I read “The Soul of a New Machine” in 1981 and it gave me inspiration to study computer engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Great read; you will quickly empathize with the lead designer. A lot of the work you do in the digital basement reminds me of the early debugging days presented in the novel. Enjoy!
@Kristian Van Der Vliet My American Lit. professor assigned the book in 1988. Another from that class was The Handmaiden's Tale. I'm grateful he was so prescient. I read Hackers when my ex got a job at Symbolics (that was interesting). "The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition" by Hunt and Thomas, like Mythical Man Month is nonfiction and might be a little dry for non-techies, although another classic in that vein.
Oh man. Someone recommend "the soul of a new machine" to me when I was a teenager. What a fantastic book for nerds. Seriously, read it asap. You won't regret it.
The Macintosh LC was originally designed with schools in mind. It was easier for teachers to give kids a new boot disk when needed, like the old Apple II days, then to constantly administer a hard disk. Because the Mac was so inexpensive, it was popular with home users. You only find dual-floppy LCs from schools. Also, the 68881 FPU can run at a separate speed from the CPU. The LC II was basically what you have here: a 68030 in an LC. The main benefit was the MMU for virtual memory. Very useful for schools who couldn’t splurge on RAM which was incredibly expensive in the 80’s and 90’s.
unpopular opinion , i like the prequel series and only the first two . podracing ,dual lightsabers , jedi mink tricks , war. it was kind of hype . there was shitty parts but thats just weird pacing .
@@tobiwonkanogy2975 I grew up with the VHS original trilogy just, I do mean just, before they made the GL versions on VHS. I agree with you on the prequel trilogy.
That's the first thing I thought of when I saw that error. I've heard of people fixing many early 2000s video cards with ram issues that way. Should be a similar situation.
From the amount of chip failures you recorded on original c64's, the faulty ram feels like an accurate recreation of the original. Loved the chocolate segment. It brought back warm memories of Kinder country.
Recently I was repairing an LC II, and its 80MB HDD had a head stuck to the limiter/bumper. There was a rubber insert in this bumper, which transformed into a chewing-gum like substance. I've managed to remove it and replace it with two layers of a double-sided foam tape, with a protective film left on the top side. Without this tape the head would crash into the platter hub. The drive is now working, without any bad sector. I've formatted it and verified using a Silverlining software, which I've seen on your channel, thanks for that hint. Macs are really rare in my country, and this was the first one I had in my hands, so I had no idea what software to use. Strangely it had a Polish keyboard (which is really odd, as we use US Intl. layout), and had System 7 in Polish (with a very strange terminology/translation).
Kinder Country has been my favourite since i was a kid in the 80s!! in Italy it was called "Kinder Cereali" meaning cereals but I think it's puffed rice in there. delicious!! glad you liked it! it's not available in australia but i do stock up duty free when i go to asia :) pre-covid obviously!
The Soul of a New Machine is almost certainly the best book ever written about a computer. It's an absolute classic from the mid '80s, definitely find the time to read it soon!
Hot air gun on that memory chip, put a small amount of solder on top of it. 20 seconds after it melts the solder under the chip should melt as well. Also some liquid flux around the chip will help reflow any cracked solder joints. Aliexpress sell a temperature controlled hot air rework station for £20. It's well worth learning soldering SMD chips and components and it's not too hard to do after a bit of practice with the right equipment. You can even buy kits of chips/components and boards to practice with for about £1-50
23:10 "No signal" on the monitor, a cable hanging from the top shelf looking like a gallows rope, and you saying "the thing appears to be dead". Marvellous.
Hello Adrian I really enjoy your videos and the time you must put in to create them. You may have been disappointed not to get the Mini C64 working but I was really impressed with your skills to work out those pins were a serial interface and to know how to connect it and what baud to at least get to the diagnostic to tell you what is wrong. I learn a lot from your videos. I'm afraid my troubleshooting is usually limited to turning things off and on again! As to the C64 keyboard you probably know this already but I am in the UK, so Shift+2 is the usual key to use to get double quotes on a PC here in the UK, it's standard UK layout. This makes me wonder if C64s sold in the US had the same keyboard layout as in Europe. If so it seems surprising that Commodore, as a US company used a UK keyboard layout globally though of course at the time there wasn't really a "standard" layout anyway.
The IIci was top of the line in 1989. The only Mac faster was the IIfx, and that didn’t come out until the following year and was more than twice the price. The LC was heavily compromised, certainly, but Apple eventually got that model right with the LCIII, which was a fantastic little machine.
Awesome video! Just ordered some of those kinder country bars on amazon. While it's still winter lol. Here in Louisiana, you don't order / ship chocolate in the summer for obvious reasons.....
Chef Excellence approves of this video, and the Sad Onion. Also, that round ball one is a Lindt gourmet truffle chocolate. :) That one is the milk chocolate. Super creamy and velvety. I feel you about the milk chocolate... I don't like them either, as it reminds me of too many Easter's gone by with melted milk chocolate... Can't stand the texture any longer. Lindt makes a wide range of truffle chocolates. Dark chocolate (My favourite), a white chocolate one with cookie bits in it, peppermint crunch, and toffee crunch ones as well.
Yeah, your take on the Odroid Go is 100% spot-on. I just got one of these, already owning 2 Odroid Go Advance handhelds (much more capable RK3326-based Linux handhelds), and it was specifically for the purpose you realized: custom programming with the Arduino sdk.
The dual floppy no hard drive Macintosh LC’s were only used in schools and were never sold to consumers. Most schools that used these LC’s stored application software on file servers.
@@adriansdigitalbasement That’s right. I remember when I was in high school using Mac Pluses and Classics using a system 6 boot floppy and using a third party network stack called Waterloo McJanet developed by the university of Waterloo to get onto a file server which was just a a classic with a SyQuest drive attached
With an oven reserved for soldering, in a last resort, I would try to reflow the pcb. To check the temperature, I put a small length of soldering wire. When it melts, I wait for 10 sec. and turn the oven off
It's not just the Rigol doing the frequency calculation. I have yet to see an oscilloscope with time-domain cursors that does not display 1/(delta T) expressed as frequency. As far as I remember, even the old CRT-based Tektronix and Hameg scopes with digital cursor readout could do that.
To make a proper C-64 to RS232 interface, you need two of the MAX232 chips. One does the TX/RX work, the second handles hardware flow control lines. But the single-chip solutions do work well in most cases. This is one reason it's nice to own one of the OEM Commodore interfaces, as they do have full flow control support
I have had some luck with repairing pcb's that had bad solderjoints. I put them in a oven at 80° Celsius for 10 minutes, let it cool down before handling. You can start at a lower temperature and try increasing the temp incrementally. If you don't have an oven you are willing to use for this you could use your 3d printers heatbed. Best to build a cover to put over the pcb (insulation that one of your viewers uses to pack stuff he sends you) or use an enclosure for your 3d printer.
The LC does support 640x480 too, at 16 colors IIRC but there's the VRAM socket that enables 256 colors. 512x384 is for the 12" RGB monitor which was a new thing with the LC, and the 640x480 was for the 13" RGB monitor that was used with the Macintosh II models from before. The cheapest monitor was a 12" or 13" monochrome, at 640x480 and 16 grays is perfectly usable with these.
I tried to switch to bluetooth headphones but I found that keeping them charged was always a pain. It seems like wired studio headphones are having a bit of a resurgence, if the prices are anything to go by. I bought a pair of Sony MDRV6s for $75 back in 2018... and today you can find them used for $300-$400.
