Welcome back to the 8-Bit Guy. So, we start off this episode with a road trip. I got a
call from a guy in Oklahoma City that runs an electronics recycling shop there and he
picked up some things that should be quite interesting and worth the trip.
The drive from Forth Worth to Oklahoma City is 221 miles, or a little over 3 hours each
direction.
Usually I like to point out some interesting sights along the way on road trips but in
this case there isn’t a huge amount to see in this area. There is a giant wind farm along
the way that you can see for miles away.
Another interesting thing is the multiple casinos along the way including the Winstar
World Casino and Resort, which is the largest Casino in the world. Believe it or not, gambling
is actually illegal in Oklahoma, but these casinos are located on Native American reservations,
which have their own legal autonomy. For the Futurama fans out there, if you’ve seen
the episode where they all go to Mars Vegas, that episode is very much a parody of this.
I can’t help noticing a lot of your employees are native Martians. So, hopefully this helps
to explains that, especially to my European viewers.
After about 3 hours I finally make it to Oklahoma City, but my final destination is actually
on the other side of town.
And here we are at Oklahoma Electronics Recycling.
Jeremiah starts by opening the back of his truck and showing me some of the recent pickups
he has made.
Lots and lots of kit boards. Most of these are synthesizer related, We have found some
for like the Kim-1. I think that, yeah, that’s a voice card.
There were certainly some interesting things in here. For example, I THINK that is a keyboard
for an Apple II of some kind. And then there was this mystery keyboard that I just have
no idea what it would have been used in. And there was also a slim-cam camcorder. Doesn’t
seem very slim by today’s standards. I also found this Wyse keyboard. I thought it was
for a terminal, but didn’t see the terminal anywhere.
Of course, I wasn’t there to see any of this, the best stuff was already inside. But
first he had to show me his doorbell.
So, we needed a doorbell. We had parts. We didn’t have a doorbell at the time. Honk.
So, it’s a septic tank alarm for when it overflows, a relay, and a mouse. Both buttons?
Inside the building was, of course as to be expected. Most of this was certainly scrap.
But there were a few gems here and there.
Oh look! We found the Wyse that goes with that Wyse keyboard we saw in the back of the
truck. That’s a Wyse PC. I’ve never seen one of these. Oh wow. Those are some big ole’
heavy hard drives. It’s got an old MFM Seagate 225 in it! It’s actually hard for me to
believe that it’s been long enough to find things like these old MacBooks and iBooks
are now considered scrap. It wasn’t too long ago I was restoring these, refurbishing
these and reselling them. I guess that was like 10 years ago I guess at this point.
On this shelf, Jeremiah stores some of his more interesting recent finds.
There we go. Got to love the 8 inch. 300 K abouts with the format they were using. And
the best feature of all, an actual manual write protect.
Of course the best was yet to come.
So, from the description of this system from the gal that was actually at the company at
the time, They were looking at a system to be able to read audio cues as well as write
them on reel to reel recorders. So, they actually had one of the big ole’ reel to reels. I
believe it was an industry standard connection for recording studios. There’s actually
a dongle that would plug into the back.
Wow, so these are uh, yeah you can tell this has been sitting for quite some time. Yeah,
and they didn’t have the lid open or closed, so it’s picked up quite a bit of dust. Looks
like you’ve got quite a few of these. These here were pretty much packed and ready to
go, minus the interface kit. Looks like they just re-used Commodore’s end-cap there.
Synchronous Technologies. I have not found an original box for ‘em. Wow, there’s
even more of them. I think there’s about 12, plus the first units. Oh look at that!
Whole bunch of VIC-20s. In various states of repair. And in various states of yellowing
too, look at that! I wonder if it’s. You can tell which side was facing up, because
you get the oxygen fade. That one doesn’t have the. Yeah, there’s no labels. There’s
no labels on these. I think they painted the keys. Yeah, I was looking at that and I was
thinking, well these can’t be original commodore keys because the color. But they could be
technically painted, I guess. You can see the paint on the underside, so they probably
just set ‘em all out and rattle canned them. More VIC-20s, VIC-20 motherboards, Box full
of them here. I’m sure you’ve gotten plenty of familiarity with those. Yeah, I know a
lot about VIC-20 motherboards, now this…. That is uhh, Definitely made by hand. I’m
not sure what the story is on that guy. I don’t know if that has anything to do with
the VIC-20. So I heard you had some other really rare Commodore equipment. Yes, I have
some very rare, what became Commodore equipment. This was kind of an oddball. This guy was
actually an engineering kit.
