It’s a duck blur!

Mastodon: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@prokyonid

Gopher: gopher://gopher.club/1/users/prokyonid/

  • 1 Post
  • 19 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle





  • Had an electrician go through the entire place when we first bought the house so we could get safe three-prong outlets in place of the two-prong ungrounded outlets that were originally there. Didn’t do a full rewire because there’s no ceiling access - originally, the only heatsource for the house was electric radiant ceilings, though a couple baseboards were installed at some point after initial construction. The wiring for the sunroom’s A/C is run through a conduit on the outside of the house. I replaced the original through-wall unit shortly after we moved in, and I’ve seen that whole circuit.

    What about the interior wall, against what used to be the exterior of the house?




  • I’ll recommend some modern keyboards that are suitable for your retrokit - I’m a big fan of Unicomp keyboards myself, though they do not do N-key rollover, if that is something important to you. Their lighter shade (they call it ‘white’) is more of a grey than a beige.

    You may also consider USB keyboards that can handle P/S2 protocol with use of an adapter (not all of them can do this very well). I have a WASD keyboard for my modern PC that I sometimes also use with my older machines. I would recommend them, but they appear to be out of business.











  • Just a couple years ago, I could have pointed you in the direction of some really good recyclers that could get you enough parts to build a fun 486 or Socket 5/7-style machine, if you weren’t too picky about what you got. Unfortunately now the supply has either dried up or the recyclers think their extreme budget clone parts are solid gold. The only time I find parts now is when I stumble across them at thrift stores or estate sales.


  • Someone on the SDF Mastodon got bent out of shape because I suggested a computer with those specs might be considered ‘retro’, haha.

    Right now, the only retro machines I have accessible are my Tandy 1000TX and my C64, but my actual preferred machine for most things retrocomputing is one that I built out of a bunch of my spare parts:

    Biostar M6TLC Slot 1 Motherboard PGA 370 Slotket 500MHz Mendocino Celeron PGA370 CPU 128MB of 168 pin SDRAM Sparkle SP5200 RIVA TNT2 Vanta AGP Soundblaster 16 CT2940 ISA 3Com Etherlink III ISA 1.44MB FDD, DVD-ROM, 20GB HDD Running MSDOS 7.1 (stripped from Windows 98SE)

    The only picture I have of it was taken in the dark with a Mavica, so I won’t bother posting it, haha.