A mostly merry Southern Hemisphere Commodore Christmas

A merry Christmas and happy holidays from the Southern Hemisphere, where it's our year to be with my wife's family in regional New South Wales, Australia. One of my wife's relatives had an "old Commodore" in their house and asked if I wanted it. Stupid question, yeah?

So they brought over, in their original boxes, a Commodore 128D (PAL) with Commodore 1802 monitor, Commodore MPS-1250 dot matrix printer and a separate box of magazines, circulars and boxed software. Let's fire it up!

Composite and hard reset mods for the Tandyvision One

I still have my literal first home computer (the Tomy Tutor), and it so happens I also have my literal first game console: the Tandyvision One, Tandy Radio Shack's label variant of the Mattel Intellivision Master Component.

In another happy coincidence, my first console, like my first home computer, was also an early 16-bit system: in this case powered by the General Instrument CP1610, famous for its use of 10-bit "decle" instructions stored on specialized ROMs in Inty cartridges. This was a family system and did lots of two-player duty with my father and sisters. Although I still have nearly all of our old cartridges, even the manuals and controller overlays, nowadays I play with a Cuttle Cart 3 and an Intellivoice speech synthesizer module.

Like my original Tutor, this is one system I'd never part with, so if I were going to make some tweaks to it this would be the unit. We're going to do two mods in this article, neither particularly complex but nonetheless handy: composite video and sound outputs for improved quality and flexibility, and a power cycle hard reset button for convenience and less wear on the power switch. Some drilling and soldering required but not very much.

The Hall SC-VGA-2 video processor, the Atari ST and NeXTSTEP: more tales of the unscreenshotable

A periodic fascination on this blog is figuring out better ways to get better screenshots of our classic systems, which often hail from the Wild Wild West/East in terms of video standards (read all entries in this series). Naturally the best way is a bitwise direct grab of the framebuffer, but that's only possible if there's sufficient operating system support. This support is obviously absent for things like boot messages (especially important when investigating NetWare on the Power Mac 6100), so we need to figure out a way to capture that information. My capture box of choice is currently an Inogeni VGA2USB3, which is small, self-contained, USB-powered, highly compatible and makes high quality grabs of anything you can wire into composite or a VGA HD-15 connector up to 1080p, but is limited to 60Hz refresh rates. Various solutions like the OSSC exist, but these are more oriented to arcades and consoles rather than (our primary interest) workstations, and the Pro in particular isn't cheap.

While you might be able to trick the hardware into emitting a compatible signal, that's not good enough or even possible with several of my machines. Previously my problem child was astro, my SAIC Galaxy 1100, a modified PA-RISC HP 9000/712 crammed into a MIL-SPEC portable case with a fabulous built-in flat panel. These machines ran HP-UX 10.10 in their original heyday, but this particular system runs NeXTSTEP 3.3 for PA-RISC during the brief period of time NeXT supported the architecture and was a big hit at the Vintage Computer Festival West a few years ago. Its flat panel runs at an odd 62Hz and the external VGA port only generates a 60Hz signal for 640x480 (all other resolutions use different refresh rates), which is hopeless for running NeXTSTEP. However, now I have a new candidate I'd like to get some grabs off: a particularly problematic member of the Atari ST family which has been the subject of a long-running and highly frustrating extended Refurb Weekend. You'll get to meet this bad girl soon enough. The standard ST high resolution mode is 640x400 — at 71.2Hz. I can get a picture from it with my trusty NEC flat panel, but not with the Inogeni.

The usual solution to this is a scan converter, but those can be expensive and inconvenient. Here's one I picked up used on eBay for $2. Yes, really. It cost more to ship it.

This is the Hall Research Technologies SC-VGA-2, sold as a "VGA/HDTV Video Processor." In addition to slicing, dicing and pureeing, apparently, it will take any of a bundle of input formats and both rescale and resample them on the fly into the VGA or HDTV signal you desire, including 60Hz rates. This came from a seller specializing in teleprompter equipment and Hall still sells an HDMI version with additional resolutions ... for around US$500. However, this or the slightly newer SC-VGA-2A and SC-VGA-2B are all relatively common devices and found substantially cheaper used. Let's try it out and show some sample output, including those delicious NeXTSTEP system messages and some ST grabs.

