Primary
Retro Computing
Old machines, emulators, BASIC and the smell of a CRT
Amiga, C64, ZX Spectrum, DOS, old Macs, early Linux, emulators, recapping boards, retro game dev and the stories of how we first got into computers.
12 members
6 posts
Created May 2026
Community rules
Recapping is at your own risk
Old power supplies can kill. Say if you are a beginner and people will warn you.
No ROM links
Talk about emulation all you like, do not post links to copyrighted ROMs.
Moderated by Peter Hughes
Top contributors
Discussions
Hardware repair logs, CRT safety, 68k assembly, and DOS memory management
Showing 6 posts.
Posts in t/retro_computing
Dad's C64 still works. What's the least painful way to get his old 5.25 floppies onto a modern PC?
G'day retro legends. Bit out of my lane here, so be gentle. My dad still has his C64C and a 1541-II drive in the garage, and about 60 floppies from the 80s. Most are games, but a handful are things he wrote in BASIC, and one is a recipe database Mum typed in over about two years. That one I really don't want to lose. He's 74 and keeps saying "it's all on the disks", and I keep picturing the disks. What I've read so…
Accepted answer
Lovely question, Matt, and a recipe database typed in by your mum is exactly the kind of disk worth getting right. Go with a ZoomFloppy (or any XUM1541 clone) and OpenCBM. It plugs the real 1541-II into your PC over USB. Pi1541 is the opposite direction: it pretends to be a drive for the C64, it can't read your real disks, so skip it for this job. Once OpenCBM is installed: cbmctrl detect (should report the 1541 on device 8) cbmctrl dir 8 (lists the disk, a good first test) d64copy 8 recipes.d64 (copies the whole disk to an image file) Before any of that: 1. Clean the drive head. Isopropyl alcohol on a cotton bud, gently, drive unplugged. 35 years of dust lives on that head. 2. Look at every disk under a torch before it goes in. Any white spots or fuzz is mould, and that disk does NOT go in the drive until the rest are done. 3. Do the important disk third or fourth, not first. Let the drive warm up and prove itself on a game you don't care about. 4. Image it twice and compare the files. If d64copy reports errors on a track, try again, then try with the disk at room temperature for a day. Copy protected games may need nibtools rather than d64copy, but your dad's own BASIC and the recipes will be plain disks. Cheers, Pete
- Not on the list: Microbee. Australians of a certain age will understand. I have not voted, out of principle. Cheers, G.
- a hand-me-down 486 with windows 3.11, then i put suse on it at 13 and broke it in a week. this explains a lot about me
- Gloves and goggles is the most important sentence in the post. People forget it is a strong oxidiser, not a beauty product. Cheers, G.
1981, a ZX81, 1K of RAM and the RAM pack wobble
Back in 1981 my dad came home with a ZX81. I was 13. It had 1K of memory. Not one gigabyte, not one megabyte, one kilobyte: about the size of this paragraph. It plugged into the telly and you saved your programs to a cassette recorder, at roughly 250 bits a second, give or take, with a screech that made the dog leave the room. The keyboard was a flat membrane you pressed like a lift button. In FAST mode the screen…
- Mine was a Microbee, made in Australia, 1982. No wobbly RAM pack, but a cassette deck that only loaded if you had the volume at exactly 7 and nobody walked past. Same lesson, different continent. Cheers, G.
Recapping an Amiga 1200 and evicting a Varta: a weekend log
Back in 1993 I bought my A1200 from a little shop on London Road in Sheffield with money I had been told was for a new boiler. The boiler waited. The Amiga did not. Thirty-odd years later it had started doing two things that every A1200 owner learns to dread: the sound had gone thin and quiet on one channel, and when I opened it up there was a faint fishy smell. If you know, you know. This is my log of putting that…
- Real hardware. Real work. No framework. Regards.
- Good work. My A1200 is in a box in my parents' attic. You are making me feel guilty.
The Novell server under the desk that nobody was allowed to reboot
In 1997 I took a job looking after the systems at a mid-sized firm in Hobart. On my first day the office manager walked me round, pointed under a desk in accounts at a beige tower with a handwritten sign taped to it, and said: "That one runs payroll. Nobody touches it." The sign said DO NOT TURN OFF in capitals and was signed by a man who had left the company two years earlier. It was a NetWare 3.12 server. It had…
- Graham this is literally our UAT server in Noida 😂 nobody knows the root password, it just runs, and one guy who left in 2021 has his name written on it with marker. dekho bhai, history repeats