Your oscilloscope has built in serial decoding... if it’s not enabled on your unit you can download the code needed. Shortly after releasing the DS1054z they started enabling all the features for free... unless you have an early model, you should already have it there...
That LC looks absolutely mint compared to the LC II I currently have on the bench, haha. I know others have mentioned it already, but The Soul of a New Machine is a fantastic book about the development of the Data General Eclipse, what's really unique is how it's told from an outsider's perspective looking in during the whole process, so it's nowhere near as dry of a read as it sounds.
Hey Adrian, with the SD RAM chip it’s not that hard to repair - just a hot air station and the proper amount of flux to remove the dead chip - then a little cleaning with more flux and desolder braid - and then a bit less flux and a new chip. I made my first (Louis Rossmann style) try to swap out a FBGA 256 one week before christmas and it did fail first try but worked the 2nd time. I suspected some pads didn’t made contact or shorted but it really wasn’t to hard. I never did much smd work at all before that but I guess it’s the way we have to go sometimes as long as it’s still possible to repair stuff. Greetings from Germany, keep up the great content you create - its really fun to watch!
Coincidently Voltlog has published a nice BGA soldering tutorial just today - ruclips.net/video/15RFI9wKHq8/видео.html so only desoldering Rossmann style ;)
I still have my 1st gen iPod Shuffle in my vintage iPod collection and last time I checked it still worked though I haven’t used it regularly in recent years. I also have a working 2nd gen Shuffle I have used more recently on an occasional basis. There are uses for stand alone digital music players these days especially if your phone is lacking a headphone Jack or you want an entire large digital music library on a DMP device without eating lots of space on your smart phone. You can also use them with older stereo systems or give one to a kid, among other uses. Also, I find a certain nostalgia about using an old iPod model just for the heck of it even if I don’t really need to.
Riegel sounds almost like 'regal' in English. Although, sometimes the family name is pronounced 'wriggle' in English. Interestingly, the Haribo candy name is a contraction of HAns RIegel BOnn, named for its founder and location in Germany. Riegel literally means 'bar' in German, but it's a specific kind of bar like the bolt of a door locking mechanism. It would seem to be an occupational name associated with locksmithing. And probably where we get the word 'wriggle' like wriggling a key in a lock.
Well, Ferrero is Still a italian company. ;-) even If their German Division flood the world with Kinder. So everyone thinks they are German. But the company is originated in italy.
IIRC (hey, I was like 7) my elementary school's computer lab was Mac LCs which originally had two floppies. It wasn't much of a problem then because most of the use they got was being booted directly off floppies. I remember them being upgraded to have hard drives later...
I can also answer your question about the overall speed of the 68020-based LC v the 60830-based LC II. Because both machines only had 16 bit buses despite using 32-bit processors, the LC II’s processor upgrade only provide a modest speed increase over the LC. The LC II though did offer at least one major advantage over the LC it replaced in the it sold for a mere $1300 vs the $2500 of the original, making it one of the cheapest Macs sold at the time. Despite the crippled nature of these machines, Mac users wanting a color Mac on the less expensive side (vs other color Macs) bough enough of them LC and LC II for it to called a success seemingly willing to overlook it hobbled nature. I imagine that most had previously used a monochrome Mac (512k, Plus, SE, SE/30, or Classic) which ran at the same or slower speeds so they didn’t realize what they were missing. If you had “upgraded” from Mac II to an LC then you would have realized that the older Mac II ran at 2x the LC’s speed, despite both having 16mhz 68020 processors because the Mac II had 32 bit bus (though it was not 32 bit clean meaning that without a special special software later developed (MODE32) the bus ran at 24 bit limiting memory to 8mb but still much faster then LC’s 16 bit bus).
BGA soldering actually isn't that difficult - at least in the scale of RAM ICs. Just get a cheap hotair station, flux, some stencils and balls and you're ready to go. Something like a bad ram is a good point to start and learn. My first tries were an old router and a graphics card. I unsoldered the CPU/GPU, reballed it and reattached. Worked both times. You only have to be careful with the desoldering braid and the heat, it's quite easy to rip a pad.
I wonder if the “reflow solder in the oven” method would do anything to that mini c64. But I know nothing about this stuff. Kinda want an LC after all this criticism, I love underpowered stuff.
Re: Dual Drive LC: Yes, they sold loads of them to schools in fact. That way you could keep the OS boot disk in one and the data program disk in the other. In 1990, skipping the hard drive would be a huge cost saving (and a classroom of 30 students loading MS Word from floppy is still faster than a classroom of 30 students loading MS Word over LocalTalk *at the same time*). This would have been especially useful for machines with the Apple IIe card, since the IIe software took up most of a single floppy by itself. About 10 years ago I bought a job-lot of dual-floppy machines liquidated from a school, all with the Apple IIe card. All LC I's have the dual disk ports of the motherboard (but not sure of the LC II and III) regardless of how many were actually installed, and that can be handy since you can connect something like the Big Mess o' Wires Floppy Emu to the other internal floppy port so you've got both physical disks and disk images in one box.
Hi Adrian. You should do a reflow of the ram and / or CPU. Some flux and a littlebit of heat. It is already bricked so maybe you can bring new life into the c64mini
About rebranded Apple drives: I'm quite confident I've seen Apple brandet Fujitsu M2624F hard drives (520MB). I'm sure i've seen a drive from that series with DIGITAL branding, too, so maybe I mix that up.
I got an iPod Classic recently, and it's delightful. My phone has a headphone jack, but I have 20+ GB of music, and use my phone for (many) other things. If you download the firmware from the retro-esp32 project, you can play Colecovision, ZX Spectrum (48K), Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari Lynx, PCEngine, and the original 5 systems. The emulators have gotten updates over time, as well.
38:29 - a lot of dual floppy models where used in schools, 1 drive for the OS and the other for student data. I configured a lot of the dual floppy drive models as "wyse" terminals as in dumb serial terminals. Most users preferred them as they had sound & colour (I can still hear that default "eep" sound!)
I had suspected as much, schools ordering that combination. Give a student a floppy for their data and homework and boot the OS off the other one. Maybe even do that at the start of the day and then load in today’s schoolwork software before each lesson? Depending on how scarce the OS floppies were. In the UK the BBC Micros in the ‘80s and early ‘90s had a system for loading the software remotely onto the class’s machines from the teacher’s one, called Econet. But I suppose going round sticking the boot floppy in each machine sequentially might have taken too long, even if only done at the start of the day. So I presume each machine had a boot floppy permanently stationed?
To fix the commodore 64 mini you could use a digital SMD rework station with the smallest tip, set the temperature to 450° Celsius and air flow to the lowest setting, put the board with the top of the chip up towards you on a cookie pan or a silicone mat (or both), put some flux all over under and on the sides of the chip, hold it with a tweezers to keep it from flying away and move the hot air around it until the solder is melted then turn the temperature down to 375° Celsius and turn the airflow down more too so the tweezers aren't needed to hold the chip without letting the solder harden then give the chip a gentle tap on the sides with the tweezers let the chip pull itself back where it's supposed to be and cool then clean it after it has been cooling for 2 to 6 hours, that should fix it. Or I could probably fix it I would just need to get some more tools first and I don't know how much the shipping would be back west from where I am over in the east.
