Hello, and welcome back to 8-bit unboxing.
In this episode, I’m going to unbox all of the stuff that you guys have sent me during
the month of December 2017.
Now, despite the fact that I’ve turning down probably 95% or more of all of the offers
of donations, mostly due to lack of space, I still managed to receive some pretty interesting
items this month, so let’s dig right in!
The first package of the month is from K.C.
Oaks.
OK, looks like a couple of really small items.
And a note, “from one middle-aged 80s loving tech nerd to another.”
OK, looks like we’ve got a microprocessor, a 486.
However, I suspect the other package is where the real goodness is.
Look at that!
An original Intel 8088 CPU!
Very cool.
Thank you KC!
Moving on, the next package is from Braydon Firestone, or Nancy Orischak.. not sure what
that story is there.
Well, one way to find out is to open it up!
Please Read….
Looks like Braydon has a speak and spell for me.
I actually remember this conversation.
Yeah, so I already have a speak and spell, but I accepted this one because it is the
original model that has the raised chiclet buttons on it, and is also the one use in
the movie ET.
And it’s in pretty decent shape too.
Very nice!
Thank you Braydon!OK, I have a mystery box here.
Here’s a little thing to place under your tree.
I suspect this is from Anders Jensen, even though he, he never told me he was sending
this.
Well, I could wait until Christmas, or I could just open it now.
Besides, by the time this goes on line it will be January anyway.
It’s heavily fortified in bubblewrap.
Which is a good thing.
It means it should still be in one piece.
OK, after digging it out, it appears to be one of these really rare Casio Boombox slash
keyboard gizmos.
It appears the speakers are detachable and they are wrapped separately.
Here we go.
OK, let’s see if I can figure out how to attach these speakers.
Yeah, so they just slide down and click into place.
It’s got a cassette deck.
And several inputs and outputs.
Looks like the speakers have to be connected with these little patch cables.
I’ll go ahead and plug the power in and see what it does!
OK, the keyboard works.
OK, looks like the radio works.
OK, let’s try the cassette deck.
I can’t think of a better tape to try than one of Anders Jensen’s own albums.
And, it looks like it doesn’t work.
I can hear the motor spinning, so I think the belt is broken.
Well, at least that’s something I can probably fix.
Well, this should make an interesting video.
So thank you Anders Jensen!
OK, this is a mystery box, which is wrapped up like Fort Knox in tape.
It appears to have been sent from Hong Kong.
Well, let’s dig into this thing and see what it is.
This thing is packed like Russian Nesting dolls, with a box in a box in a box.
It took me a while to get inside.
Hmm..
This is interesting, it came with an Apple II logo.
OK, we’ll I’ll keep working my way to the center like a tootsie pop.
OK, it LOOKs like an Apple II, but not quite.
Oh wait.
I know what this is.
I remember chatting with this guy.
This is a brand new product that mimics the look of an Apple II, but I believe it is designed
to accept a standard ATX motherboard.
I can tell this is a prototype.
It appears to be made of resin.
Not sure if it is from a mold or if it has been 3D printed.
So, that is apparently where the Apple II logo goes.
By the way, I think there is a crowdfunding campaign going on Indigogo for this for a
few more days, so if you want to get in on that, I’ll put a link down in the description
field.
OK, let’s open this thing up.
And inside is more packing material.
Apparently the bottom is made of metal, which means it should be pretty sturdy.
Now, this keyboard feels very much like a finished product.
I am also just about positive these keys have individual mechanical switches.
They have a really nice feel to them, and would be a pleasure to type on.
As long as nobody else is in the room that hates to hear clicky keys!
Although it does look like the backslash key has been installed upside down for some bizarre
reason.
Let’s have a look at these USB and audio ports.
Oops, something fell out.
Looks like a piece of chipped resin.
Oh, and that must be the power button right above the USB ports.
And on the bottom there are two pretty large fans and room for a 3rd I guess in case you
want to put something really powerful inside.
Moving on, the next package is from Augustin Chenault.
I think.
Well, at least these types of packages are easy to open!
And oddly enough, there were more packages inside that one.
He has very nice handwriting.
Warning, contains fan mail.
Hahah.
Let’s open the smaller one first.
OK, I think this is a chip inserter.
It keeps the pins bent at just the right angle too.
Very nice.
Also in the package is a chip puller.
I’ll use that EEPROM and see how that works.
Very neat.
This should come in handy!
If I see one more bent DIP pin, you’re grounded!
haha.
OK, let’s see what’s in that second package.
All right.
Looks like some very old computer magazines.
I’m not even sure what year this one is from.
