Digging the Apple IIc and Laser 128 out of the hoard These were an extremely grubby set of machines that came out of an estate sale. They seemed to be sitting for a very long time with a pile of classic macs. BUT, I had been looking for a Laser 128 for a while as I...
The All in 3Dfx Voodoo 2 SLI build
Coming across the elusive Voodoo 2 12MB cards Somehow, I managed to get 2 3DFx Voodoo 2 12MB cards and the SLI cable. Both cards came from various estate sales over the years and I even gave one away not knowing how it worked. As most people other than me would know,...
Blacked out Commodore 64
I have had this Commodore C64 in my possession for a while at this stage and it just sat there in the corner unused beyond making sure it powered up. Something about the colour always just bummed me out and I didn't want to use it. So the goal was to bring it back to...
Chime of Death with the Mac Color Classic
The coolest and yet slowest Mac of them all, the Color Classic. I had been after one of these for a while and then a friend was offering up a non working, but cosmetically good condition unit. I was told it had been attempted to be recapped but it did not come back to...
Fighting Parallel cable issues with Willem Programmers
This Willem Eprom Programmer V4.5 build should have been an easy one but it turns out, when you have the wrong parts without knowing it, it turns into a much harder job. Building the unit Most of this build was fairly straight forward other than I had to swap the ZIFF...
Surface Pro 3 Screen replacement
This was an odd pickup where the machine had a cracked screen AND a dead SSD, so the only way to replace the SSD was to also replace the screen. Which I found out was not a very fun job. Ordering the screen I scored a new to me screen on Trademe for $10 and when it...
My Dream DOS 6.22 Setup
Starting DOS 6.22 image This was a very long running project that started off with a Direct Access 5 based DOS 6.22 image from my mate with a fairly stock install with some utilities and games loaded on it with a bunch of sound card drivers. This image was targeting a...
Restoring some Toshiba 486 & Pentium Laptops
As with some of my other projects, these machines came from the vintage tech sale in Q1 2020 just before the first lockdown. The sale was absolutely massive ( a few photos below ) and there were bins upon bins of laptops, which at the time had been a big attraction...
AOC portable monitor graveyard
This pile was a pickup from work. Apparently, auditors are extremely rough with their kit and these AOC Portable monitors are not upto the task and the USB 3 Mini B connectors all gave up the ghost. Out of the pile, there was 4-5 that were totally dead with smashed...
AST 386 laptop resurrection
As another find at the retro computer day I picked up these two AST Premium Exec 386SX's that both looked pretty interesting and being the same machine I figured if I could get one to work out of the two of them then I would be in luck. I was in the zone to try get...