So, what we have here, of course, is a Kim-1, and possibly a very early model. For those
that don’t know, this is like the Apple-1 of Commodore systems. It predates the PET.
And it’s certainly not the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a recycle shop.
Anyway, we had a look at some other neat systems he had found, such as this Hazeltine system.
And we founds some old Mouser Electronics bags, which was quite the throwback for me,
because these are the exact bags they were using when I worked at Mouser in the mid 1990s.
And of course, now it was time to load all of this stuff up in my car, and honestly I
wasn’t sure if it was all going to fit. I’d definitely have to fold my back seats
down. I was also constantly asking myself where in the world I was going to put all
of this when I got it home. Anyway, we did manage to fit it all in the car. And I headed
back on the long trip back to Texas. It was dusk at this point, and while it might seem
like it would be a pleasant trip home, I actually thought I’d have to commit myself to an
insane asylum after listening to the squeaky styrofoam all of the way home. Imagine listening
to this for 3 and a half hours.
So, now that I’m back home, let’s have a look at one of these VIC-20s. When I pull
the styrofoam off, you can see this huge contrast of color, which is most likely just dirt and
dust. Looking a bit closer, I have a bad feeling there might also be some yellowing going on,
but this was one of the units on the top, so maybe the ones underneath wouldn’t be
as bad.
Obviously what I needed to do was try cleaning the thing off. So here goes. As you can see
just a good 5 minute cleaning job made a dramatic difference, but unfortunately there is some
yellowing of the plastic in the center.
So, at this point you may find yourself asking, “David, what the heck is this thing? You
know, what is this monstrosity that somebody made? And I think there’s something that
I need to explain first. If you go back to the early eighties, like 1981 to to like 1985.
There was no Raspberry Pi. There was no Arduino, right? So, if you building some sort of industrial
control system or something that required a computer to interface with it, the cheapest
thing you could get was going to be a VIC-20. Technically you could get like a ZX81 or a
Timex Sinclair 1000 for cheaper, but the membrane keyboard on that made it very unsuitable for
those types of applications. So, the VIC-20 was often the choice of the day for what today
somebody might use an Arduino for. And so, I did that episode a while back restoring
that old oily nasty VIC-20 and I had speculated in that video that that computer was probably
used in some sort of industrial environment to control some sort of, I don’t know, milling
equipment or something like that. And that was actually really common. I mean, the VIC-20
was way cheaper than an Apple II, and even after the Commodore 64 came out, it was still
half or even sometimes a quarter of the price of the Commodore 64. And if you didn’t need
all of the graphics and sprites and the SID chip and all of that kind of stuff, if you
were just using it to control something, the VIC-20 was a much more logical choice. And
so that’s exactly what we have here. This is actually not the first time I’m seen
one of these. I’ve actually seen them in photographs before because they’ve been
brought up and discussed on facebook a few times and there’s some magazine articles
that you can look at, and I’ll post some pictures of them here. And you can see that
this was used as some sort of control interface for an audio editing system. That’s the
best I can make out. So, in fact, I saw one person make a comparison and say that this
was like the. If you’re familiar with the Video Toaster for the Amiga, and how that
revolutionized video editing, well this was kind of the audio equivalent of that, that
came out a few years earlier. And they used, of course, the VIC-20 for it. Now, I’m actually
really interested to power one of these things on because I don’t know whether its going
to have any custom ROMs in it, or whether that was all handled through the cartridge
interface, which we can’t seem to find any of that left over. So, for those wondering,
by the way, Jeremiah actually picked these up from an abandoned building there in Oklahoma
City that actually used to be the headquarters for where this product was actually manufactured.
So that’s why there were so many of them there.
