

Lizardcommando said:

Oh damn, I didn't see the Non-IBM part.

I do fail... :(

Lizardcommando said:
Which is why I said this in my last post:

I know, I fail at pressing the Submit button when I actually write my posts, rather than 45 minutes later...

In the basement, there's an Atari 800 and a Mac Classic running System 6.0.7 (technically running 6.0.3 since I can't get the goddamn HDD to work). I wish I still had my C64.

sargebaldy said:

Nice, that was the computer I grew up on. I remember at one point we had a choice between keeping that computer or our Nintendo, and we went for the TI. Some of the games for that are really great, like Parsec and Superfly (I can't find anywhere I can emulate the latter; I guess it wasn't that popular.)

I actually have never played those games. I grew up playing Tombstone City on it, which to this day is still one of my favorite games. I also had a bunch of educational games, one of which uses the speech synthesizer add-on. The best part was when it tried to say the number eight (aich!)

Three working C64's (one breadbin), each with at least one broken key. One floppy drive. With only one game - Tapper.

Emulation feels just fine for me, always has. Not going to bother with fixing old junk that's useless since the tapes are dead.

If I could get my JetFighter to work with a PC I wouldn't really know the difference.

Lüt said:

some racer/shooter combo where you'd have car races (and fights?) on the road then pull over into a building which was a sidescroller/shooter area then back onto the road

Fire Chief?

Doubt it. There were no firemen anywhere in the game (that I know of - I never did win it), and if the player was a fireman he wasn't in uniform. I think he wore a blue outfit. I don't think there were any fires either. I forget what the point of it was too :P He might've been an escaped criminal for all I know.

DJ_Haruko said:

I actually have never played those games. I grew up playing Tombstone City on it, which to this day is still one of my favorite games. I also had a bunch of educational games, one of which uses the speech synthesizer add-on. The best part was when it tried to say the number eight (aich!)

I played Tombstone City, and it was all right, but never stood out too much. I guess we had a lot of games. Some other good ones were Microsurgeon and TI Invaders, even if that one was just a clone of a popular game. We had some educational games as well, and had that pad thing you could get as an add-on. The only one of those I can remember was the Adventures of Terry Turtle, which we always made fun of for being so silly ("I ate a BAD strawberry"), but was entertaining anyway.

I miss the old C64. It was the first computer I had. :(

I have three ZX Speccys: a 16, a 48 and the +2A. I believe the +2A still works well. The older ones are totally busted, but they were a pain to use anyway.

I've been trying to get my hands on a 68k machine lately, but I really haven't been able to find a decent (complete with a monitor) ST or Amiga for a good price around here. Old Macs I don't care about.

Um, where do you live again?
Unless you live in the Russian tundra it shouldnt be that hard grabbing one on ebay.
There are enough international sellers around.
Other way would be asking the nice people at forum64.de . Yap, .de for Deutschland, so either bring some German with you or just create an account and search for the "Flohmarkt" and there post in "Suche", i am SuperMod there and ill beat everyone who flames a serious(!) English written search request. ;)
I wouldnt mind sending an Amiga around the world, but sadly i have no working spares that i could sell. (And they would be PAL, so if you happen to live in NTSC or SECAM Country it wouldnt help you...)

I'm from Portugal. The trouble is that I don't want to bother with expenditure taxes and stuff like that, and if I was to buy the computer I would want it ASAP...