I recently bought this computer at the local flea market. I still wonder why Olivetti put that thing on the market when the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum were selling like hotcakes. And it wasn’t even something Olivetti designed or produced – it was just a rebadged Thomson MO6.
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In my (very scarce!) free time I have completely rewritten the site that hosts the registry for the VIC 1001 and VIC 20. If you’re interested in the technical details, the previous site was written from scratch in php, while now it’s based on the Laravel framework.
Besides the different “engine”, the new site brings some improvements for the users and under the hood. Here’s what’s new:
The accounts have been migrated on the new site; all the users need to request a password reset (Login › Forgot Your Password?) and click the link in the email.
As for privacy, the summary is: registration data, VIC data and cookies are only used to make the site work; there is no tracking or profiling.
The new site is available at the same address of the previous one: cbmvic.net. If you didn’t already, register and add your VICs! The more, the better :-)
If you have some suggestions, add a comment or contact me.
I’ve finally finished and published a project I’ve been working on in my spare time for the last year: a booklet that presents all the tape recorders used or produced by Commodore for its 8-bit computers.
Continue readingOn 25 September 2018 Andrew Colin passed away. He was known to the fans of old Commodore computers as the author of the “An Introduction to BASIC” guides. Continue reading
I found this console a couple of weeks ago at the usual flea market; usually I don’t look for these items (you need a warehouse to collect all the variants), but I liked it and for 5 euros I decided that it was worth the risk – flea market findings are often cheap but nobody guarantees that what you buy will work. At the end it was working fine. Continue reading
Samsung made only one computer that was compatible with the MSX standard; it was rebranded and sold in Italy by Fenner, keeping the existing model name. There are two revisions of the Samsung SPC-800; the Fenner computer corresponds to the second revision of the South Corean model. Continue reading
The cable of this Sega light gun for the Master System was damaged right under the grip: to repair it I had to teardown the entire unit. I took the opportunity to take a few pictures. Continue reading
It’s time to show some love for Atari since my VCS post is almost 4 years old. I took some pictures of my Atari 400, a North American NTSC model produced at the very beginning of 1983. Continue reading
Since the initial price of this computer was between 9 and 20 thousand dollars in 1975 (43 to 95 thousand dollars in 2018!), I didn’t expect to find it in a small town near the even smaller town where I live. A friend of my father-in-law gave him this IBM 5100 for free, probably because my father-in-law talked to his friend about my passion. This person ran a small repair shop, but sadly passed away shortly after and I never got the chance to ask him where this computer came from.
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Once a month I go to a local flea market where sometimes – not very often – I find something on the junk dealers’ market stalls. I have “rebuilt” the complete system in two months: the first month I found the main unit, a broken control pad and the power supply unit; the second month, from the same seller, I got the light phaser, a working control pad, and a classic cartridge of Sonic The Hedgehog. Continue reading