Just a tip from someone who's studied German for a few years! an "a" is almost always pronounced as "ah", but the "ä" is pronounced as "ay". So wolfgang would be pronounced more like "volfgahng". German has pretty complicated vowels for english speakers, so i hope i helped you out! :D
Vowels in German don't have long and short forms, the accents handle the variations. Just say them short (duration) and don't draw them out. The main thing to remember Germans love their consonants so give them emphasis.
I think that case the Odroid was in is for a DS Lite originally, I have one that's practically identical other than it having pink meshy fabric on the outside.
hmm, not sure why my comments are disappearing, but yeah, hold the button for 2-3 seconds to power on the c64 mini, and they have flashing instructions on their web site, not sure if my comments are being deleted because I included the URL to them
Schools bought dual floppy LCs because they were cheap. That's almost 3 megabytes of storage, what more could you ask for! I think the '030 was pretty much just the same CPU core as the '020, except it had an onboard PMMU. (You had to add one to the only other '020 Mac, the original II, in order for it to support virtual memory.) The LC II was just an LC with an '030 instead of the '020, so it could break through the 10 MB barrier.
You can always try taking the flash memory off and flash with a FlashCat usb programmer but you would have to takeoff the chip with a hot air station 🚉 pretty cool looking inside The machines
That was what I came to say, but I figured somebody would have beaten me to it. I'm really enjoying how much better retropie works on the 4GB Pi4 though!
Once you get used to it, reading German is pretty easy. In grad school I had to read a lot of papers in German from the journal Angewandte Chemie, despite the fact that I only speak English. Give it a shot!
I'd highly recommend reading Soul of a New Machine. I would very much like to hear what you think of it. It's some real history. I don't want to say much about it or it would give away the riveting plot! I've read it a few times and might just pull it off the shelf.
Yes, as others had said the round in red wrapping is Lindt (Swiss) chocolate, in the UK you can get one with mint filling, and you can get dark chocolatey too
There is a discount store that I pass that has various flavors of Lindt that never sold well. I sometimes try some of them just for the heck of it. It's amazing how "creative" they get.
We have several varieties of Lindt Lindor balls here in Canada. One of the rare ones that I found to be my favorite is the ones in gold wrapping, chocolate with the same milky creamy center, but in this case the gold one is sort of a caramel cream. I'm not overly fond of straight up caramel in chocolates, but the texture and flavor of the creamy caramel is extremely addicting. We also have those "Riegel" here too, but they're just called Kinder T1 - basically a Kinder egg in bar form - though I've never heard the milk cream insides referred to as "marshmallowy"...
The Soul of a new machine is an amazing inside into the Development of a revolutionary Data General computer. Btw guys if you watch Adrians channel. You are amazing ☝️
The 8-bit Guy has 1.25 million subscribers, I don't really want to compare RUclips creators like that, but 8-bit Guy lives in Texas and has a good episode about what a disaster it is, and for him personally, go watch it! LGR is probably #1
Sometimes just warming the thing (SDRAM) up enough with hot air helps. Just need to know what temp. "Reflow"? Louis Rossmann did it all the time with Macs and RAM.
two most common baud rates for those debug connectors are 115K and 9600. If I couldn't measure it, I'd try those two first. Guess "LC" stood for "Low Cost", a Macintosh oxymoron. Looks like a floppy connector on the MB left side, so I guess dual floppies were a thing.
You mention (and quote your viewer) that the Mac LC shared system RAM with video RAM. This is not the case! The LC used dedicated, video RAM. The first Mac to support onboard dedicated color video, without the need for a video card in a slot. The IIsi shared its system RAM with the video, and that machine was limited to 256 colors. The LC, on the other hand, was limited by the video RAM you had installed. It could support 512x384 @ 256 colors/grays as standard (2x 256 Kbyte VRAM SIMMs), and 640x480 @ 256 colors/grays (and 512x384 @ 32,768 colors) with an upgrade to 2x 512 Kbyte VRAM SIMMs. The LC 2 was nearly identical to the LC, except it had the 68030 processor, but was essentially the same machine. The LC3 was the first real redesign, and used 72-pin SIMMs, and came with the 512 Kbyte of VRAM soldered to the board, with a single VRAM slot supporting an additional 256 Kbyte, and incidentally removed the 10MB limitation and 16 bit memory path the LC/LC2 had. The LC475 used the similar board design as the LC3, but went back to dual VRAM sockets for some reason. Macs that used shared video memory were the IIci, IIsi, and the PowerMac 6100 (oddly enough).
The C64mini is also known as "Retro Games Ltd RGL001" and it is partially documented on linux-sunxi. linux-sunxi documents most of what anyone needs to know about allwinner based devices.
You must find time to read The Soul of a New Machine. As a fan of computer biographies, I go back to it over and over to reread passages on troubleshooting the design of a discrete IC based CPU for a mainframe.
ESP series MCU's are tiny and powerful with lots of flash memory and RAM, they are more than capable of emulating any retro console or computer in terms of processing power. But the trouble is they have limited number of GPIO pins. Because of that I think the creators of that unit had to drive the LCD with a port expander type of device on a serial bus (I2C, SPI etc.) which will cause significantly slower data feed. I think that's why the display is jerky like that. With a RasPi, you gets tons of GPIO pins and can drive the same LCD on a parallel data bus, thus with enough data speed, not to mention the native HDMI capability. As you also mentioned, seems like it is actually not 100% intended to be a gameboy emulator, it is actually a great ESP(32?) development board with its own power supply, a decent screen and some buttons etc. already attached, and tons of other devices can be attached with the GPIO pins available to the user. I like it, IMHO, it is well worth the price.
I had this happen to my C64 mini too. From when I first got it, it was very temperamental, wouldn't power up sometimes, and then it just stopped working altogether. I did a consumer guarantee return to the site I bought it from and they sent me a brand new one, that has had no problems since. I'm assuming there was a manufacturing problem with it, rather than it degrading over time.
That book transformed my views of product development, separating the hardware engineers (Hardy Boys) from the software gang (whiz kids)... Well-well-wellnworth the read!!!
Hello Adrian is the old external AppleCD SC drives still going strong or are they prone to fail, i bought an older sampler and need a SCSI 1 drive for it. Am clueless what external SCSI drives to look for. Keep up the good channel, it is my favourite computer channel to watch. Both repairs mail-calls.
Adrian, you can do a lot with the Odroid. It can have a variety of native software python based. You might have better look with the emulation with different firmware. There are also ways to port Wolfenstien, Spear of Destiny and doom. Also on the other firmware there are ZX Spectrum and C64. Maybe I can't see the lag on the emulators which is scary but I play games I know the speed of that I grew up with on the Odroid and didn't notice and I love the device it is kinda open source and I"m really excited about that microcontroller, I know it's not the best but you can make your own emu box or prorgrams for it. I would suggest getting the extra firmware and retrying maybe that'll help with the problems. You hold B when you power on to change the firmware. If it's not for you no biggie but figured I'd make my suggestions for your enjoyment.
Holding B may not work since that device had the initial ship firmware. He may need to do the hard way upgrade. I have a guide on my channel for it. Also yes it does work much better then how it was working in this video. A lot of other reviewers did the same thing running the old firmware and saying it sucks without trying to upgrade first.
7:20 - That's a Lindor (Chocoladefabriken Lindt & Sprüngli AG, more commonly known simply as Lindt, is a Swiss chocolatier and confectionery company founded in 1845). I doubt you'll get to experience any of the milk range from Kinder as they require refrigeration, can't get enough of them!