This one here is from June of 1982.
It should definitely be interesting looking through these.
It gives you a glimpse of the past like a time capsule.
Very neat!
Thank you Augustin!
Next up, we have a somewhat large package from Tony Ortale.
This doesn’t have a lot of packing material, so I hope it survived.
It appears to be a keyboard.
Indeed, I remember this conversation.
So, this is a Casio model I’ve been interested in for a while, because it has the Casio ROM
cartridge, yet it is not quite as primitive as most of the keyboards that used those,
so I’ll be interested to play with it.
This is definitely a fixer-upper, though.
Thank you Tony!
All right, got a little something here from Casey Barela.
Hope this helps with the C64 video.
Haha, yes, it will.
This is a composite video cable for the C64, still brand new.
But what makes it different is that, you’ll notice it says for Monochrome monitors only.
It’s wired up a bit different, and I’ll get into that later in the C64 video.
So thanks Casey!
OK, so UPS delivered two very big and heavy boxes.
They feel like they have anvils inside of them or something.
So I’m just going to open them right here in the living room floor.
Now, they say they are from Brian.
Oh and look!
61 Pounds a piece!
But I have no idea what is in here.
Well, only one way to find out.
So, it turns out there are more boxes inside these.
In fact, there were 6 boxes total.
And it looks like they may be floppy disks.
From Midwest Liquidations.
It says there are 500 double-sided.
Double-density disks.
I’ll spoil the surprise..
I found out later that these were actually also shipped to me by Anders Jensen.
He thought I could use these for my upcoming DOS port of Planet X2.
And these disks are perfect because they are 720K disks, so they will work in the older
MS-DOS computers, as well as the newer ones.
These will also work in Amiga, Atari ST, and old Macs too.
Let’s open one of these bags and have a look at one of the disks.
It’s pretty generic, which is perfect.
You’ll notice it is missing the hole on the left side, that indicates it is the double-density
which are actually a bit hard to find these days.
So this is great, thank you Anders!
Next up, I got a little package here from CreateSpace.
Let’s see what we have here.
Retro Game Dev.
By Derek Morris.
So, it appears to be a book about how to develop games for old systems.
I’m not sure why I need this, but people are always asking me for advice on a book
for such topics.
So, I guess I’ll have to look through this one and see if it is any good.
I’ll let you know later.
Otherwise, thank you whoever it is that sent this to me.
Next I have a decently large box from Chris Lasagne.
Wow, I bet he gets a lot of jokes about that name.
Although, I suspect that’s a typo because I got a box from a Chris Lozaga last month
from the exact same town, so I’m guessing somebody mis-typed his name.
I think that’s a Tandy model 100.
And a Graphite clamshell.
Very nice.
I’ve been trying to complete my clamshell collection for a while.
I was still missing the graphite and the blueberry.
Looks like I’m almost there now!
This one is in pretty decent shape.
Let’s have a look at this model 100.
So, I already had a model 100 as well as a 102, but mine was in pretty bad shape.
So I agreed to take another one since this one was supposed to be in better condition.
And yeah, it definitely looks to be in good shape.
See, I’ve been wanting to do a documentary about these, so I was waiting to get one in
better shape like this.
So, very nice.
Thank you Chris!
Here’s a box that says The 8-Bit Guy right on it.
It’s from Andrew Lichtenhan.
What do we have here?
Looks like a box of chocolates or something.
haha.
May these pieces of the past bring you good times.
I hope it isn’t 30 year old chocolates.
Oh!
OK!
Look at that!
It’s an unopened box of 8-inch diskettes.
I can’t believe it.
These are still sealed up like new.
I really want to open this and look at the disks, but at the same time I can’t bring
myself to cut the shrink wrap off.
Well, I’ll hold onto these until I find a machine that can use 8-inch floppies, then
maybe I’ll open them up!
Thank you Andrew!
Ok, I have a mystery package here, because it doesn’t say whom it is from.
But it does say it has 2 cassette tapes and it apparently from the U.K.
Later, I did find out this was from Jake Mullen.
This is really neat to see for me.
These sort of games were never sold on cassettes here in the USA.
They were only available on floppy disk.
So this is my first time seeing something like this for the C64.
Also, I’ve never played the C64 version of Lotus Turbo Challenge, I’ve only played
the Amiga version.
And here’s a game I’ve actually never even heard of.
Of course, neither of these games may work on my C64 because they may require a PAL system,
and mine are all NTSC.
But we’ll see.
Well, thank you very much Jake!
Next up is a box from Mark.
What we have here is a Sony Watchman.
And while I also already had one of these, mine is dead.