One-parting some Commodore 64 utilities for fun and profit

I've got a few retrocomputing bucket list items I'm slowly working down, and a couple of them involve some little Commodore 64 games I've had kicking around on the backburner. However, every game needs media assets, and while there are many great tools for doing art on your present-day workstation and exporting it, sometimes you just want what you used to work with — in as convenient and quick-loading a way as possible that blends with modern emulation workflows. So here's two I tweaked and one-parted — Ultrafont+ and DOODLE! — and some tips for making self-contained tools like these yourself.

The unreleased Commodore HHC-4's secret identity

Once upon a time (and that time was Winter CES 1983), Commodore announced what was to be their one and only handheld computer, the Commodore HHC-4. It was never released and never seen again, at least not in that form. But it turns out that not only did the HHC-4 actually exist, it also wasn't manufactured by Commodore — it was a Toshiba.

Like Superman had Clark Kent, the Commodore HHC-4 had a secret identity too: the Toshiba Pasopia Mini IHC-8000, the very first portable computer Toshiba ever made. And like Clark Kent was Superman with glasses, compare the real device to the Commodore marketing photo and you can see that it's the very same machine modulo a plastic palette swap. Of course there's more to the story than that.

Ward Christensen dies

There was initially some issue verifying this, but there appears to be direct confirmation now that Ward Christensen passed away October 11 at the age of 78, co-founder of the pioneering Computerized Bulletin Board System in February 1978 with Randy Suess — now believed to be the first BBS — and developer of the XMODEM transfer protocol. Although his notional job was at IBM, where he worked for 54 years, he became better known for his prolific public domain software output which was widely used in the early 1980s and his innovations with computer-based telecommunication. He was reportedly found dead at his Illinois home after a welfare check on October 13. Ars Technica has a nice summation. Rest in peace.

Refurb weekend: the Symbolics MacIvory Lisp machine I have hated

Every collector has that machine, the machine they sunk so much time and, often, money into that they would have defenestrated it years ago except for all the aforementioned time and money. Yours truly is no exception.

That machine is my first Lisp Machine and my only one actually using real Lisp Machine hardware, this Symbolics MacIvory III in a Macintosh IIci host. To date it's cost me over $6000 total, primarily its initial purchase price, but also to rehabilitate it and just keep it alive. That's nearly as much as what I paid out of pocket for my $7300 (in 2018) POWER9 Raptor Talos II Linux workstation and my $10,000+ IBM POWER6 server, which I acquired in 2010 and in 2024 dollars would be over $14,000 — and both of those machines have been substantially less troublesome.

For those of you unfamiliar with the general world of Lisp machines, they are, as their name implies, workstations entirely designed around the Lisp programming language. That doesn't just mean using conventional processors with a Lisp runtime either: these devices are built to run Lisp from the silicon up with specific hardware support. (Some of these systems could also run Prolog, my personal favourite AI-adjacent language. We'll play with a surprising small Prolog implementation in a future article.) They existed in highly technical environments as workhorses of the first wave of AI hysteria (you crazy kids today with your LLMs) for applications like natural language processing and expert systems. The genre more-or-less flourished from the end of the 1970s to the early 1990s and included some of the first systems to implement advances like bitmapped displays, networking and pointer devices. In turn, those unusual capabilities caused them to also develop distinctive user interfaces for their unique feature set, years before today's GUI and keyboard conventions we almost unconsciously take for granted were even conceived of. Working with a Lisp machine can be a remarkably different user experience from modern computing and the occasionally jarring nature of those differences isn't something present-day emulators fully capture.

Unfortunately, their rarity also makes them the whitest of white elephants sometimes. Besides what I had to do to get it working properly to start with, the hard drive started timing out and it randomly froze during boot or shortly afterwards. (There was also the matter of me never finishing its setup, let alone getting it networked.) I'm not letting this benighted thing die on me after all I've put into it — it's time for a Refurb Weekend.