@Old Guy Channels take years to grow a channel to that size - unless they're playing minecraft and a gazillion children subscribe or they're doing something controversial or extraordinary. Even though it may be due, there isn't enough people that used to mumble "38,911 basic bytes free" in their sleep when they were young.
I always love seeing a PET getting repaired. I've managed to amass 3 different models (2001, 2001-N and 8032) and am currently restoring my flood-damaged 8032
My CBM4016 has a different main board, also the smaller screen. I've had it since new from sometime in the early 80s. Had to replace a video memory chip and a filter cap in the floppy disk drive, which went bang and let all the magic smoke out. Got a few video's on getting it working again. Always great to see another pet brought back to life. Keep up saving pets.
Yeah you're right, I haven't seen that. Wikipedia states: "First year 4000-series PETs retained the same video hardware as the PET 2001/3000, but in 1981 this was replaced by the 12-inch screen and 6845-based CRTC hardware."
@@itsTyrion as the title of the video has the word "pet" in it , i assumed that folk would not think that i was referring to cats or dogs. Either way saving pets would be a good thing, bringing back to life might be a bit more difficult for some. Also mine is a CBM4016, in the UK they were sold as "Commodore Business Machines" but well known as PET'S.
@@TheEmbeddedHobbyist "I just revived my pet, just had to replace some parts." "Where did you get them" "I just took them out of my other one I didn't like that much, because it got to yellow and bleaching made it splotchy"
@@VintageTechFan I think i hit lucky with a few parts from ebay that seem to work ok! the mains bits it got from RS or Farnell in the UK. The good thing is there are not many special parts except eprom code but that as well can be found on the web.
The first computer I ever saw was a Commodore PET. I cannot thank you enough for these videos which will come in handy when I get my own classic computers. There's nothing like the real thing. Glad this channel exists.
The PET was also my first computer to play with. I remember fondly turning it on and then typing in the question: "who bent the banana?" to which I got the iconic "SYNTAX ERROR" resposnse. What can I say. I had never been close to a computer before.
@@MatthiasWelwarsky I have a similar, but later, memory of the DOS prompt in Windows 98 - I typed versions of “die windows”, “kill windows” etc and thought the BAD COMMAND response was a promising sign that it was fighting back. I amused myself for a few days like that.
I want to commend you on another excellent job explaining complicated technical things. I took some rudimentary electronics courses back in 2003-04. I love how you try to explain the problem in semi-layman terms. I get a lot of what you are talking about but am a little lost at other times, at no fault of your own. I also want to commend you on your "presentation skills." I see you seem to be more comfortable and fluid in front of the camera. Kudos!!
This video sorts me out on the ROM situation for the universal motherboard so much! Can hardly wait for the next video. I am presently in the middle of empirical action on the RAM - new sockets and chips for all. I was fine and got started then one day. 98 bytes free…. Trying get to fiddling around with a Z80 & C/pm daughter board I had hanging out in the lid, an Easter egg when I found my 8032…
I can't tell you the amount of joy I have watching your videos. The respect and care you have for this tech that literally helped shape many of our childhoods is greatly appreciated.
It's my dream to own a PET some day. It is daunting though knowing how many issues they typically have though. So I'm glad for videos about how to fix them. Great video as always!
I 3D printed the same one but it's kinda lightweight and the center spindle on mine kept popping out, I ended up trashing it and buying a Hakko 611 holder which is rock solid.
I occasionally see these go up for sale in the portland area on craigslist. Still hoping to snag one some day. Always fun to see a PET restoration. Great video!
Yes, I'm kicking myself for not thinking of checking our local e-waste companies, there's no telling what retro goodies have passed by. I'd be so stoked if I could find a PET without having to resort to eBay. :(
What these Commodores do to print out this value is to take the integer value of the bytes free, convert it into a float value stored in the floating point accumulator (some bytes in the zeropage) and then convert that value into a string to print it out. In this case, I would rule out the ram, because the routine basically works, it just gives wrong results. The same applies to the ROM. That leaves the CPU. It can have a minor fault where it doesn't update the carry- or the zeroflag correctly in some cases, which could lead to such results.
It always reminds me of Computer Studies (1981-3) - the PET was sat right in the middle of the classroom, connected to an accoustic coupler. No one ever sat at it unless there really was no other computer available. BBC B, BBC A, Spectrum (latterly) , ZX81 then the Pet.
I love retro computer videos and I am so glad this one is less than thirty minutes in length. The simple reason for that is I don't have time for videos more than thirty minutes and in my experiences most people don't. Please keep these videos to this magic length.
Don't forget that you can save a little time by watching videos at 1.25x or 1.5x speed. But I also don't like watching videos more than thirty minutes long. He found a good stopping point for this one.
Hello Adrian. I am an automation engineer, i love to entertain watching Your movies. Your "deduction" path is similiar to mine. Your accent, pronousing is vsry very "understandable". Keep going good work!
@Brandon Taylor Yeah the IIe is definitely better for productivity. my aunt and uncle were Apple IIe people then went to the mac. We had C64 here in my house and then we went to IBM PC's.
@@primus711 mostly because the Apple could display more columns on screen etc. I'm a commodore guy but apple and IBM were always better for productivity.
