GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

Since last time I wrote in, I have been extremely busy preparing for Texas Pinball Fest 2016 -- tried to get four machines ready, then three, and then... oh well... only the two I had working to begin with were actually working by showtime.  Meanwhile, I had started to investigate a couple other projects, but never got something going nice enough to warrant writing a blog post on. Now that Texas Pinball Fest is over, and I swear my games are acting like rabbits (if you know what I mean ;), I'm trying to step back and work on some of the projects I had going before this massive push to restore a bunch of pinball machines happened.  However, I have another great big push for this weekend to get prepared for the North Dallas Area Retrocomputing meetup.  I've had vintage computers hanging around me since they were new, but have acquired some "new" stuff since around Thanksgiving (especially from Fred's "Warehouse of Wonder"), and need to get all the new ac...

Recently, I’ve acquired a bunch of vintage computer hardware from various sources, whether donated to me personally or stumbled upon during scavenger hunts through crazy places that used to be companies whose owners have pretty much turned into hoarders.  It’s been quite a tedious process getting some of these things working, but surprisingly, there have been very few instances lately where my skills with a soldering iron or my cache of loose parts has actually come in handy to fix something.  In fact, most things have come back to life surprisingly by simply plugging them in and giving them some time. Cases 1 & 2: Some Commodore 64 Computers Last week, a kind fellow who was moving granted me three Commodore 64 computers belonging to him and his brothers.  They grew up with these machines, and had a large collection of games and utilities on floppy disk.  There were also accessories such as floppy disk drives, joysticks, plenty of power supplies ...

It Was a Dinosaur Back Then... At some point a very long time ago in my life, I acquired an IBM 5150 PC from my grandfather.  I'm not sure why he wanted to give it to me at that time, but I did have fond memories of playing old games on 5.25" floppy such as Grand Prix Circuit and Wheel of Fortune with my cousins on hot summer days in Grandpa's garage in Houston (along with a similarly vintage Ferrari 308GTB which always remained under wraps -- I didn't even realize it was blue until after he died), so I was definitely happy to take it.  (The computer, of course. ;)  By most people's definition, the 5150 is the root of the modern personal computer, but in the late '90s when I received the machine, I did not have the right skills nor tools to get it up and working; moreover, with no expansion cards installed (no floppy disk controller nor video card in particular), it would not have been very useful nor even easy to triage and fix.  Fast forward 16 or 17 yea...