Hackaday Retro Edition: The Second Most Valuable Home Computer

February 15, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 38 Comments

This will come to no surprise to anyone who has ever talked to me for more than a few minutes, but one of my guilty Internet pleasures is heading over to eBay’s ‘vintage computing’ category, sorting by highest price, and grabbing a cup of coffee. It’s really just window shopping and after a while you start seeing the same things over and over again; Mac 512s with a starting bid far more than what they’re worth, a bunch of old PC-compatible laptops, and a shocking amount of old software. For the last week I’ve been watching this auction. It’s a Commodore 65 prototype – one of between 50 and 200 that still exist – that has over 60 bids, the highest for over $20,000 USD. It’s the most successful vintage computer auction in recent memory, beating out the usual high-profile auctions like Mac 128s and Altair 8800s. The most valuable home computer is the Apple I, but if you’re wondering what the second most valuable one is, here you go.

The C65 is not a contemporary of the C64, or even our own [Bil Herd]’s C128. This was the Amiga era, and the C65 was intended to be the last great 8-bit machine. From a page dedicated to the C65, it’s pretty much what you would expect: the CPU is based on a 6502, with the on-die addition of two 6526 CIA I/O controllers. The standard RAM is 128kB, expandable to 8MB by an Amiga 500-like belly port. Sound would be provided by two SIDs, and the video is based on the VIC-III, giving the C65 a pallette of up to 4096 colors and a resolution of up to 1280×400.

There’s still a little over five hours to go in the auction, but the current $21000 price should go even higher in the final hour; a C65 auction from a few years ago fetched $20100 for ‘a computer with missing parts’. This auction is for a complete, working system that has remained intact since it was discovered during the Commodore closing.

Update: Auction finished for $22,862.01 USD. For historical purposes, here’s a flickr album, a video, and another video.

The Hackaday Retro Edition is our celebration of old computers doing something modern, in most cases loading the old, no CSS or Javascript version of our site.

If old and rare computers are your sort of thing, Hackaday will be at the VCF East this year.

If you have an old computer you’d like featured, just load up the retro site, snap some pictures, have them developed, and send them in.

Hackaday Links: January 18, 2015

January 18, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

A little while ago, we complained that there aren’t many projects using the Microview, a very cool Arduino and OLED thing that might be just too big for a ring. [Johannes] answered the call with a slot car track timer. He’s using an infrared distance sensor to count off lap times for his slot car track and a mini thermal printer to print out the times. Video right here.

Too many cables in your freshman college dorm room? Here’s the solution.

Our Internet travels frequently take us to strange auctions (we’re still looking for a US Mail truck, btw), but this one takes the cake. 24kt gold plates that were flown in space for five and a half years weighing 6,015.5 grams (212.191 oz). At the current price of $1277.06/oz, this auction should go for $270,980 USD. I’m 99% sure this was part of the Long Duration Exposure Facility, but I have no clue why this much gold was flown. Surely they could have done the same amount of science with only a hundred thousand dollars worth of gold, right?

So here’s this, but this isn’t your everyday, “put an Arduino in a vibrator” crowdfunding campaign. No, they actually have some great tutorials. Did you know that a stroke sensor looks like shag carpeting? [Scott] tells us, “I believe the founders are all graduate students getting PhDs in something or other, starting a sex toy company on the side.” More power to ’em.

Speaking of dildonics, the guy who coined that term will be giving one of the keynotes at the Vintage Computer Festival East this year. Yes, we’ll be there in full force.

VCF East Wrapup MegaPost

April 9, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

VCF East, the fabulous retrocomputing festival held in Wall, NJ this last weekend was a blast. We had a great time, dropped t-shirts and stickers to just about anyone who wanted one, took a lot of pictures, and shot a lot of video. Now that it’s over it’s time for the post-mortem, with one insanely long post.

We saw some very cool stuff that merited its own post, and much more that we simply didn’t have time to video. The previous posts from VCF East:

There’s still tons more, including a tour of the retrocomputer museum that hosted VCF East. The biggest talk was from [Dave Haynie], lord of the Amiga giving part three of a multi-year talk on the soap opera that was Commodore International.

Click that ‘Read more…’ to see all this.

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VCF East: Old Computers, New Games

April 8, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 2 Comments

While the vintage computer festival in Wall, NJ had just about every vintage app you could imagine – multiple varities of *NIXes, pre-Zork Dungeon, BASIC interpreters of all capabilities, and just about every game ever released for 8-bit Commodore systems – there was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a distinct lack of modern programs written for these retro systems. Yes, despite there being people still curled up to keyboards and writing games for vintage systems, modern software was a strange oddity last weekend.

There were two wonderful exceptions, however. The first was Fahrfall, a game for the TRS-80 Color Computer. We’ve seen Fahrfall before when [John Linville] wrote it for the 2012 RetroChallenge Winter Warmup. The game itself is a re-imagining of Downfall for the Atari Jaguar, with the graphics scaled down immensely. The basic idea of the game is to jump down, ledge to ledge, on a vertically scrolling screen. Hit the walls or the bottom, and you’re dead. It’s a great game that probably would have sold well had it been a contemporary release.

Next up is a rather impressive port of Flappy Bird for the TI-99. The video does not do this game justice, although part of that might just be the awesome Amiga monitor used for the display. This game was brought in by [Jeff Salzman] of Vintage Volts who isn’t the author of the game. Honestly, the video doesn’t do the graphics any justice. It really is a great looking port that’s just as addictive as the Android/iDevice original.

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VCF East: PetPix, Streaming Images To A Commodore PET

April 6, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

PETaday

Thought the Vintage Computer Festival would just be really old computers with hundreds of people pecking 10 PRINT “HELLO” 20 GOTO 10? Yeah, there’s plenty of that, but also some very cool applications of new hardware. [Michael Hill] created PetPix, a video player for the Commodore PET and of course the C64.

PetPix takes any video file – or streaming video off a camera – and converts 8×8 pixel sections of each frame to PETSCII. All the processing is done on a Raspberry Pi and then sent over to the PET for surprisingly fluid video.

There is, of course, a video of PetPix available below. There are also a few more videos from [Michael] going over how PetPix works.

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