Yesterday we went out and collected what was left of the Atari collection we bought, so today we set up pretty much everything in one place. This is why we need to build furniture:

This collection comes to us from a man I was in an Atari computer club with back in the '80s, when I was an Overly-Enthusiastic 'Tween pirate. So while I don't have my personal childhood 8-bit and ST computers anymore, this is actually stuff I remember. I specifically remember the ICD enclosure with the Apple sticker stuck on it for example. The ST actually was lovingly packed in a suitcase with custom foam for the machine, Spectre GCR and external floppy. However when we got it home the foam utterly disintegrated all over our dining room, so that's all being replaced just in case we ever take it anywhere again, but I can definitely remember that case being lugged into meetups back in the day as well.

There are also lots of things I've never seen in person before, like the Atari-branded tablet, light pen or the Indus GT drive. Apparently you can retire quite comfortably off the sale of an Indus GT, at least according to eBay weirdos. I don't know, I just remember they looked real cool in magazine ads.

It should be noted that all those boxes of disks, and the other boxes of stuff not pictured, contain nearly all fully licensed commercial software and manuals. That's why I haven't posted any shots of ST demos and cracked game intros and stuff. There aren't any :-) Everything is legal and has manuals, which is great. One of the big issues I had when I was a kid is that yeah, I had tons of games, but no idea how half of them worked, not a problem for Jumpman, but big problem for SCRAMM or Silent Service or MULE, at least I never knew how to play them. While this definitely wasn't a "Gamers" computer, it's really going to be interesting to stick Natalie in front of Calamus or PageStream and show her the state of the art for 1988 design software. Spectrum 512 has already left us both stumped. I've got some re-learning to do for sure.

Natalie was super excited playing with the drawing tablet and I guess I might have to get a CRT just so we can try the light pen out too. We're also looking forward to projects with the AtariLab temperature and light modules, which just have a really interesting history.

My loose plan is to get a GoTek so as not to have to deal with physical disks as much, and a SCSI to SD that can live in that ICD enclosure (along with probably 15 Raspberry Pis!) so that everything is gainfully employed once its new home is ready. To use the Spectre GCR I'll need high resolution mode, which should be achievable with a VGA converter. Color requires a monitor to support a 15Khz refresh rate (or use of an expensive scan doubler), but monochrome should work just fine. I'm waiting eagerly for CheckMate1500Plus.com to start selling their "ultimate" retro computing monitors to actually solve that problem once and for all.

Once we get the new storage built we'll have much more room to get in and start opening stuff up on the bench and start some repairs.

Inventory

On the 8-bit side, inventory-wise, we've got:
130XE
XE Game System
XEGS Light Gun
1010 Tape Drive
1050 Disk Drive
Indus GT Disk Drive
CX80 Trackball
CX77 Touch Tablet
CX75 Light Pen
AtariLab Light Module
AtariLab Temperature Module

Of that, the XEGS seems to be totally fine, while the 130XE tests bad on a bunch of its RAM, so that will be a project. I don't know whether I'll just replace the 64x1 DIPs that are in there now or go for some over-the-top modern upgrade that might be easier to source. It's also likely got a bad keyboard membrane, but I have a spare to replace that on hand.

On the ST side:
Atari 1040 ST
SC1224 Color monitor
SF-314 Floppy Drive
ICD FA-ST 2x SCSI disk enclosure
Spectre GCR Mac Emulator
There's also an internal PC emulator mod that I've not tested yet
Gravis analog joystick

The external floppy at the very least has a bad power switch, and doesn't seem to do anything. There are a total of 4 SCSI drives spread between two enclosures, but none of them spun up immediately either, so some work to do there. The Atari mouse doesn't work (yet!), so we got a DE9 to USB adapter so we can use modern mice. However that Gravis stick will work as a mouse, and was crucial to getting the machine up and tested.

There's one broken key slider stem that can be seen in the picture, we have the key and got a whole bag of replacement sliders so that's handled.

The external mouse & joystick switch box kind of resolves the problem of those ports being buried under the machine.

I'm just sticking this here because it seems Mr. Santorum is reportedly expending some effort to get this photo removed from anywhere it's found on the Internet.


So here's a photo of Rick Santorum with his arm around Russian spy and notorious honey trap Maria Butina. I mean, I'm not saying he fucked her, though it seems many other Republicans did. So if he didn't fuck her, then Santorum either missed out or dodged a bullet depending on how you look at it.

Josh Hawley memes are the only thing trending and showing up in my feed right now.

Kinzinger and Cheney are hopefully having to do some real thinking. The fact that their entire party is still either in avid support of Trump or had no problem with endorsing him while campaigning in 2020. This was so obvious for so long, and those two are the "Your Lifelong Conservative Parents" of Congress. They will not be in Congress in January by the looks of things.

One line, just barely too far for TWO members of congress. They get zero support from their peers in public..

Their leaders have run screaming away from their statements on the 6th and 7th. They are all actively stonewalling and obstructing the committee. Ignoring subpoenas. Literally /running/ from them, like with their actual legs. "Liberal Lies and Conspiracy". RINOs.

This could really really blow things up.

Hopefully we win.

But I'm glad to see no time was wasted scoring cheap political points after the speech against /exactly that thing/ we just watched.

Note: I say "We" a lot. Natalie has been doing at least as much of this work as me. She has a whole method that she likes for the tantalum caps so she pretty much installed all of those. She even discharged the CRT. We learned later that the Classic seems to bleed the CRT automatically which is nice. I'm still sticking a screwdriver back there every time though just to make sure.

Good and bad news on the Mac Classic front.

If you read in part one, we over-paid a princely sum for a Mac which "Works as intended", but which should really have been "For parts or repair" for 1/3 what we paid.

So I'm personally beholden to make this fucker run regardless of personal cost in blood or treasure at this point.

"Rookies do very tidy job and rightfully feel pleased"

We recapped the motherboard on the Mac Classic. We got a heat gun, generous with the tape all around to make sure we didn't mess up any other components, and quickly and easily got the old parts off, we cleaned the pads up with solder wick, tinned them with new solder and put in the replacement tantalum caps, applying a bit of flux and cleaning regularly along the way. No damaged pads, everything went extremely smoothly regardless of which of us held the iron. Natalie really did most of the installation of the new parts.

Before:

After:

"Rookie makes Rookie Mistake"

The eagle-eyed among you already see why my office smelled like shit all day last Saturday. Of course, tantalums don't note polarity the same way any electrolytic I've dealt with has. So we installed them all backwards.

I know I have seen at least one person mention that while doing a recap and replacing electrolytics with tantalums. In fact, in the box from the company we ordered the replacements from:

So it's not like there weren't ample people trying to get this information into my head. Oh well, happens. Here's the before & after, after the second recap:

I also took the cardboard shield off the high voltage board and saw sticky burnt electrolyte gack on the back of the board. That gack was the smell that took this machine beyond just "nicotine soaked" when you turned it on.

We've removed the high voltage board and will re-cap that in Part 3.

I'm in no position to recommend the hot air station we got, but it was just "not quite the cheapest one on Amazon". Came with some extras like a pair of side cutters and a couple pairs of tweezers, so that was helpful.

The OS on the laptop I'm typing on goes back probably at least 3 years and spans a couple of different laptops that I've swapped between. I've done dist-upgrades on it and kept it current, and use it for hours a day. A couple of things stand out to show how little "work work" I do on this.

I tried to traceroute something and traceroute wasn't installed.

I was looking in my terminal config and the scrollback is only 1000 lines and not unlimited.