Nice trick to jumper CS from the Kernal to one of the option ROM socket. I need to remember that one. The Romulator can replace the kernal but not everyone has one of those.
Good luck with the fixing of this machine. Nice that you recycled before it was too late. I love the pet chasis, never had or seen one irl. I'll like a similar desing but for a modern pc
So I just started this video and both of my daughters (1 year old and 2 years old) came running over when they heard your intro music, lol. I think they were expecting an 8-bit dance party.
makes you wonder who thinks "Hmm, this old computer can't be worth anything so I'll just bin it!!" without checking the internet first, but, at least you have it now and is on its' way back to health... :D
I wonder if you could use Bondo's fiberglass resin on the case to go over the engraving and other scratches? Then possibly rattle can the entire case and print a new sticker for the front.
I've done this before on a TRS 80 that had really deep scratches and a piece of the case broken off. It looks fabulous if you know your way around prep and paint.
There is a very distinct texture to the case plastic, so I think it would be really hard to replicate although maybe not for someone with a lot of skill?
@@adriansdigitalbasement There is a simple little trick for plastics with texture. Get a hot glue gun and place a blob of hot glue on the textured surface and place a stick in the glue standing up. Once cooled, carefully peel up the glue with the stick still in it and viola, you have a texture stamp that can be used while the filler is soft.
@@notneb82 Yup. Hot glue or also polyester resin and anything that hardens but stays kinda flexible and can be torn/peeled away without bonding with the texture you're matching. Then you can press it on the filler or even the paint, if you go with painting with several thick coats
@@adriansdigitalbasement you'd have to take a mold of the texture in silicone, and then use that to re-add the texture to any epoxy resin you use to fix the damage. David Murray has a pretty good video from a few years ago about doing that to fix the lid on a Bell & Howell Apple II+.
I'm sure its not the first time you've mentioned you're in the Portland area, but TIL I learned you're local! I'm down in the Salem area, and learning a bit about what is going or on, or has happened in the area is interesting. I always see LGR, RMC and GamersNexus talk about cool stuff near them but they're not local. xD
I'm still amazed by hardware working 40 years later. Anything made today seems to just fail in just a few years, or in barely a year if it's a peripheral. Maybe not a complete failure, but degrades in one way or another which affects usage of the product. God forbid you buy something that's a refurb/recert.. those go so quickly. Every time I turn on my computer I worry some part of it will suddenly be dead, especially a storage drive.
Funny, that budget electronics from this era last longer than professional stuff or even mil spec field equipment of the same era, because of the lack of exploding tantalum capacitors...
This is my favorite computer of all time, as a 2nd grader I was the only kid who could program and load games on them, I also got cassette tapes from the regular library and played the games at school. We had 20 or so of them in our computer lab in the early 1980s, my mom was the media center lady so I had free reign on them and it was my thing to be the "computer genius" and geek. I remember some of them had like calculator keys, and some had commodore style thick keys. All had cassette tape drives for data and games of which we had a decent selection of. I also remember we had a few Apple 2Es which were great as we had tons of software, as well as being the first school in the country to get the Apple macintosh in a pilot program. They replaced all our PET computers with them, and I still remember all those computers sitting in a back hallway for a long time and asking repeatedly if I could take one home but was always told no. I actually contemplated just taking one, I can still remember 😆 Those games really were next level on the macintoshes because they had actual graphics, lots of games, even though they were just black/white/greyscale which I thought was stupid.
Well we've always been pretty good at recycling in Portland so I'm not shocked that so many school district PETs are still around. We'll always find a way to make old things be useful here!
"[this video's] gettin kinda long" Only time I can recall hearing that on a video from this channel less than forty minutes lol. The disconnect between minutes of unedited footage versus an edited together video combined with how every person perceives the passage of time differently always makes statements like that throw me down a rabbit hole.
Nice to know that some places do auction off old hardware..If I had the space to have an old pc or two I would have jumped at the chance to grab any and max them out and just simply enjoy them.
I remember when the Personal Electronic Transactor (PET) was first announced and would have loved to have one. At school I was using different computers (Research machine 380Z), which had some proper graphics capability, so when I finally got to use a PET, I was quite disappointed. But it's still an iconic machine.
I learned to program on one of those... and wrote a program for the local ski center to manage their ski rentals. Had to load it from C-cassette at startup😄
Interesting topic. Doesn‘t the /NOROM signal go to the option ROM sockets, too? That stack thing is weird. Somehow, a stack must be living somewhere else. Because, when you boot up, several subroutines and also the interrupt service routine is called. And that would not work without a proper return address from the stack. Exciting video, looking forward to the next part.
If you can solder, you can build your own - everything you need is listed clearly in the wiki attached to the project. It's all on GitHub, hoglet67 RGBtoHDMI
@@HutchCA The files are all there to order a PCB from one of the cheap internet suppliers - PCB Way, JLCPCB, Oshpark etc - depending on how long you're willing to wait for it to arrive, and what import duties/taxes your government levies, it can cost less than $10. If you don't feel confident ordering a PCB ( and honestly, it's a lot easier than you'd imagine, very user friendly these days) there are people on various forums ( try stardot the BBC micro forum) who make 'group buys' where one forum member will buy PCBs and components in bulk and then ship them individually to anyone who wants a kit, at or near cost price. There are sometimes people also selling kits on eBay, and Tindie, although you never know when they might have stock. Good luck :)
If you approach one of our e-waste bins at the drop-off here, and don't have something to deposit, they yell at you. I saw some cool Commodore stuff in ours once but they told me to get away.