This one, supposedly works.
So, thank you very much Mark!Moving along, we’ve got a box from Norman Strayer.
Ahh yes…
This is a 32K ram expander for the TI99 computer.
Apparently a 3rd party product by Tachyon Systems.
Oh, well, if I had looked at the other side of the box, it would have also told me what
it was.
OK, thank you Norman!
Next up we have a box from A Pemrich.
Pemrich, something like that.
Oh wow.
This has been on my want list for quite some time.
It’s not that it’s terribly expensive, they’re just hard to find.
This is the Excelerator Plus disk drive, which is a 3rd party disk drive for the Commodore
64.
It’s much smaller than the 1541 which was the prevailing drive at the time.
And here’s the power brick.
Anyway, you’ll see more about this when I do the planned episode on Commodore disk
drives.
So, thank you A.Pemrich!
Next we have a box from Howard Poe.
OK, so I know what this is.
It’s some Tandy 1000 stuff.
What we have here is a compact flash drive probably loaded with some Tandy stuff.
Some Tandy software.
This, I believe is a converter that turns a Tandy socket into a standard ISA socket.
And this is an IDE hard drive controller designed for XT class systems.
And it looks like it will snap into this converter.
So, very nice.
This will be very helpful in getting my Tandy 1000 units up and running.
Thank you Howard!
Up next we have a box from Marc Morrisette.
Looks like a bunch of Sega stuff.
I already have a Sega Master system.
But all I had was literally just the machine.
I didn’t even have a power cord, or any games or controllers.
I’ve always wanted to try out the master system.
Looks like it came with some 3D shutter glasses.
I didn’t even know they made these back then.
Looks like part of it is broken, but I can probably fix that.
Lets look at the games.
I’m not familiar with this one.
But I am familiar with this one!
This was one of my favorite C64 games.
It’ll be interesting to see how it compares to that version.
Not familiar with this one.
Or this one either.
Well, this should be interesting!
Thank you Marc!
And here is the last package of the month, and in fact the entire year.
And it is from Tony P. And we have a Joystick.
Believe it or not, I’ve never had a joystick for any of my Apple II computers.
This one is for the IIc or IIe.
So, this is great.
I can definitely make use of this!
And it’s in great condition too!
Thank you Tony!
Ok, so that about wraps it up for the entire year!
I do have some other things I want to mention, though.
First of all, I want to give out a big thank you to everybody who donated this month, including
any previous months.
So, just wanted to through that out there.
I do appreciate all of the donations and you know, even all of the offers of donations
that unfortunately, I wasn’t able to accept.
Also, I want to mention.
Every now and then I’ll do a video and I’ll…
There’s some piece of technology that I wanted to show in the video but I just simply
couldn’t find.
At least, I couldn’t find it in time to make the video.
And so, I’ll mention something about that in the video.
And I’ll say “yeah, if only I’d had XYZ piece of equipment.”
Well, what invariably happens is that I’ll receive 50 offers for that piece of equipment
immediately after the video is done.
Now, the irony behind that is that by the time we’ve reached that point, I no longer
need that piece of equipment because I needed it for that video.
And that video is done, so that ship has sailed.
And so, it’d be great if I could get this stuff before those types of videos come up.
And I actually have quite a few videos that are on hold indefinitely because I’m waiting
to fill some last piece of the puzzle.
So I may have like 6 or 7 pieces of equipment I want to show, to show an entire line of
equipment, but I’m missing one piece of that puzzle, right?
And so those videos are kind of on indefinite hold.
And so, I encourage you to go look at my website because I keep a running list of items that
I’m kind of waiting for in order to fill those pieces of puzzles.
So, go check that out, there’s a link down in the description and if there is something
there you have, and you know, even though the website talks about donations, in many
cases on some of the more expensive items, if you do have one and you don’t want to
give it up for free, but you don’t really need it anymore, it doesn’t hurt to ask
if I’ll pay for it.
Because, in many cases I will.
It just depends on what it is.
So, you know, just check it out.
But, just to mention some of the things I’m particularly looking for that I need kind
of in a hurry, is I need a Commodore 116.
I’ve had several offers for these but none of them have ever shown up.
And I will be getting to, as I continue to move this year through my Commodore history
series, that’s one piece of the puzzle that I don’t have, as well as a couple of Commodore
disk drives that are just a bit hard to find.
So, again those are listed on my website.
Some other things I’m looking for are a Tandy 600 laptop.
Again, those aren’t particularly valuable, they’re just a little bit hard to find because
they didn’t make very many of them.
So, again, hope you enjoyed this episode and thanks for watching!