Refurb weekend: Atari Stacy

Ask any Atari Stacy owner how to open an Atari Stacy and the answer is always "never, if you can avoid it." So I'll just lead with this spoiler image after the refurb to prove this particular escapade didn't completely end in tragedy:

Stacys are horrible machines to work on. Nobody likes being inside of one. The daughterboards don't have keyed connectors (including the power supply!) and are constantly attempting to come free, the display "cable" is actually a Medusa's wig of wires that like to short (!), the top case is a huge bulky sheet of increasingly fragile plastic that somehow has to fit around the floppy drive yet down on the keyboard simultaneously, and the entire laptop is an uneasy sandwich held together by a small set of screws in plastic races that strip and fracture with little provocation. So why do we tolerate this very bad, bad, bad, bad girl? Because most of us will never see the much lighter and streamlined STBook in the flesh, let alone own one. If you really want a portable all-in-one Atari ST system, the Stacy is likely the best you're gonna do.

And we're going to make it worse, because this is the lowest-binned Stacy with the base 1MB of memory. I want to put the full 4MB the hardware supports in it to expand its operating system choices. It turns out that's much harder to do than I ever expected, making repairing its bad left mouse button while we're in there almost incidental — let's just say the process eventually involved cutting sheet metal. I'm not entirely happy with the end result but it's got 4MB, it's back together and it boots. Grit your teeth while we do a post-mortem on this really rough Refurb Weekend.

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.