My dad was the principal of a small town K-12 school. The school had Commodore PETs like this before I attended school but the summer before I started Kindergarten they all got replaced with Zenith IBM PC clones. They knew this was coming by June so they went grade by grade asking the students if they wanted a free PET. It took... I think going down to grade 10 but every PET found a home.
holy moly, you have an open Haribo-Happy Cola rail exposed on your desktop. that's extremely dangerous! :'D nitpicking just to be a nit picker: 23:40 it's 65536 addresses that can be addressed, 0 - 65535 :P
It was apropos to see you wiring up the PET video to a modern monitor --- I just got a Brother WP-1 word processor, with a really cool letterbox CRT, and it uses the same scheme (16kHz hsync, 60Hz vsync). Unfortunately I don't have any monitors which will accept CGA so I'll have to convert the TTL video signal to VGA's 0.7V. Apparently you can get CGA to VGA converters, but I don't know whether they'll work with the Brother's strange screen size. What happens if you feed 5V into a VGA port's colour pin? Does it explode?
If you're really lucky you may find a monitor which will work, but with an RGBtoHDMI adapter, you can easily get a pixel perfect display on any modern panel which supports HDMI input - if it's really wide-screen, there are LCD panels designed for car rear view mirrors, or marquee type displays as seen on pinball machines - plenty of strange shaped displays available - which will give you a perfectly sharp image no matter what aspect ratio you need. Common 'unusual aspect ratio' resolutions are often the width of one standard resolution, but the height of a different one, for example 1280x480 or 1920x600, so if your word processor is outputting, say 640x200, that will scale nicely to 1280x400, or display in the middle of 1280x480 with slim black bars top and bottom. The key is finding a panel with a nice integer multiple of the output resolution (or a little larger, RGBtoHDMI can scale perfectly and then apply a 'border' like you used to get on a CRT, to match resolutions perfectly). Good luck!
@@richardbanks2669 I have an OSSC on order, which I'm hoping should sync to it. I should add that this is only for workbench use --- the real monitor actually works fine. I believe the format is 640x256 (80x16 characters, each 8x16 pixels). Although now I think of it could just be CGA with a physically squashed screen.
@@richardbanks2669 My teardown video of it is here, BTW, assuming the RUclips automoderator doesn't eat it due to the link: ruclips.net/video/2V2G00UQuWw/видео.html
@@ginkumpow3726 I think it's on the analog side actually. I have two - one with mechanical damage - and the plan was get one working but C= used different revs. I haven't dug into it all the way yet. This video did inspire me to power up the 4032 though and it was satisfying to see that still works.
Just going off of the looks of the machine, I think I can see why a lot of these might've been saved. It has that retro-futuristic look to it that people like. In the 80s when these became obsolete, they could still do useful work, especially with a modem. BBSes probably worked just fine on these. But as their usefulness dropped off, their beauty picked up.
Interesting to hear a (former) Canadian talking about CRTC a lot in a video that has nothing to do with the CRTC 🤣Obviously they have the same initials to the controller chip, but a totally different beast... (For context, the CRTC - Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission - is our equivalent to the USA's FCC or Federal Communications Commission) P.S. Also don't mean to imply that Adrian isn't Canadian any more, just that he has resided in the US for quite a while now.
Hey Adrian, I am also from the Portland area. Finally got a job in the last year where I could start to afford to buy some of these vintage machines. Apart from online can you suggest any businesses or resources in Portland for finding vintage computer equipment? Maybe the kind of place where you sometimes get lucky and find something cool for a lot less than the usual eBay price?
My MCL65+ could also be dropped-in to replace the 6502 which can emulate all of the PET's RAM and ROM. Perhaps not as user-friendly as the ROMulator, but does allow the user to enjoy some acceleration modes such removing 6502 cycle-accuracy and mirroring the RAM/ROM at very high speeds. Could make you machine the World's Fastest PET. :)
Back when they were new, I used to repair the older versions of PETs, apple 2 plus, S-100 computers, and the earliest IBM PCs. Chip level repairs, aligning floppy drives, all that stuff.
The first thing I thought of was bad RAM. All it takes is a flipped bit to mess up a number like that, and those 6502 BASICs all use single-precision floating point everywhere except when they need to be converted to or from a 16-bit integer. Other things were weird enough that I also expected it might be a whole column bad or something like that. The error that came up implies that there is aliasing between the zero page and the stack page, which would be quite troublesome on the 6502. It's quite right to stop the test right there, because having the stack crash into and twiddle with the zero page can cause some really subtle problems. At least try re-seating all the DRAM chips first, and check for tarnish on the pins. Sockets are nice for repairability, until oxidation makes a pin or two stop working after a decade or two. As for the display, I'm guessing that the CRTC was initialized incorrectly. Probably it is "scrolled" to the third line of the screen, and the first two lines are simply hidden. I wouldn't be surprised if that's being caused somehow by zero-page vs stack interference during the initialization. Fix the RAM and you'll probably fix the screen.