Hi Adrian. I just got an Apple Quadra 605. I'm new at this. I need a special adapter to connect it to a VGA monitor, right? Any tip you can give me in general?
The odroid you have is discontinued and replaced with $80 versions called "ODROID-GO Super Clear White". They moved away from ESP32 and use a RockChip RK3326(Quad-Core ARM 64bit Cortex-A35 1.3GHz) with a Mali-G31 MP2 GPU running Ubuntu.
I think the reason for Germany being so far up in the list of countries where your viewers come from despite people here (guess where I am from) speaking a different language is that it is the sweet spot of population size, access to the internet and RUclips and the number of poeple understanding English*. Especially people who are interested in things you cover on your channel are very likely to understand enough to watch your channel. Sure, there are countries in Europe where even more people have even better English language skills while not being native speakers, especially when looking towards Scandinavia, but the population of each individual country up there is much smaller than the population of Germany, so they can't get up that high on a list that is surely not adjusted for population size. ;-) And of course, thinking back to the 80s and early 90s, Commodore and Atari were all the rage here. I unfortunately never had any such computer, I wasn't old enough to buy one myself and my parents didn't want to buy one for me. But we got started with PCs pretty early on, so fortunately I did not grew up under a rock. :-) *) Even though Germany are known to often have ze terrible accent when speaking English, zey can still watch your videos. (I just had to get the accent in here somewhere)
@@jeffreyjoshuarollin9554 Nobody criticized my accent. I just wanted to make fun of the stereotype, as I am German. Ad you wouldn't believe how much I laughed with my American friends when they tried to sing along to Rammstein. :-D
@@WilliamAndrewPhilipBodie Most of them probably don't know anything but Hamburg up there in northern Germany. ;-) Which is a shame, as it's really nice up there.
you could try to reflow the SDRAM chip. Anyone can reflow. Just drown it in flux heat gun for a few seconds and it should be reflowed successfully. To know for sure you can give it a gentle nudge and it will pull itself back into place but there is the risk that you could ruin something that would have otherwise been fine. Check out tronix fix. He does reflows all the time. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. He doesn't ever replace BGAs.
I think this chocolate filled with liquid you ate at the beginning of the episode is from Lindt. It is a swiss brand, but if they have stores here in Brazil I think they're all over the world... Nice!
I hope you find a way to fix that C64 Mini. I purchased a C64 Maxi and I really enjoy it for the casual Commodore 64 experience with the kids. It is also a bit more accessible for the kids to enjoy the games of yeseter-year.
I can explain the second floppy drive slot (for an optional 2nd floppy) on the original LC. In March 1991, around 6 months after after the LC debuted in Oct 1990, Apple began offering a special educational bundle of the computer that came with an Apple IIe emulator card installed in the PDS slot and replaced the hard drive with 2nd floppy drive. The idea here supposedly was that Apple was trying to encourage schools still using aging Apple II family computers to upgrade their systems to a modern Mac that could run all their old Apple II software rather then switching to an IBM PC compatible system instead. Both schools and consumers could also buy the Apple IIe PDS card separately for around $250 for use in any PDS equipt Mac. I imagine that with the much cheaper floppy drive replacing the expensive 40mb hard drive on the cheapest LC, that even with the added cost of the IIe card that this educational bundle was priced competitively enough for schools to discourage enough of them from considering going PC-Compatible.
Except for the chocolate covering, it sounds a lot like hanuta, a product by Ferrero which is not (yet?) marketed using their "kinder" branding, although the coloring of the hanuta letters looks like the "kinder" brand in recent editions of hanuta.
@@tw11tube in the uk the product they’re describing was sold as kinder bueno. it was marketed toward an older age range than the kinder surprise and kinder hippos.
I too read "the soul of a new machine", Decades ago, but I'm quite sure I must have it somewhere. If you have a hot air gun, (soldering equipment) you could try reflowing The memory chip, and Chinese ARM SOC (YECCH...!) to try to reflow the solder balls, it might work :-)
Around the time the LC came out the idea of "thin client" PCs was big, they had no mass storage and booted off the network. Maybe Apple made a network booting LC with 2 floppies? IDK but its a possibility.
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I read “The Soul of a New Machine” in 1981 and it gave me inspiration to study computer engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Great read; you will quickly empathize with the lead designer. A lot of the work you do in the digital basement reminds me of the early debugging days presented in the novel. Enjoy!
It's a great book, and goes great alongside The Mythical Man Month, Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Hackers.
@@Vanders456 the mythical man month should be required reading for managers!
@Kristian Van Der Vliet My American Lit. professor assigned the book in 1988. Another from that class was The Handmaiden's Tale. I'm grateful he was so prescient. I read Hackers when my ex got a job at Symbolics (that was interesting). "The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition" by Hunt and Thomas, like Mythical Man Month is nonfiction and might be a little dry for non-techies, although another classic in that vein.
Oh man. Someone recommend "the soul of a new machine" to me when I was a teenager. What a fantastic book for nerds. Seriously, read it asap. You won't regret it.
The Macintosh LC was originally designed with schools in mind. It was easier for teachers to give kids a new boot disk when needed, like the old Apple II days, then to constantly administer a hard disk. Because the Mac was so inexpensive, it was popular with home users. You only find dual-floppy LCs from schools.
Also, the 68881 FPU can run at a separate speed from the CPU.
The LC II was basically what you have here: a 68030 in an LC. The main benefit was the MMU for virtual memory. Very useful for schools who couldn’t splurge on RAM which was incredibly expensive in the 80’s and 90’s.
Your Star Wars analysis is inline with the OG fans.
unpopular opinion , i like the prequel series and only the first two . podracing ,dual lightsabers , jedi mink tricks , war. it was kind of hype . there was shitty parts but thats just weird pacing .
@@tobiwonkanogy2975 I grew up with the VHS original trilogy just, I do mean just, before they made the GL versions on VHS. I agree with you on the prequel trilogy.
What is 'OG'?
@@infinitecanadian original gangster. That's what original version Star Wars fans are.
@@jamesthompson7694 Ah, kinda like me.
"I've seen ALL the Star Wars movies! All three of them!" :D
So true!
Was I the only one hoping the Chewy box had something for the Commodore PET?
31:35 I think that reflowing the SDRAM can help. as we aren't louis rossman, using oven for reflowing is the only plausible way.
Unless a bad attempt at reflow is why RAM failed already
If you've got a heat gun, you might try a reflow in that BGA SDRAM. Nothing to lose.
That's the first thing I thought of when I saw that error. I've heard of people fixing many early 2000s video cards with ram issues that way. Should be a similar situation.
Time is something that can be lost. There's a very low return on investment on that time for something that's easily replaced these days.
@@Those_Weirdos Sometimes, the point (and the appeal) is to try to fix - even if you could buy a new one! :)
@@Those_Weirdos Plus, if you can keep one more device away from the landfills and prevent the unnecessary use of materials, I'd say it'd be worth it!
Or an Xbox 360. I fixed one of mine with a heat gun. Sometimes it lasts and sometimes it doesn't, but you have nothing to lose.
27:46: "It's really convenient how the Rigol scope calculates that for you."
I always love a good "Adrian's Candy Review"
He could make a second channel: "Adrian's Candy basement" I definitely would watch that content.
i have old electronics i wanna send in... but now i wanna go to the little international market and buy random candy to send!