OK, time to plug this thing in and see what happens. These didn’t come with power supplies,
so I’ll just use mu trusty NuBrick. These particular VIC-20s use the same power supply
as the C64. The earlier models were different, but these are all the later models.
And here we go. Well, it appears to boot up just like a regular VIC-20. I guess there
are no custom ROMs inside. OK, well, let’s try the keyboard. As I suspected, these keys
do exactly what they always did. They simply removed a lot of keys, but the ones that remain
are unchanged.
Well, let’s open it up and see if there is anything different inside. And, I don’t
think so. I am surprised how clean it is inside. This looks like a brand-new VIC-20. There’s
a hint of dust on the motherboard, but that’s it. Also, as far as I can see, everything
on this board is stock. There are no modifications. The keyboard, of course, is a different story.
I can see they probably pulled this tape off at one point and didn’t put it back very
well. Oh, and look at this. They completely cut the shift-lock key out of the board. I
don’t even think they bothered to desolder it.
OK, well, I put it back together and I wanted to see if I could play some games on it. I
tried Cheese and Onion first. Most of the good games for the VIC-20 came on cartridge
and typically those didn’t require much of any keyboard input. So I think this shouldn’t
be a problem. I’ll just plug in the joystick here.
And, as expected. It actually works just fine. Ironically, I would show the game I’m working
on right now for the VIC-20 but I can’t. It requires me to type the LOAD command on
the keyboard, and there’s just no way to do it.
So, I tried a few more games, such as Avenger. This one actually requires that you press
F1 to start the game, which is no problem since that’s one of the keys that are still
left on the keyboard. So, yeah, no problem there.
Same thing with Donkey Kong, it actually uses 3 of the function keys, but again, no problem.
Pole position works fine.
Tetris works fine.
And, I tried one more, Pentagorat. So yeah, I’d say that virtually all cartridge games
will still work fine on one of these, despite the missing keys.
So, let’s take a look at all of this stuff in my garage floor. As you can see, quite
a few filthy VIC-20s. A box of scrap VIC-20s, and of course this stray Atari 2600 that somehow
wound up in the box too. Looking over here, there is a box of cassettes. These are kind
of interesting as they have this little locking mechanism to keep the tape from moving. This
one says DRUMSYS and seems to have, what might be some memory addresses in hexadecimal.
Ahhh. Now this is something! I’ve never seen one of these before, but I recognized
it right away. I’ll explain that here shortly. Needless to say, this is an EPROM programmer
that fits in the Commodore USER port and was most likely used to write EPROMs for their
cartridges. I also found this, which appears to be a user port peripheral too, but seems
to have some audio and MIDI interfaces on board. And I was wrong, it looks like there
are at least a few power supplies in here. I’m not sure I’d want to risk using them,
though. Digging a little deeper, I found an older-style VIC-20 power supply. This is the
2-prong style. And as it turns out, a few of these VIC-20s are indeed the older board
type that have the 2-prong adapter. There were also a couple of RF modulators, both
the old style which is just a black box, and the newer style which is smaller and says
Commodore on it. Fortunately, most people today would not need these since composite
video is everywhere.
And, there were also a few of these in here. This is apparently a metal top piece to some
of their hardware, but that seems to be all I can find of it.
Here we have an almost complete VIC-20 keyboard, except for the shift-lock key, which has already
been removed.
And in the bottom of the box are these strange boards. I’m not sure what these are. They
are hand wired, but have a lot of what appear to be MIDI and audio ports on them. Plus a
few bare VIC-20 motherboards.
Let’s see if we can clean up this eprom programmer. Yeah, it seems to clean up pretty
easily. So, I told you that I’ve never seen one of these, but recognized it right away.
You might ask why. Well, you see, when I was about 11 or 12 years old, I got this book
with my Commodore 128. And, I took this book to school and read through every page. What?
You didn’t know I was a big-time nerd? Anyway, so this book shows all of the official Commodore
products of the era, but also shows a number of 3rd party products. And right there on
one of the first pages you’ll see this! I used to read about this, even though I didn’t
fully understand what it was supposed to actually do. But anyway, here it is. I never thought
I’d see one in person.