VisiCorp sold their products to include an option ROM for the PET. VisiCalc and others (VisiWord and VisiBase) would not run on the PET without the added ROM. There was other option ROMs out there.
Fancy! Not sure how many of these you do, but seems like that diagnostic stuff seems like a useful candidate for a PCB that plugs into the socket instead, so you don't have to bend chip legs. But, then you'd have to find chip leg shaped pins to solder into the PCB instead, maybe that's harder than replacing an EPROM after wearing out the bent-out pins.
Very good!! A question, I have many commodore PET/CBM, and some have problem with chip ram. I have see this chip are with 200ms, other 250ms and other 150ms (on different machine) time access. Can I replace all the bad Memory chip ram with 200/250ms time access with chip at 150ms? Sorry for my english
Commodore Pet 2001 and 4032 are what Space invaders was orignally hacked with ... by 6 guys in high school in Canada ... Ottawa to be exact ... . was great fun using the daisy chain network to drive the teacher nuts too when trying to get a program to work for her next class lol . mind all 6 of us had to have our class work done first and each prgram handed in .. of course we had to do the same assignemtn 6 different ways so we wouldnt be called on cheating ...
This was the first computer I had access to, I remember how disappointed I was when I opened it and nothing was happening. I don't know what I was expecting but the system was so magical it was a major letdown to see that it was just a thing.
The PET was the first computer I ever saw!! The one with the original keyboard and the built in cassette 'drive' Yes this was in the mid 1970's! Nearly 50 years ago!
Excellent video and work. My friend is working on the same motherboard but has a double churp. I have the fw8b diagnostics chip that replaces the cpu. Have you seen it? Thanks again
Thanks for sharing, that's very interesting. My first idea was : oh god, what will happen when the CRT's are all dead ? And there was the answer : conversion. Another idea was : what make those IC's fail ? What is the physical reason and is there a way to diagnose it ?? Cheers
Those green, b&w or amber crts last forever if you don't use the PET as a display piece that's turned on all the time. And those all glass crts don't lose their vacuum. I am sure they will still work in 100 years. I actually have some tubes (no crts though...) that are from the late 20s and early 30s and they test good and are still under full vacuum.
Years ago I had a 4K TRS-80 Model I which started acting up and would show 0 bytes free when issuing a PRINT MEM statement. It finally got boxed up in the garage when PRINT MEM started showing negative values. I'm pretty sure it's still in Dad's garage, but the last time we looked we couldn't find it.
Heh heh, in one of my math classes, we had one PET and two Apple II computers. There wasn't a whole lot of time to use computers but what little time we had, no one ever used the PET.
That extra fraction of a byte shows Commodore's dedication.
I like this comment
that 1/12th of a bit
My wife wanted me to let you know we're glad you've given this machine a new home. When it comes to Pets, adopt don't shop!
This channel is amazing! How do you not have 5-million subscribers already?? Because you SHOULD!!
@Old Guy Channels take years to grow a channel to that size - unless they're playing minecraft and a gazillion children subscribe or they're doing something controversial or extraordinary. Even though it may be due, there isn't enough people that used to mumble "38,911 basic bytes free" in their sleep when they were young.
I always love seeing a PET getting repaired. I've managed to amass 3 different models (2001, 2001-N and 8032) and am currently restoring my flood-damaged 8032
My CBM4016 has a different main board, also the smaller screen. I've had it since new from sometime in the early 80s. Had to replace a video memory chip and a filter cap in the floppy disk drive, which went bang and let all the magic smoke out. Got a few video's on getting it working again. Always great to see another pet brought back to life. Keep up saving pets.
Yeah you're right, I haven't seen that. Wikipedia states: "First year 4000-series PETs retained the same video hardware as the PET 2001/3000, but in 1981 this was replaced by the 12-inch screen and 6845-based CRTC hardware."
without context regarding the word pet, this coimment has a strange end..
@@itsTyrion as the title of the video has the word "pet" in it , i assumed that folk would not think that i was referring to cats or dogs. Either way saving pets would be a good thing, bringing back to life might be a bit more difficult for some. Also mine is a CBM4016, in the UK they were sold as "Commodore Business Machines" but well known as PET'S.
@@TheEmbeddedHobbyist "I just revived my pet, just had to replace some parts." "Where did you get them" "I just took them out of my other one I didn't like that much, because it got to yellow and bleaching made it splotchy"
@@VintageTechFan I think i hit lucky with a few parts from ebay that seem to work ok! the mains bits it got from RS or Farnell in the UK.
The good thing is there are not many special parts except eprom code but that as well can be found on the web.
The first computer I ever saw was a Commodore PET. I cannot thank you enough for these videos which will come in handy when I get my own classic computers. There's nothing like the real thing. Glad this channel exists.
The PET was also my first computer to play with. I remember fondly turning it on and then typing in the question: "who bent the banana?" to which I got the iconic "SYNTAX ERROR" resposnse. What can I say. I had never been close to a computer before.
@@MatthiasWelwarsky I have a similar, but later, memory of the DOS prompt in Windows 98 - I typed versions of “die windows”, “kill windows” etc and thought the BAD COMMAND response was a promising sign that it was fighting back. I amused myself for a few days like that.