@@DrHouse-zs9eb I think he should get people together for a Try Channel style show where they rate candy.
From the amount of chip failures you recorded on original c64's, the faulty ram feels like an accurate recreation of the original.
Loved the chocolate segment.
It brought back warm memories of Kinder country.
Mandalorian and Rogue One are MY favourite Star Wars products so far, too.
Recently I was repairing an LC II, and its 80MB HDD had a head stuck to the limiter/bumper. There was a rubber insert in this bumper, which transformed into a chewing-gum like substance. I've managed to remove it and replace it with two layers of a double-sided foam tape, with a protective film left on the top side. Without this tape the head would crash into the platter hub. The drive is now working, without any bad sector. I've formatted it and verified using a Silverlining software, which I've seen on your channel, thanks for that hint. Macs are really rare in my country, and this was the first one I had in my hands, so I had no idea what software to use. Strangely it had a Polish keyboard (which is really odd, as we use US Intl. layout), and had System 7 in Polish (with a very strange terminology/translation).
Kinder Country has been my favourite since i was a kid in the 80s!! in Italy it was called "Kinder Cereali" meaning cereals but I think it's puffed rice in there. delicious!! glad you liked it! it's not available in australia but i do stock up duty free when i go to asia :) pre-covid obviously!
The Soul of a New Machine is almost certainly the best book ever written about a computer. It's an absolute classic from the mid '80s, definitely find the time to read it soon!
Hot air gun on that memory chip, put a small amount of solder on top of it. 20 seconds after it melts the solder under the chip should melt as well. Also some liquid flux around the chip will help reflow any cracked solder joints. Aliexpress sell a temperature controlled hot air rework station for £20. It's well worth learning soldering SMD chips and components and it's not too hard to do after a bit of practice with the right equipment. You can even buy kits of chips/components and boards to practice with for about £1-50
23:10 "No signal" on the monitor, a cable hanging from the top shelf looking like a gallows rope, and you saying "the thing appears to be dead". Marvellous.
The round ball in a red wrapper is a Lindor, i also am not a great milk chocolate fan but they are absolutly amazingly nice.
www.lindtusa.com/lindor-truffles--sc4 and they do make them in dark chocolate.
Dark chocolate Lindt truffles were a favorite stocking-stuffer treat growing up -- so good!
Hello Adrian I really enjoy your videos and the time you must put in to create them. You may have been disappointed not to get the Mini C64 working but I was really impressed with your skills to work out those pins were a serial interface and to know how to connect it and what baud to at least get to the diagnostic to tell you what is wrong. I learn a lot from your videos. I'm afraid my troubleshooting is usually limited to turning things off and on again! As to the C64 keyboard you probably know this already but I am in the UK, so Shift+2 is the usual key to use to get double quotes on a PC here in the UK, it's standard UK layout. This makes me wonder if C64s sold in the US had the same keyboard layout as in Europe. If so it seems surprising that Commodore, as a US company used a UK keyboard layout globally though of course at the time there wasn't really a "standard" layout anyway.
The IIci was top of the line in 1989. The only Mac faster was the IIfx, and that didn’t come out until the following year and was more than twice the price. The LC was heavily compromised, certainly, but Apple eventually got that model right with the LCIII, which was a fantastic little machine.
Awesome video! Just ordered some of those kinder country bars on amazon. While it's still winter lol.
Here in Louisiana, you don't order / ship chocolate in the summer for obvious reasons.....
Chef Excellence approves of this video, and the Sad Onion. Also, that round ball one is a Lindt gourmet truffle chocolate. :) That one is the milk chocolate. Super creamy and velvety. I feel you about the milk chocolate... I don't like them either, as it reminds me of too many Easter's gone by with melted milk chocolate... Can't stand the texture any longer. Lindt makes a wide range of truffle chocolates. Dark chocolate (My favourite), a white chocolate one with cookie bits in it, peppermint crunch, and toffee crunch ones as well.
Yeah, your take on the Odroid Go is 100% spot-on. I just got one of these, already owning 2 Odroid Go Advance handhelds (much more capable RK3326-based Linux handhelds), and it was specifically for the purpose you realized: custom programming with the Arduino sdk.
The dual floppy no hard drive Macintosh LC’s were only used in schools and were never sold to consumers. Most schools that used these LC’s stored application software on file servers.
Ah so it would boot from disk, then use Appleshare to run programs?
@@adriansdigitalbasement That’s right. I remember when I was in high school using Mac Pluses and Classics using a system 6 boot floppy and using a third party network stack called Waterloo McJanet developed by the university of Waterloo to get onto a file server which was just a a classic with a SyQuest drive attached
With an oven reserved for soldering, in a last resort, I would try to reflow the pcb. To check the temperature, I put a small length of soldering wire. When it melts, I wait for 10 sec. and turn the oven off
It's not just the Rigol doing the frequency calculation. I have yet to see an oscilloscope with time-domain cursors that does not display 1/(delta T) expressed as frequency. As far as I remember, even the old CRT-based Tektronix and Hameg scopes with digital cursor readout could do that.
"Soul of a New Machine" is a great book, you're going to love it. And no doubt, get a Data General Nova or better afterwards.
To make a proper C-64 to RS232 interface, you need two of the MAX232 chips. One does the TX/RX work, the second handles hardware flow control lines. But the single-chip solutions do work well in most cases.
This is one reason it's nice to own one of the OEM Commodore interfaces, as they do have full flow control support
I'm from Brazil we don't have a lot of commodore 64 but it's very good to watch your video. congratulations
I have had some luck with repairing pcb's that had bad solderjoints. I put them in a oven at 80° Celsius for 10 minutes, let it cool down before handling. You can start at a lower temperature and try increasing the temp incrementally. If you don't have an oven you are willing to use for this you could use your 3d printers heatbed. Best to build a cover to put over the pcb (insulation that one of your viewers uses to pack stuff he sends you) or use an enclosure for your 3d printer.
Your analysis of Star Wars reflects my views perfectly! 👍
Fist-bump!
totally agree
Yep, that opinion seems to be the norm.
Count me in as well.
The LC does support 640x480 too, at 16 colors IIRC but there's the VRAM socket that enables 256 colors. 512x384 is for the 12" RGB monitor which was a new thing with the LC, and the 640x480 was for the 13" RGB monitor that was used with the Macintosh II models from before. The cheapest monitor was a 12" or 13" monochrome, at 640x480 and 16 grays is perfectly usable with these.
I tried to switch to bluetooth headphones but I found that keeping them charged was always a pain. It seems like wired studio headphones are having a bit of a resurgence, if the prices are anything to go by. I bought a pair of Sony MDRV6s for $75 back in 2018... and today you can find them used for $300-$400.
The 9 down votes are all from the doctors and the nurses at Adrian's Endocrinologist office 😭😂😭
Your oscilloscope has built in serial decoding... if it’s not enabled on your unit you can download the code needed. Shortly after releasing the DS1054z they started enabling all the features for free... unless you have an early model, you should already have it there...
That LC looks absolutely mint compared to the LC II I currently have on the bench, haha.
I know others have mentioned it already, but The Soul of a New Machine is a fantastic book about the development of the Data General Eclipse, what's really unique is how it's told from an outsider's perspective looking in during the whole process, so it's nowhere near as dry of a read as it sounds.
