This article covers all three of the 3.5″ external floppy drives produced by Commodore for the Amiga line of computers.
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Commodore Amiga 1010, 1011, CD-1411
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Commodore 8050 dual drive floppy disk (1980)
A few years ago, I experienced a water leak in my basement after several consecutive days of heavy rain. To prevent the moisture from damaging them, I brought a couple of items home. One of these items was the 8050 drive, which is the subject of this article and was given to me by my friend Lorenzo in 2011.
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Nintendo DSi XL (2008)
As I’m now short on space for all my retro stuff, I’m focusing on maintaining and repairing what I already have or looking for small items.
I recently bought a pair of non-working Nintendo DSi XLs with the intention of repairing them; the price obviously reflected the consoles‘ condition. The seller wrote in the ad that both consoles would eventually display a generic error screen prompting the user to turn off the console.
Once I had received the consoles, I verified that the error occurred at different times on the two consoles: on one, it appeared only when launching a game from a cartridge (the internal applications worked fine), while on the other, the error appeared when launching any application or game.
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Atari 7800 (1986)
This console, with a few games, cost me 50,000 Lire in 1998 (before the Euro), which is about 36€ or 41$ today. At that time there were a few classified magazines: in the beginning you had to pay for them, then came the free ones, then came the internet… and all those magazines disappeared like tears in the rain.
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NEC TurboGrafx (1990)
I was familiar with a couple of variants of this console: the original Japanese PC Engine from 1987 and the American version from 1989 called TurboGrafx-16. I have the version intended for the European market, simply called TurboGrafx, from 1990: it was based on the American model, with a few adjustments to make it work with the PAL standard. The launch of the console in Europe was cancelled, and those already produced were sold to various distributors.
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Amstrad & Schneider CPC 464 (1984)
I received the two computers as a gift from Enrico S. in 2011. The inspiration for this article came from a message I received from the contact form:
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80MB SCSI Quantum hard drive with melted rubber rings
I have a lot of non working Macintosh computers, and they’ve been sitting on the shelves of my lab room and cellar for too much time; since I’m out of space for “new” computers at the moment, I decided that I must focus on repairing what I got.
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Nintendo Entertainment System / NES (1985)
Last December a friend of mine came back from the UK for a vacation and brought me this NES, with a few cartridges, as a gift. When I saw Zelda and Zelda II I told him that those could sell for a nice price, and after looking for loose cartridges sold in similar conditions, I made him a reasonable offer.
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Apple Macintosh SE motherboards
Before Apple had its own stores, it forced all its network of authorised service providers to keep a minimum stock of spare parts. A few years ago (well… probably a decade) I got some leftover spare parts for free from a shop that was closing. In the past weekend I took some pictures of the two revisions of the Macintosh SE motherboards.
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Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2 (1986)
My first computer back in 1984 was the 48K version of the original Sinclair ZX Spectrum; one year later we sold it to my cousin and bought a Commodore 128 – but that’s for another post.
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