I want to commend you on another excellent job explaining complicated technical things. I took some rudimentary electronics courses back in 2003-04. I love how you try to explain the problem in semi-layman terms. I get a lot of what you are talking about but am a little lost at other times, at no fault of your own. I also want to commend you on your "presentation skills." I see you seem to be more comfortable and fluid in front of the camera. Kudos!!
That diagnostic feature of the design is pretty darned cool, and I love how you were able to emulate it the way that you did.
Thanks Adrian, love these fault-finding and repair videos, really appreciate your logical and honest narrations. I learn something from each one.
Well prepared, nice tempo, very interesting and nicely explained.
Thanks Adrian. Such a joy to watch.
This video sorts me out on the ROM situation for the universal motherboard so much! Can hardly wait for the next video. I am presently in the middle of empirical action on the RAM - new sockets and chips for all. I was fine and got started then one day. 98 bytes free…. Trying get to fiddling around with a Z80 & C/pm daughter board I had hanging out in the lid, an Easter egg when I found my 8032…
I can't tell you the amount of joy I have watching your videos. The respect and care you have for this tech that literally helped shape many of our childhoods is greatly appreciated.
It's my dream to own a PET some day. It is daunting though knowing how many issues they typically have though. So I'm glad for videos about how to fix them. Great video as always!
I just saw your 3d printed solder spool holder. I printed and use the exact same holder on a regular basis. Nice.
I 3D printed the same one but it's kinda lightweight and the center spindle on mine kept popping out, I ended up trashing it and buying a Hakko 611 holder which is rock solid.
Heh yeah I've had that little thing a couple years now and it's very handy!
I occasionally see these go up for sale in the portland area on craigslist. Still hoping to snag one some day. Always fun to see a PET restoration. Great video!
Amazing, that you can still find PETs in the e-waste bin.
Nice find and it ended up in the right hands!
Yes, I'm kicking myself for not thinking of checking our local e-waste companies, there's no telling what retro goodies have passed by. I'd be so stoked if I could find a PET without having to resort to eBay. :(
The NOROM signal is also used by the Super PET to disable the ROMs for the 6502, when the 6809 CPU takes over.
What these Commodores do to print out this value is to take the integer value of the bytes free, convert it into a float value stored in the floating point accumulator (some bytes in the zeropage) and then convert that value into a string to print it out. In this case, I would rule out the ram, because the routine basically works, it just gives wrong results. The same applies to the ROM. That leaves the CPU. It can have a minor fault where it doesn't update the carry- or the zeroflag correctly in some cases, which could lead to such results.
I was thinking the same, plus it's an easy thing to swap out to test.
I was wondering where a floating point value would creep into an integer memory count, thanks for explaining that signal chain :D
Wow, what an ewaste save!
It always reminds me of Computer Studies (1981-3) - the PET was sat right in the middle of the classroom, connected to an accoustic coupler. No one ever sat at it unless there really was no other computer available. BBC B, BBC A, Spectrum (latterly) , ZX81 then the Pet.
I love the repair vids so much, looking forward to Part 2!
I love retro computer videos and I am so glad this one is less than thirty minutes in length. The simple reason for that is I don't have time for videos more than thirty minutes and in my experiences most people don't. Please keep these videos to this magic length.
This is the first time I have been able watch a video on the channel for months since the others were too long.
Don't forget that you can save a little time by watching videos at 1.25x or 1.5x speed. But I also don't like watching videos more than thirty minutes long. He found a good stopping point for this one.
Hello Adrian.
I am an automation engineer, i love to entertain watching Your movies. Your "deduction" path is similiar to mine. Your accent, pronousing is vsry very "understandable". Keep going good work!
Your video's are really awesome and in each one of them I have learned something new, no matter how well I know the system. You rock!
Hi Adrian. I appreciate all the general troubleshooting hints you provide in this video.
I'm an Apple guy, but your explanation about the Commodores (PET, 64, etc) is very interesting. Well done!
@Brandon Taylor Definitely better for gaming anyway. The graphics and audio hardware were absolutely amazing for 1982.
@Brandon Taylor Yeah the IIe is definitely better for productivity. my aunt and uncle were Apple IIe people then went to the mac. We had C64 here in my house and then we went to IBM PC's.
Explain how its better for productivity than a c64 ill wait
@@primus711 mostly because the Apple could display more columns on screen etc. I'm a commodore guy but apple and IBM were always better for productivity.
@@maxxdahl6062 that's all debatable and c64 could do 80columns in software
Really in-depth diagnosis, Adrian. Good work!
100.01066% quality video as always!
Nice trick to jumper CS from the Kernal to one of the option ROM socket. I need to remember that one. The Romulator can replace the kernal but not everyone has one of those.
The biggest issue is programming a 2532. But a simple PCB or hand made adapter is all that's needed to use a 2732 instead.
"Piggybacking" it on the Kernal should also have worked (but less reliable)?
I love seeing the ancient computers revived and fixed as it means a lot when it comes to preserving the last remaining functional piece of history.
I just dreamed of sitting in a Tram, seeing Adrian and through a store window, repairing an old car. I smiled and waved and he smiled and waved back.
Interesting. Can't wait for the next part.
Love it when someone takes care on these old computers👍🏻
I got rickrolled by the CRT in the background XD
Good luck with the fixing of this machine. Nice that you recycled before it was too late. I love the pet chasis, never had or seen one irl. I'll like a similar desing but for a modern pc
Very impressive screen capture prowess and chip select trickery. In awe, as always.
