The pickup Trolling Trademe one night I did my usual filter of 'faulty' and this came up in the search results. It was a Sound Blaster X 2.1 Sound System at $1 reserve, I placed a $1 bid on it and woke up in the morning to find that I won it for a whole $1. A bit of...
The Trademe find that started it all This is what started this project, a $38 trademe buy for an AdvanTech 486 on a Card. Listed as Untested with a 486DX2 and 8MB of ram, how could I go wrong. I had a DOS machine already but I liked the idea of an ultra compact but...
Finding the Right MT32Pi Hat Since nobody can afford a real Roland MT32 a bunch of smart people had figured out how to use a Raspberry Pi to emulate it as a hardware device, which was much more in my price range. I did some digging and found that most Pi hats were for...
Laying out the parts I have a really old test bench that came with a motherboard I bought years ago but I wanted to some more modular and more sturdy that could work for both modern and vintage setups. It wasn't until I came across this video from Tech Tangents that I...
Digging the Apple IIc and Laser 128 out of the hoard These were an extremely grubby set of machines that came out of an estate sale. They seemed to be sitting for a very long time with a pile of classic macs. BUT, I had been looking for a Laser 128 for a while as I...
Coming across the elusive Voodoo 2 12MB cards Somehow, I managed to get 2 3DFx Voodoo 2 12MB cards and the SLI cable. Both cards came from various estate sales over the years and I even gave one away not knowing how it worked. As most people other than me would know,...
I have had this Commodore C64 in my possession for a while at this stage and it just sat there in the corner unused beyond making sure it powered up. Something about the colour always just bummed me out and I didn't want to use it. So the goal was to bring it back to...
The coolest and yet slowest Mac of them all, the Color Classic. I had been after one of these for a while and then a friend was offering up a non working, but cosmetically good condition unit. I was told it had been attempted to be recapped but it did not come back to...
This Willem Eprom Programmer V4.5 build should have been an easy one but it turns out, when you have the wrong parts without knowing it, it turns into a much harder job. Building the unit Most of this build was fairly straight forward other than I had to swap the ZIFF...
This was an odd pickup where the machine had a cracked screen AND a dead SSD, so the only way to replace the SSD was to also replace the screen. Which I found out was not a very fun job. Ordering the screen I scored a new to me screen on Trademe for $10 and when it...