So, moving along, I wanted to find out if these bare VIC-20 boards worked or not. All
I need is video and power to get a pretty good idea. And here goes nothing. Well, I
think we can safely assume that one doesn’t work. So, I thought I’d test the second
board and I noticed an empty socket here where the CPU goes. So, no problem. I have a spare
working CPU. I’ll stick that in there. And, this one is dead as a doornail.
However, I feel kind of dumb now. After looking the board over for potential problems I noticed
there’s no friggin RAM chips in the board. I would have noticed an empty socket, but
I guess my brain wasn’t looking for missing chips. And the other one was also missing
RAM as well.
OK, well, I just happened to have some extra VIC-20 RAM chips laying around. I also have
a few sockets, so I thought, what the heck. It’ll only take 5 minutes to see if these
boards work. I was curious if these were scrap boards from defective units, or if they were
actually experimenting with them, for example to add extra RAM or something like that. So,
depending on whether the board works once I add RAM chips, will help answer that question.
And lookie there! It works! The screen is a bit dark, but this is a common issue I’ve
seen working on VIC-20s. It just needs a little adjustment. If you remove the metal cover
over the video chip, there is a little potentiometer in there you can adjust. And as you can see
you can go really dark or super bright. But, I think this setting here is just about perfect.
So, the question is, why did they remove the RAM chips? Hmmm. Makes me wonder.
Moving along, we need to talk about this KIM-1. This is a very rare and valuable piece of
computing history. The trouble is, I know next to nothing about it, other than historical
facts. I have no idea how to use it or even test it. And looking at this old power supply
that came with it, I wouldn’t dare even consider plugging this thing into power. I
mean, just look at that. Eww.
I do think this slot here was added on to the board, this is not standard equipment.
As you can see it is soldered to a whole bunch of places on the bottom of the board. I suspect
this was used for a video card. Keep in mind the KIM-1 was never meant to connect to a
display. Unfortunately, no video card was found with the board.
And so this raises a lot of questions about what the heck to do with this thing. The board
itself is really dirty and grungy. I can probably clean that up. But what to do with the rest
of it?
So, there’s several considerations to think about with this KIM-1. First of all, the question
of “does it work?” And then, I have to counter that question with “does it matter?”
I mean, because nobody is going to sit around and play with a KIM-1 in the same regard that
nobody is going to sit around and play with an Apple-1. Now, if you really wanted to play
with a KIM-1 that badly, there are some replica boards which would make far more sense than
playing around with an original one. So, for example, I don’t know that I would want
to desolder the CPU or some of these ceramic chips and replace them with modern ones just
to fix it and make it work. I think it probably looks better just keeping it the way that
it is. Obviously I do want to clean it up, and I’m investigating what the best way
would be to do that. But, here’s the other thing. What to do with this power supply and
this ugly green rotted piece of wood that it’s attached to? Those are not original.
I mean, they didn’t come with the board. That was something the user added. Same with
this video socket or whatever this expansion socket is that they added here. So, should
I get rid of those, then mount this board in something else? Like some kind of glass
display case or something like that? I just don’t know. These are things that I’ll
need to think about. I’ll probably have to follow this up with another video at some
point. Anyway, I welcome any suggestions on what the best thing to do with this. Oh, and
by the way, I don’t actually even plan on keeping this. There’s actually, it’s not
well known, but I think there is a new computer museum that’s going to be opening up in
Austin here maybe next year. And my plan is to donate this to them. That way it will be
on display for people to see.
So what will happen to the VIC-20s? Well, I’ve picked out the 3 best ones and I plan
to donate one to the Home Computer Museum in the Netherlands, another one to Bo Zimmerman’s
collection, and the 3rd will go with the KIM-1 to Austin. That’s the plan anyway. I’m
donating the rest of them to my friend Chris Haslage who also came over and helped me clean
and test the rest of them. He works for an organization called “One up on Cancer”
which is a non profit for helping cancer patients, based here in Dallas and has a video game
theme to everything they do. They are going to finish cleaning and testing these and will
be auctioning them off. So if you are interested in getting one of these, I’ll put a link
in the description field explaining where to keep an eye out for these.