So I just started this video and both of my daughters (1 year old and 2 years old) came running over when they heard your intro music, lol. I think they were expecting an 8-bit dance party.
makes you wonder who thinks "Hmm, this old computer can't be worth anything so I'll just bin it!!" without checking the internet first, but, at least you have it now and is on its' way back to health... :D
I wonder if you could use Bondo's fiberglass resin on the case to go over the engraving and other scratches? Then possibly rattle can the entire case and print a new sticker for the front.
I've done this before on a TRS 80 that had really deep scratches and a piece of the case broken off. It looks fabulous if you know your way around prep and paint.
There is a very distinct texture to the case plastic, so I think it would be really hard to replicate although maybe not for someone with a lot of skill?
@@adriansdigitalbasement There is a simple little trick for plastics with texture. Get a hot glue gun and place a blob of hot glue on the textured surface and place a stick in the glue standing up. Once cooled, carefully peel up the glue with the stick still in it and viola, you have a texture stamp that can be used while the filler is soft.
@@notneb82 Yup. Hot glue or also polyester resin and anything that hardens but stays kinda flexible and can be torn/peeled away without bonding with the texture you're matching.
Then you can press it on the filler or even the paint, if you go with painting with several thick coats
@@adriansdigitalbasement you'd have to take a mold of the texture in silicone, and then use that to re-add the texture to any epoxy resin you use to fix the damage. David Murray has a pretty good video from a few years ago about doing that to fix the lid on a Bell & Howell Apple II+.
I just love how this case opens.
I'm sure its not the first time you've mentioned you're in the Portland area, but TIL I learned you're local! I'm down in the Salem area, and learning a bit about what is going or on, or has happened in the area is interesting. I always see LGR, RMC and GamersNexus talk about cool stuff near them but they're not local. xD
I'm still amazed by hardware working 40 years later.
Anything made today seems to just fail in just a few years, or in barely a year if it's a peripheral. Maybe not a complete failure, but degrades in one way or another which affects usage of the product. God forbid you buy something that's a refurb/recert.. those go so quickly.
Every time I turn on my computer I worry some part of it will suddenly be dead, especially a storage drive.
Funny, that budget electronics from this era last longer than professional stuff or even mil spec field equipment of the same era, because of the lack of exploding tantalum capacitors...
This is my favorite computer of all time, as a 2nd grader I was the only kid who could program and load games on them, I also got cassette tapes from the regular library and played the games at school. We had 20 or so of them in our computer lab in the early 1980s, my mom was the media center lady so I had free reign on them and it was my thing to be the "computer genius" and geek. I remember some of them had like calculator keys, and some had commodore style thick keys. All had cassette tape drives for data and games of which we had a decent selection of. I also remember we had a few Apple 2Es which were great as we had tons of software, as well as being the first school in the country to get the Apple macintosh in a pilot program. They replaced all our PET computers with them, and I still remember all those computers sitting in a back hallway for a long time and asking repeatedly if I could take one home but was always told no. I actually contemplated just taking one, I can still remember 😆
Those games really were next level on the macintoshes because they had actual graphics, lots of games, even though they were just black/white/greyscale which I thought was stupid.
What an ingenious way to use the diagnostic chip!
this was my first computer I ever used!!!! so much nostalgia, I remember the first time I saw it- it looked like something from the future
Another GREAT video as always!!! TY!!!
Very interesting set of issues and diagnostics!
Well we've always been pretty good at recycling in Portland so I'm not shocked that so many school district PETs are still around. We'll always find a way to make old things be useful here!
"[this video's] gettin kinda long" Only time I can recall hearing that on a video from this channel less than forty minutes lol. The disconnect between minutes of unedited footage versus an edited together video combined with how every person perceives the passage of time differently always makes statements like that throw me down a rabbit hole.
Nice to know that some places do auction off old hardware..If I had the space to have an old pc or two I would have jumped at the chance to grab any and max them out and just simply enjoy them.
I remember when the Personal Electronic Transactor (PET) was first announced and would have loved to have one. At school I was using different computers (Research machine 380Z), which had some proper graphics capability, so when I finally got to use a PET, I was quite disappointed. But it's still an iconic machine.
Impressive diagnostics!
I learned to program on one of those... and wrote a program for the local ski center to manage their ski rentals. Had to load it from C-cassette at startup😄
Interesting topic. Doesn‘t the /NOROM signal go to the option ROM sockets, too? That stack thing is weird. Somehow, a stack must be living somewhere else. Because, when you boot up, several subroutines and also the interrupt service routine is called. And that would not work without a proper return address from the stack. Exciting video, looking forward to the next part.
I need one of those RGB2HDMI. Definitely a useful device
If you can solder, you can build your own - everything you need is listed clearly in the wiki attached to the project. It's all on GitHub, hoglet67 RGBtoHDMI
@@richardbanks2669 I at least need a PCB.