Hey Adrian, with the SD RAM chip it’s not that hard to repair - just a hot air station and the proper amount of flux to remove the dead chip - then a little cleaning with more flux and desolder braid - and then a bit less flux and a new chip. I made my first (Louis Rossmann style) try to swap out a FBGA 256 one week before christmas and it did fail first try but worked the 2nd time. I suspected some pads didn’t made contact or shorted but it really wasn’t to hard. I never did much smd work at all before that but I guess it’s the way we have to go sometimes as long as it’s still possible to repair stuff. Greetings from Germany, keep up the great content you create - its really fun to watch!
Coincidently Voltlog has published a nice BGA soldering tutorial just today - ruclips.net/video/15RFI9wKHq8/видео.html so only desoldering Rossmann style ;)
I still have my 1st gen iPod Shuffle in my vintage iPod collection and last time I checked it still worked though I haven’t used it regularly in recent years. I also have a working 2nd gen Shuffle I have used more recently on an occasional basis. There are uses for stand alone digital music players these days especially if your phone is lacking a headphone Jack or you want an entire large digital music library on a DMP device without eating lots of space on your smart phone. You can also use them with older stereo systems or give one to a kid, among other uses. Also, I find a certain nostalgia about using an old iPod model just for the heck of it even if I don’t really need to.
Riegel sounds almost like 'regal' in English. Although, sometimes the family name is pronounced 'wriggle' in English.
Interestingly, the Haribo candy name is a contraction of HAns RIegel BOnn, named for its founder and location in Germany.
Riegel literally means 'bar' in German, but it's a specific kind of bar like the bolt of a door locking mechanism.
It would seem to be an occupational name associated with locksmithing. And probably where we get the word 'wriggle' like wriggling a key in a lock.
We have the kinder things in italy, and the filling isn't marshmellow, it's a milk filling.
That too happens in Spain
Well, Ferrero is Still a italian company. ;-) even If their German Division flood the world with Kinder. So everyone thinks they are German. But the company is originated in italy.
@@worldsendace You're right! Sometimes I forget that Kinder is owned by Ferrero.
IIRC (hey, I was like 7) my elementary school's computer lab was Mac LCs which originally had two floppies. It wasn't much of a problem then because most of the use they got was being booted directly off floppies. I remember them being upgraded to have hard drives later...
I can also answer your question about the overall speed of the 68020-based LC v the 60830-based LC II. Because both machines only had 16 bit buses despite using 32-bit processors, the LC II’s processor upgrade only provide a modest speed increase over the LC. The LC II though did offer at least one major advantage over the LC it replaced in the it sold for a mere $1300 vs the $2500 of the original, making it one of the cheapest Macs sold at the time. Despite the crippled nature of these machines, Mac users wanting a color Mac on the less expensive side (vs other color Macs) bough enough of them LC and LC II for it to called a success seemingly willing to overlook it hobbled nature. I imagine that most had previously used a monochrome Mac (512k, Plus, SE, SE/30, or Classic) which ran at the same or slower speeds so they didn’t realize what they were missing. If you had “upgraded” from Mac II to an LC then you would have realized that the older Mac II ran at 2x the LC’s speed, despite both having 16mhz 68020 processors because the Mac II had 32 bit bus (though it was not 32 bit clean meaning that without a special special software later developed (MODE32) the bus ran at 24 bit limiting memory to 8mb but still much faster then LC’s 16 bit bus).
BGA soldering actually isn't that difficult - at least in the scale of RAM ICs. Just get a cheap hotair station, flux, some stencils and balls and you're ready to go.
Something like a bad ram is a good point to start and learn. My first tries were an old router and a graphics card. I unsoldered the CPU/GPU, reballed it and reattached. Worked both times. You only have to be careful with the desoldering braid and the heat, it's quite easy to rip a pad.
I wonder if the “reflow solder in the oven” method would do anything to that mini c64. But I know nothing about this stuff.
Kinda want an LC after all this criticism, I love underpowered stuff.
I have an LC III, which actually is less underpowered than the other LCs before it. I enjoy it
I would try reflow, hot air until you see solder melting or oven it as could be a ball not connecting
On the C64 Mini board the LED should light up no matter if the SD RAM is faulty.
Maybe a power line has gone bad and that causes the problem?
yeah, wouldn't hurt to try. It's best to flood the underside of pbga chips with flux first. maybe a solder joint has cracked.
The oven doesn't get hot enough to reflow chips so it wouldn't be a permanent fix, it would only work for a little while then crash and not boot again
Re: Dual Drive LC: Yes, they sold loads of them to schools in fact. That way you could keep the OS boot disk in one and the data program disk in the other. In 1990, skipping the hard drive would be a huge cost saving (and a classroom of 30 students loading MS Word from floppy is still faster than a classroom of 30 students loading MS Word over LocalTalk *at the same time*).
This would have been especially useful for machines with the Apple IIe card, since the IIe software took up most of a single floppy by itself. About 10 years ago I bought a job-lot of dual-floppy machines liquidated from a school, all with the Apple IIe card.
All LC I's have the dual disk ports of the motherboard (but not sure of the LC II and III) regardless of how many were actually installed, and that can be handy since you can connect something like the Big Mess o' Wires Floppy Emu to the other internal floppy port so you've got both physical disks and disk images in one box.
Hi Adrian. You should do a reflow of the ram and / or CPU. Some flux and a littlebit of heat. It is already bricked so maybe you can bring new life into the c64mini
About rebranded Apple drives: I'm quite confident I've seen Apple brandet Fujitsu M2624F hard drives (520MB). I'm sure i've seen a drive from that series with DIGITAL branding, too, so maybe I mix that up.
I got an iPod Classic recently, and it's delightful. My phone has a headphone jack, but I have 20+ GB of music, and use my phone for (many) other things.
If you download the firmware from the retro-esp32 project, you can play Colecovision, ZX Spectrum (48K), Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari Lynx, PCEngine, and the original 5 systems.
The emulators have gotten updates over time, as well.
38:29 - a lot of dual floppy models where used in schools, 1 drive for the OS and the other for student data. I configured a lot of the dual floppy drive models as "wyse" terminals as in dumb serial terminals. Most users preferred them as they had sound & colour (I can still hear that default "eep" sound!)
I had suspected as much, schools ordering that combination. Give a student a floppy for their data and homework and boot the OS off the other one. Maybe even do that at the start of the day and then load in today’s schoolwork software before each lesson? Depending on how scarce the OS floppies were. In the UK the BBC Micros in the ‘80s and early ‘90s had a system for loading the software remotely onto the class’s machines from the teacher’s one, called Econet. But I suppose going round sticking the boot floppy in each machine sequentially might have taken too long, even if only done at the start of the day. So I presume each machine had a boot floppy permanently stationed?
that round ball chocolate in the beginning of the vid is one one the Lindor truffles candy
To fix the commodore 64 mini you could use a digital SMD rework station with the smallest tip, set the temperature to 450° Celsius and air flow to the lowest setting, put the board with the top of the chip up towards you on a cookie pan or a silicone mat (or both), put some flux all over under and on the sides of the chip, hold it with a tweezers to keep it from flying away and move the hot air around it until the solder is melted then turn the temperature down to 375° Celsius and turn the airflow down more too so the tweezers aren't needed to hold the chip without letting the solder harden then give the chip a gentle tap on the sides with the tweezers let the chip pull itself back where it's supposed to be and cool then clean it after it has been cooling for 2 to 6 hours, that should fix it.
