Leaded Solder
Posts
-
Reviving a Game Gear
With the recent success of the PC-9801NS/T capacitor replacement, I had chip-electrolytic capacitors on the brain. And like I said in this article, the easiest place to find more of those leaky little rectangles in my house was in the Game Gear I hadn’t bothered to repair for years.
-
The Most Useless MSX
One of the more unloved MSX1s is the Casio PV-7. This poor little 8-bit computer was saddled with a crappy keyboard, only 8kB of RAM, no printer port, no built-in tape interface, and only a single cartridge slot. And that cartridge slot doesn’t even follow the MSX standard!
-
Ms. PC-9801 if you're NS/T
I got ahold of a PC-98 laptop. Unfortunately, it has a lot of battery leakage and won’t power on. Come hang out and smell the vinegar with me for a little while.
-
Space Walking with Gemini
While a ColecoVision is sometimes pricey and hard to find in my area, the much more rare Coleco Gemini fell into my lap while looking through my favourite flea-market junk bin. Because the machine came without cables, a power adapter, or joysticks, it had been relegated to the sad little corner where unloved consoles go, right next to a stripped-for-parts Intellivision II and a battered-looking 2600 Jr. Let’s see if it can be coerced to once again play Combat.
-
The Sega SC-3000 goes to a key party
I fixed up my SC-3000’s cartridge slot almost a year ago, but I haven’t been using the computer. Why not? Because the keyboard is super unusable. It’s time to fix it now, though, because I just paid a king’s ransom for a copy of Flicky.
-
Raising the iQue of my home
When Nintendo wanted to enter the burgeoning Chinese market in 2003, they did so with a neat redesigned Nintendo 64 in a single joypad. Unfortunately, they didn’t sell a lot of them (eight to twelve thousand units, depending who you ask). This makes it an interesting and uncommon artifact from Nintendo history. I won one on YouTube. Here it is! Let’s play some games.
-
Make Your Own ColecoVision At Home (Part 1 - Design)
When I found some cheap ColecoVision cartridges in the junk bin at the flea market, I knew I had to save them from whatever fate awaited them after the junk bin. How would I play them? Today’s old-ColecoVision prices are ridiculous, so I started building one instead.
-
Attempting CoCo 'brane surgery
Without a working keyboard, the CoCo that I’ve been working on over the past few months might as well be a fancy desk ornament. When I took a look at the keyboard last time, the membrane had some pretty serious damage to its carbon conductive traces. Before spending money to replace the keyboard, I’m first going to try and fix those traces with the conductive paint I already paid for.
-
Get the Tandy 102 (batteries out)!
Sometime last summer, I spotted a local classifieds listing where someone was selling a “Tandy laptop.” After some interrogation, I determined that it was probably a Model 102. Another Kyocera sibling to join my NEC PC-8300?
-
Hearing the PC-6001 out
When I first set up the PC-6001, I had to bring it back to life by replacing the shorted tantalum capacitors on the motherboard’s power rails. It’s such a great little machine! After some more testing, however, it became obvious that I was getting no sound out of the poor little thing.
-
Fixing the Bad ADB Mac LC's power supply
Now that I know that the computer wasn’t horribly killed by my recap job and repair of all those broken traces in the ADB input system, let’s take a brief moment to recap that original Astec power supply from the “bad” LC. And fix the video!
-
Recapping a Macintosh LC TDK power supply
While I was working on the bad ADB Mac LC, I tested it by using the “good” power supply from my childhood Mac LC. How good was that “good” power supply, though? Well, it smelled a little fishy.
-
Cleaning the keyboard on the PC-6001
When I first fixed the PC-6001, there were a few sticky keys on the keyboard. “H,” Left Shift, and - most importantly - Return were all bad to a certain extent. I could limp along with Ctrl-M for a little while to replace Return, but it was pretty awkward. How hard can it be to clean the keyboard?
-
Not conducting myself appropriately - a CoCo keyboard inspection
When I got the CoCo up and running in the previous entry, I noticed that the keyboard wasn’t working particularly well. I found myself with some spare time to dismantle the keyboard, and unfortunately it has not yet been fixed. That doesn’t mean we can’t still learn a thing or two.
-
A "Practice" Mac LC
My first real computer was a Macintosh LC. They’re not held in especially high esteem, and they haven’t been redeemed by history, either. It’s not hard to see why: a pitifully low RAM limit (10MB) introduced alongside a more RAM-hungry System 7, generally poor performance across the board, and cheap components. I still have mine, but this isn’t it.
subscribe via RSS