@@HutchCA The files are all there to order a PCB from one of the cheap internet suppliers - PCB Way, JLCPCB, Oshpark etc - depending on how long you're willing to wait for it to arrive, and what import duties/taxes your government levies, it can cost less than $10. If you don't feel confident ordering a PCB ( and honestly, it's a lot easier than you'd imagine, very user friendly these days) there are people on various forums ( try stardot the BBC micro forum) who make 'group buys' where one forum member will buy PCBs and components in bulk and then ship them individually to anyone who wants a kit, at or near cost price. There are sometimes people also selling kits on eBay, and Tindie, although you never know when they might have stock. Good luck :)
Remember the pet has floating point maths, don't think it does integer maths.
If you approach one of our e-waste bins at the drop-off here, and don't have something to deposit, they yell at you. I saw some cool Commodore stuff in ours once but they told me to get away.
My dad was the principal of a small town K-12 school. The school had Commodore PETs like this before I attended school but the summer before I started Kindergarten they all got replaced with Zenith IBM PC clones. They knew this was coming by June so they went grade by grade asking the students if they wanted a free PET. It took... I think going down to grade 10 but every PET found a home.
I was shouting at the screen saying just swap the editor rom with PETTEST but the diagnostic ROM info and NoROM line is actually pretty interesting!
Yay! Another multipart old computer repair project like the Model II. I love a good miniseries!
holy moly, you have an open Haribo-Happy Cola rail exposed on your desktop. that's extremely dangerous! :'D
nitpicking just to be a nit picker: 23:40 it's 65536 addresses that can be addressed, 0 - 65535 :P
Another great video, thanks
It was apropos to see you wiring up the PET video to a modern monitor --- I just got a Brother WP-1 word processor, with a really cool letterbox CRT, and it uses the same scheme (16kHz hsync, 60Hz vsync). Unfortunately I don't have any monitors which will accept CGA so I'll have to convert the TTL video signal to VGA's 0.7V. Apparently you can get CGA to VGA converters, but I don't know whether they'll work with the Brother's strange screen size. What happens if you feed 5V into a VGA port's colour pin? Does it explode?
If you're really lucky you may find a monitor which will work, but with an RGBtoHDMI adapter, you can easily get a pixel perfect display on any modern panel which supports HDMI input - if it's really wide-screen, there are LCD panels designed for car rear view mirrors, or marquee type displays as seen on pinball machines - plenty of strange shaped displays available - which will give you a perfectly sharp image no matter what aspect ratio you need. Common 'unusual aspect ratio' resolutions are often the width of one standard resolution, but the height of a different one, for example 1280x480 or 1920x600, so if your word processor is outputting, say 640x200, that will scale nicely to 1280x400, or display in the middle of 1280x480 with slim black bars top and bottom. The key is finding a panel with a nice integer multiple of the output resolution (or a little larger, RGBtoHDMI can scale perfectly and then apply a 'border' like you used to get on a CRT, to match resolutions perfectly). Good luck!
@@richardbanks2669 I have an OSSC on order, which I'm hoping should sync to it. I should add that this is only for workbench use --- the real monitor actually works fine. I believe the format is 640x256 (80x16 characters, each 8x16 pixels). Although now I think of it could just be CGA with a physically squashed screen.
@@richardbanks2669 My teardown video of it is here, BTW, assuming the RUclips automoderator doesn't eat it due to the link: ruclips.net/video/2V2G00UQuWw/видео.html
Kids and grown-ups love it so - the happy world of Haribo!
0:54 this would be a really great out-of-context snippet right here
That video bit was awesome. I have a working PET so I've never had to dig into that. Could use some help on the 8050 dual FDD drive though...
swap out the PIA and see what happens, they're flaky
@@ginkumpow3726 I think it's on the analog side actually. I have two - one with mechanical damage - and the plan was get one working but C= used different revs. I haven't dug into it all the way yet. This video did inspire me to power up the 4032 though and it was satisfying to see that still works.
IIRC the userport on the PET has the video signals. You could connect your video converter there
Just going off of the looks of the machine, I think I can see why a lot of these might've been saved.
It has that retro-futuristic look to it that people like.
In the 80s when these became obsolete, they could still do useful work, especially with a modem. BBSes probably worked just fine on these. But as their usefulness dropped off, their beauty picked up.
4116 DRAMs seem so primitive until I remind myself of core memory and the discrete transistor drivers that were the interface to it. :o
Interesting to hear a (former) Canadian talking about CRTC a lot in a video that has nothing to do with the CRTC 🤣Obviously they have the same initials to the controller chip, but a totally different beast... (For context, the CRTC - Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission - is our equivalent to the USA's FCC or Federal Communications Commission)
P.S. Also don't mean to imply that Adrian isn't Canadian any more, just that he has resided in the US for quite a while now.
You forgot to put that link to the VIC20 video you spoke about at the end of the video!
Sorry it's a card at the end of the video but I forget that a lot of people can't see those. Will add the link to the description.
Oh it was there, I just didn't mention the VIC-20 part: ruclips.net/video/wamgUxN1z6o/видео.html
Hey Adrian, I am also from the Portland area. Finally got a job in the last year where I could start to afford to buy some of these vintage machines. Apart from online can you suggest any businesses or resources in Portland for finding vintage computer equipment?
Maybe the kind of place where you sometimes get lucky and find something cool for a lot less than the usual eBay price?