Or I could probably fix it I would just need to get some more tools first and I don't know how much the shipping would be back west from where I am over in the east.
Just a tip from someone who's studied German for a few years!
an "a" is almost always pronounced as "ah", but the "ä" is pronounced as "ay".
So wolfgang would be pronounced more like "volfgahng". German has pretty complicated vowels for english speakers, so i hope i helped you out! :D
German vowels are at least fairly consistent. English vowels are all over the place.
@@smeezekitty it's what I loved about studying German, the pronunciation was mostly so straightforward (even if challenging at times)
@@GPSC998 Just have to remember that w is 'v' XD
Vowels in German don't have long and short forms, the accents handle the variations. Just say them short (duration) and don't draw them out. The main thing to remember Germans love their consonants so give them emphasis.
I think that case the Odroid was in is for a DS Lite originally, I have one that's practically identical other than it having pink meshy fabric on the outside.
hmm, not sure why my comments are disappearing, but yeah, hold the button for 2-3 seconds to power on the c64 mini, and they have flashing instructions on their web site, not sure if my comments are being deleted because I included the URL to them
Obfuscate the URL.
not deleted, just automatically held for approval. but a lot of youtubers don’t go thru that screen bc that’s where the abuse and spam gets sent too.
Schools bought dual floppy LCs because they were cheap. That's almost 3 megabytes of storage, what more could you ask for!
I think the '030 was pretty much just the same CPU core as the '020, except it had an onboard PMMU. (You had to add one to the only other '020 Mac, the original II, in order for it to support virtual memory.) The LC II was just an LC with an '030 instead of the '020, so it could break through the 10 MB barrier.
Regs from nearby Cologne in Germany Adrian, I like your content a lot since the very early days of your channel, keep it up! Cheers, Peter
You can always try taking the flash memory off and flash with a FlashCat usb programmer but you would have to takeoff the chip with a hot air station 🚉
pretty cool looking inside The machines
At 15:00, you'll need a fan for a Pi 4. Even at idle, they are WAY to hot!!!!
That was what I came to say, but I figured somebody would have beaten me to it.
I'm really enjoying how much better retropie works on the 4GB Pi4 though!
You legend. Holy crap. The teaching us about oscilloscope stuff and random stuff is hugely useful to me.
Once you get used to it, reading German is pretty easy. In grad school I had to read a lot of papers in German from the journal Angewandte Chemie, despite the fact that I only speak English. Give it a shot!
I read Soul of a New Machine, it’s pretty good.
I'd highly recommend reading Soul of a New Machine. I would very much like to hear what you think of it. It's some real history.
I don't want to say much about it or it would give away the riveting plot!
I've read it a few times and might just pull it off the shelf.
The chocolate balls were 'Lindt chocolate'.
Yep, love these dudes! Loads of different flavours of Lindt balls too
Lindt Lindor to be specific :)
Yes, as others had said the round in red wrapping is Lindt (Swiss) chocolate, in the UK you can get one with mint filling, and you can get dark chocolatey too
There is a discount store that I pass that has various flavors of Lindt that never sold well. I sometimes try some of them just for the heck of it. It's amazing how "creative" they get.
We have several varieties of Lindt Lindor balls here in Canada. One of the rare ones that I found to be my favorite is the ones in gold wrapping, chocolate with the same milky creamy center, but in this case the gold one is sort of a caramel cream. I'm not overly fond of straight up caramel in chocolates, but the texture and flavor of the creamy caramel is extremely addicting. We also have those "Riegel" here too, but they're just called Kinder T1 - basically a Kinder egg in bar form - though I've never heard the milk cream insides referred to as "marshmallowy"...
23:28 Lol, without those bars the thing probably would float like a blimp
C64 Mini and the full size machines have the same ports + an extra usb on side. They both use the same firmware as well.
The Soul of a new machine is an amazing inside into the Development of a revolutionary Data General computer.
Btw guys if you watch Adrians channel. You are amazing ☝️
Wednesday... unpacking day yay!! Adrian must be the number one retro computer influencer for receiving stuff. And tbh, well deserved👍🏻
The 8-bit Guy has 1.25 million subscribers, I don't really want to compare RUclips creators like that, but 8-bit Guy lives in Texas and has a good episode about what a disaster it is, and for him personally, go watch it! LGR is probably #1
Thanks a lot for your always entertaining personality Adrian. Oh yeah, as always, instant "thumbs up" for you sir!
Sometimes just warming the thing (SDRAM) up enough with hot air helps. Just need to know what temp. "Reflow"? Louis Rossmann did it all the time with Macs and RAM.
I should start a alt rock band and call it the Sad Onions. Metaphors for days about expired food, old tech, and vintage toys.
two most common baud rates for those debug connectors are 115K and 9600. If I couldn't measure it, I'd try those two first.
Guess "LC" stood for "Low Cost", a Macintosh oxymoron. Looks like a floppy connector on the MB left side, so I guess dual floppies were a thing.
You mention (and quote your viewer) that the Mac LC shared system RAM with video RAM. This is not the case! The LC used dedicated, video RAM. The first Mac to support onboard dedicated color video, without the need for a video card in a slot. The IIsi shared its system RAM with the video, and that machine was limited to 256 colors. The LC, on the other hand, was limited by the video RAM you had installed. It could support 512x384 @ 256 colors/grays as standard (2x 256 Kbyte VRAM SIMMs), and 640x480 @ 256 colors/grays (and 512x384 @ 32,768 colors) with an upgrade to 2x 512 Kbyte VRAM SIMMs. The LC 2 was nearly identical to the LC, except it had the 68030 processor, but was essentially the same machine. The LC3 was the first real redesign, and used 72-pin SIMMs, and came with the 512 Kbyte of VRAM soldered to the board, with a single VRAM slot supporting an additional 256 Kbyte, and incidentally removed the 10MB limitation and 16 bit memory path the LC/LC2 had. The LC475 used the similar board design as the LC3, but went back to dual VRAM sockets for some reason. Macs that used shared video memory were the IIci, IIsi, and the PowerMac 6100 (oddly enough).
So funny when you try out all the Kinder-products I grew up with. Many greetings from Austria. Your channel is amazing.
The C64mini is also known as "Retro Games Ltd RGL001" and it is partially documented on linux-sunxi. linux-sunxi documents most of what anyone needs to know about allwinner based devices.
You must find time to read The Soul of a New Machine. As a fan of computer biographies, I go back to it over and over to reread passages on troubleshooting the design of a discrete IC based CPU for a mainframe.
Thanks for the tip! I've put it on my stack of books to read.
ESP series MCU's are tiny and powerful with lots of flash memory and RAM, they are more than capable of emulating any retro console or computer in terms of processing power. But the trouble is they have limited number of GPIO pins. Because of that I think the creators of that unit had to drive the LCD with a port expander type of device on a serial bus (I2C, SPI etc.) which will cause significantly slower data feed. I think that's why the display is jerky like that. With a RasPi, you gets tons of GPIO pins and can drive the same LCD on a parallel data bus, thus with enough data speed, not to mention the native HDMI capability. As you also mentioned, seems like it is actually not 100% intended to be a gameboy emulator, it is actually a great ESP(32?) development board with its own power supply, a decent screen and some buttons etc. already attached, and tons of other devices can be attached with the GPIO pins available to the user. I like it, IMHO, it is well worth the price.
