About 2 years ago I acquired a boxed commodore 128 and a couple 1571 disk drives in their respective boxes. The person handling them was turned away from the dump so I picked it up. I had a lot of things going on at the time in my life so I put them in my storage shed where they would be safe.
Now that I’m recovering from surgery and I’m relegated to lightweight lifting, I found this to be the perfect time to take it out of storage and see what I found.
The boxes weren’t perfect but definitely not bad. They have some typical outside wear and tear but nothing super drastic.
This really felt like a throwback to those times. The sense of adventure and playing with something new and undiscovered.
I grew up without a lot of money. Me and my friend would dumpster dive behind thrift stores for old computers that were being tossed. Most of the time it was a Radio Shack TRS-80 or an Apple 128k computer or something along those lines. This is my first experience with a Commodore.
This computer is in fabulous shape physically. Everything looks very clean and there’s no major scuffs or dings. It’s looking pretty nice. Much better than anything I found in the dumpster as a kid.
I found a stack of floppy disks In the box with the commodore. Handwritten labels; the nosy kid inside of me has to see what’s on them!
After setting it down on the table and hooking it up to my PVM, I flipped it on to see what would happen. What I saw was a very distorted screen with an off color palette. At first, I thought the power supply was undervolted but it turns out that you’re supposed to test the 9 volt AC across both 9 volt lines. Not each line individually and ground. Live and learn. I could tell it was alive because it was taking commands and reading disks. I figured something in the video circuit was malfunctioning so I ordered a dead boot cartridge and a new power supply to help with troubleshooting. In the meantime I tried loading some of those loose floppies. The one labeled “Space Movie” was the most interesting..
I was genuinely surprised to find 8-bit boobies on a rando floppy disk. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The picture was absolutely terrible. I had a 1902 monitor at my friend’s place in Long Beach. I picked it up the next morning.
I’m pretty pleased with how this thing is coming together. All I had at the moment was a 40 line composite cable. I got it all hooked up and was holy expecting to see the mess again…
I was amazed. The picture was insanely better. After playing around with both monitors a little bit I figured out that the C128 really blooms on composite unless you turn the saturation on the monitor down quite a bit. It was almost as if the red and blue were super high.
“Michelle” was looking finer than ever. I don’t have any software for it, so I’ll likely set up a BBS using a Pi1541 and a SD2IEC.
Stay tuned!