My MCL65+ could also be dropped-in to replace the 6502 which can emulate all of the PET's RAM and ROM. Perhaps not as user-friendly as the ROMulator, but does allow the user to enjoy some acceleration modes such removing 6502 cycle-accuracy and mirroring the RAM/ROM at very high speeds. Could make you machine the World's Fastest PET. :)
Videos coming soon now this PET is on the bench :-)
Sounds cool!
I kinda wish that I would've offered to take one of my high school's Commodore PETs when they were getting rid of them in the early 90s.
Another treasure saved. Adrian to PET: Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down :)
I noticed that Rick Rolling in the background also, LOL.
Back when they were new, I used to repair the older versions of PETs, apple 2 plus, S-100 computers, and the earliest IBM PCs. Chip level repairs, aligning floppy drives, all that stuff.
The first thing I thought of was bad RAM. All it takes is a flipped bit to mess up a number like that, and those 6502 BASICs all use single-precision floating point everywhere except when they need to be converted to or from a 16-bit integer. Other things were weird enough that I also expected it might be a whole column bad or something like that.
The error that came up implies that there is aliasing between the zero page and the stack page, which would be quite troublesome on the 6502. It's quite right to stop the test right there, because having the stack crash into and twiddle with the zero page can cause some really subtle problems.
At least try re-seating all the DRAM chips first, and check for tarnish on the pins. Sockets are nice for repairability, until oxidation makes a pin or two stop working after a decade or two.
As for the display, I'm guessing that the CRTC was initialized incorrectly. Probably it is "scrolled" to the third line of the screen, and the first two lines are simply hidden. I wouldn't be surprised if that's being caused somehow by zero-page vs stack interference during the initialization.
Fix the RAM and you'll probably fix the screen.
"No animals have been living in here"
"I cleaned out the spiders"
... Seriously?
What's an E way stream Adrian? Destined for recycling? Lovely videos thank you
Normal people listen to music when they do the dishes. I listen to Adrian.
VisiCorp sold their products to include an option ROM for the PET. VisiCalc and others (VisiWord and VisiBase) would not run on the PET without the added ROM. There was other option ROMs out there.
More Adrian goodness
The computer I learned BASIC on in high school back in the early 80's.
always nice to get a bonus bit
Would it not be a good first diagnostic step to drop in a brand new 65C02, or is it not compatible?
Fancy! Not sure how many of these you do, but seems like that diagnostic stuff seems like a useful candidate for a PCB that plugs into the socket instead, so you don't have to bend chip legs. But, then you'd have to find chip leg shaped pins to solder into the PCB instead, maybe that's harder than replacing an EPROM after wearing out the bent-out pins.
i have a ibm 5150 that was owned by the university of Maine and i live in Maine, so i thought that was cool.
Very good!!
A question, I have many commodore PET/CBM, and some have problem with chip ram. I have see this chip are with 200ms, other 250ms and other 150ms (on different machine) time access.
Can I replace all the bad Memory chip ram with 200/250ms time access with chip at 150ms?
Sorry for my english
Commodore Pet 2001 and 4032 are what Space invaders was orignally hacked with ... by 6 guys in high school in Canada ... Ottawa to be exact ...
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was great fun using the daisy chain network to drive the teacher nuts too when trying to get a program to work for her next class lol
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mind all 6 of us had to have our class work done first and each prgram handed in .. of course we had to do the same assignemtn 6 different ways so we wouldnt be called on cheating ...
This was the first computer I had access to, I remember how disappointed I was when I opened it and nothing was happening. I don't know what I was expecting but the system was so magical it was a major letdown to see that it was just a thing.
then you studied electrical engineering and it was magical again?
@@thewhitefalcon8539 The systems are still magical, I just stopped expecting the "working parts" to be interesting to watch work.
The PET was the first computer I ever saw!! The one with the original keyboard and the built in cassette 'drive' Yes this was in the mid 1970's! Nearly 50 years ago!
Excellent video and work. My friend is working on the same motherboard but has a double churp. I have the fw8b diagnostics chip that replaces the cpu. Have you seen it? Thanks again
Thanks for sharing, that's very interesting. My first idea was : oh god, what will happen when the CRT's are all dead ? And there was the answer : conversion. Another idea was : what make those IC's fail ? What is the physical reason and is there a way to diagnose it ??
Cheers
Those green, b&w or amber crts last forever if you don't use the PET as a display piece that's turned on all the time. And those all glass crts don't lose their vacuum. I am sure they will still work in 100 years. I actually have some tubes (no crts though...) that are from the late 20s and early 30s and they test good and are still under full vacuum.
The lines you can enter were - if I haven't miscounted - 8... pretty sus too; like 0 to 7... some bits seem wonky in the system.
I wonder with the no rom function if one could add some sort of cartridge capability.
I bet that's what it's for.
Years ago I had a 4K TRS-80 Model I which started acting up and would show 0 bytes free when issuing a PRINT MEM statement. It finally got boxed up in the garage when PRINT MEM started showing negative values. I'm pretty sure it's still in Dad's garage, but the last time we looked we couldn't find it.
NNNOOOOOO! Oh the suspense! Don't leave us hanging!
Sometimes I wish computers these days were this easy to understand and troubleshoot. It seems like half the work on this was just getting the lid off!
Heh heh, in one of my math classes, we had one PET and two Apple II computers. There wasn't a whole lot of time to use computers but what little time we had, no one ever used the PET.
it would be nice to see some upgrades on that pet pc