That last candy from the first box looked like a Lindt Lindor truffle to me.. Even down to the fill hole.
Those candies are pretty common in Italy too and the country bar (which is just called “cereali” or cereals ) is one of my favorite snacks
I had this happen to my C64 mini too. From when I first got it, it was very temperamental, wouldn't power up sometimes, and then it just stopped working altogether. I did a consumer guarantee return to the site I bought it from and they sent me a brand new one, that has had no problems since. I'm assuming there was a manufacturing problem with it, rather than it degrading over time.
Truly excellent book. Worth finding the time to read it.
That book transformed my views of product development, separating the hardware engineers (Hardy Boys) from the software gang (whiz kids)... Well-well-wellnworth the read!!!
Hello Adrian is the old external AppleCD SC drives still going strong or are they prone to fail, i bought an older sampler and need a SCSI 1 drive for it. Am clueless what external SCSI drives to look for.
Keep up the good channel, it is my favourite computer channel to watch. Both repairs mail-calls.
Adrian, you can do a lot with the Odroid. It can have a variety of native software python based. You might have better look with the emulation with different firmware. There are also ways to port Wolfenstien, Spear of Destiny and doom. Also on the other firmware there are ZX Spectrum and C64. Maybe I can't see the lag on the emulators which is scary but I play games I know the speed of that I grew up with on the Odroid and didn't notice and I love the device it is kinda open source and I"m really excited about that microcontroller, I know it's not the best but you can make your own emu box or prorgrams for it. I would suggest getting the extra firmware and retrying maybe that'll help with the problems. You hold B when you power on to change the firmware. If it's not for you no biggie but figured I'd make my suggestions for your enjoyment.
I say all this mainly cause I've had much better luck with esp32 devices than Pis.
Holding B may not work since that device had the initial ship firmware. He may need to do the hard way upgrade. I have a guide on my channel for it. Also yes it does work much better then how it was working in this video. A lot of other reviewers did the same thing running the old firmware and saying it sucks without trying to upgrade first.
That Tracy Kidder book is wonderful
7:20 - That's a Lindor (Chocoladefabriken Lindt & Sprüngli AG, more commonly known simply as Lindt, is a Swiss chocolatier and confectionery company founded in 1845). I doubt you'll get to experience any of the milk range from Kinder as they require refrigeration, can't get enough of them!
I also agree that the Book about the DG Eclipse is a good one.
I read in the bathtub. kind of a wellness thing. Really enjoyable and the only time I still manage to concentrate on a book.
Italy here! I bet I am your number 1 fan in Italy!
Hi Adrian. I just got an Apple Quadra 605. I'm new at this. I need a special adapter to connect it to a VGA monitor, right? Any tip you can give me in general?
The odroid you have is discontinued and replaced with $80 versions called "ODROID-GO Super Clear White".
They moved away from ESP32 and use a RockChip RK3326(Quad-Core ARM 64bit Cortex-A35 1.3GHz) with a Mali-G31 MP2 GPU running Ubuntu.
I think the reason for Germany being so far up in the list of countries where your viewers come from despite people here (guess where I am from) speaking a different language is that it is the sweet spot of population size, access to the internet and RUclips and the number of poeple understanding English*. Especially people who are interested in things you cover on your channel are very likely to understand enough to watch your channel. Sure, there are countries in Europe where even more people have even better English language skills while not being native speakers, especially when looking towards Scandinavia, but the population of each individual country up there is much smaller than the population of Germany, so they can't get up that high on a list that is surely not adjusted for population size. ;-)
And of course, thinking back to the 80s and early 90s, Commodore and Atari were all the rage here. I unfortunately never had any such computer, I wasn't old enough to buy one myself and my parents didn't want to buy one for me. But we got started with PCs pretty early on, so fortunately I did not grew up under a rock. :-)
*) Even though Germany are known to often have ze terrible accent when speaking English, zey can still watch your videos. (I just had to get the accent in here somewhere)
Next time an Anglophone criticises your accent, ask them how good their German is.
@@jeffreyjoshuarollin9554 Nobody criticized my accent. I just wanted to make fun of the stereotype, as I am German. Ad you wouldn't believe how much I laughed with my American friends when they tried to sing along to Rammstein. :-D
@@Colaholiker LOL!
i'm a German too. in a online game. one American did keep asking me. what state i'm from. every time i did say slesvig holsten. he did go WHAT :-)
@@WilliamAndrewPhilipBodie Most of them probably don't know anything but Hamburg up there in northern Germany. ;-) Which is a shame, as it's really nice up there.
you could try to reflow the SDRAM chip. Anyone can reflow. Just drown it in flux heat gun for a few seconds and it should be reflowed successfully. To know for sure you can give it a gentle nudge and it will pull itself back into place but there is the risk that you could ruin something that would have otherwise been fine. Check out tronix fix. He does reflows all the time. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. He doesn't ever replace BGAs.
I think this chocolate filled with liquid you ate at the beginning of the episode is from Lindt. It is a swiss brand, but if they have stores here in Brazil I think they're all over the world... Nice!
C64 mini: Put it in the oven! 200 degrees C for about 20 minutes. I have fixed a couple of laptop graphics cards this way... [2c]
"fixed"---- yeah.... for a while ....
this is not a flip-chip issue, 200°C is too low to reflow solder, and still, not replaced the RAM
I would rather go with hot air gun
I hope you find a way to fix that C64 Mini. I purchased a C64 Maxi and I really enjoy it for the casual Commodore 64 experience with the kids. It is also a bit more accessible for the kids to enjoy the games of yeseter-year.
I can explain the second floppy drive slot (for an optional 2nd floppy) on the original LC. In March 1991, around 6 months after after the LC debuted in Oct 1990, Apple began offering a special educational bundle of the computer that came with an Apple IIe emulator card installed in the PDS slot and replaced the hard drive with 2nd floppy drive. The idea here supposedly was that Apple was trying to encourage schools still using aging Apple II family computers to upgrade their systems to a modern Mac that could run all their old Apple II software rather then switching to an IBM PC compatible system instead. Both schools and consumers could also buy the Apple IIe PDS card separately for around $250 for use in any PDS equipt Mac. I imagine that with the much cheaper floppy drive replacing the expensive 40mb hard drive on the cheapest LC, that even with the added cost of the IIe card that this educational bundle was priced competitively enough for schools to discourage enough of them from considering going PC-Compatible.
There's a "Kinder" candy that's some kind of hazelnut cream wafer stick covered in chocolate, and they're absolutely frickin amazing!
Except for the chocolate covering, it sounds a lot like hanuta, a product by Ferrero which is not (yet?) marketed using their "kinder" branding, although the coloring of the hanuta letters looks like the "kinder" brand in recent editions of hanuta.
@@tw11tube in the uk the product they’re describing was sold as kinder bueno. it was marketed toward an older age range than the kinder surprise and kinder hippos.
I too read "the soul of a new machine", Decades ago, but I'm quite sure I must have it somewhere.
If you have a hot air gun, (soldering equipment) you could try reflowing The memory chip, and Chinese ARM SOC (YECCH...!) to try to reflow the solder balls, it might work :-)
Great episode! That generic case the ODroid came in is probably meant for consoles in the DS family
Around the time the LC came out the idea of "thin client" PCs was big, they had no mass storage and booted off the network. Maybe Apple made a network booting LC with 2 floppies? IDK but its a possibility.