Author Archives: Giacomo Vernoni

Nintendo Entertainment System / NES - Zelda

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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661-0526 Apple Macintosh SE motherboard (box)

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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Olivetti Prodest PC 128

Olivetti Prodest PC 128 (1986)

AKA Thomson MO6

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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New version of the VIC registry site

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:

  • you can (finally!) edit your profile;
  • a new page lets you view in a thorough way all the details of a single VIC;
  • the registry table is now full width;
  • revision of all the texts, some descriptions of the VIC details are more precise;
  • rewritten some help text on the “add your VIC” page;
  • added a page with some statistics for the data in the registry: VICs location, motherboard type, country of production;
  • the filter you choose on the registry page is shown more clearly;
  • added some information about privacy;
  • added a contact me page;
  • registration now needs a confirmation of the email address to avoid mistakes and spam.

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.

Sportron

Sportron (~1978)

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