Commodore SX-64 - Faults & Fixes
Added 2016-10-04 18:40:20 +0000 UTCOver the last month I've been attempting to repair a couple of Commodore SX-64 computers. In this video you can find out why & how and whether I was successful, all condensed from weeks into minutes. There are some useful links in the video text box on youtube - which can be reached by clicking the title bar in the video.
I've still to write my accompanying blog post for this, so after I do that in the morning, the video will go public.
By the way I'm going to finally attempt to re-shoot the intro in 4K tomorrow. I'll have to get the original reel to reel machine out of the loft - my main R2R machine spins too quickly to form the letters.
Comments
Thanks...well there is a design on thingverse <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1561848" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1561848</a> but I tried to order it and after a day I got an automated refund with the message 'this design cannot be printed' which is a shame as I spent another £20+ getting the pins and cable sent from an electronics component supplier. I have no idea what the problem was. Now whilst I can get by with ribbon cables and cut-off connectors, ideally I'd want something a lot closer to the original.
Techmoan
2016-10-13 21:57:44 +0000 UTCI was wondering that if I had the measurements of the special data cable if I could possibly talk a friend of mine who has a Zortrax 3D printer into creating some replacement casings?
Rachel Maxwell
2016-10-13 21:47:56 +0000 UTCI wasn't aware of that - it hasn't given me any issues so far - albeit that I haven't got any cartridge games to try on it either.
Techmoan
2016-10-10 21:28:22 +0000 UTCReally nice video. Great to be reminded that there was a time where a regular person could perform some common sense repairs on their computer - the Amiga is much the same way. So you haven't had problems with the cartridge slot? That's always been one of the complaints with this model - since the cart slot is so far from the motherboard, you can get some line noise that can interfere with running software.
bohus blahut
2016-10-10 21:15:06 +0000 UTCSimilarly for a few years I could make hay while the sun shined...by being 'the guy in the office that could do computer stuff'. Making posters, videos, newsletters etc. Gradually these things became commonplace or unnecessary. so then I had to fall back upon my traditional office skllls...which were minimal. I now work for myself, and every year I award myself 10/10 on my appraisal review and a free steak dinner.
Techmoan
2016-10-06 15:37:42 +0000 UTCAnother fab video. It's neat that there's a community behind practically everything there ever was, and you could source the right replacement components for such an esoteric machine! The video reminded me of when I was a kid, fixing the computers and disk drives at my school. The grown ups thought I was some kind of genius. All I ever did was take the thing apart, find the part that looked or smelled like it had overheated, and buy a replacement IC at the Really Good Electronics Store that was a twenty minute bike ride away. If that wasn't the fault, I was only out about four bucks.
Andy Ihnatko
2016-10-06 15:24:37 +0000 UTCDesoldering is always a pain, looks as good a job as the last time I had to replace a chip!
Sam
2016-10-05 20:13:09 +0000 UTCIt's unfortunate that most of the comments on this video are about de-soldering techniques....something I have almost no interest in...and yet I've accidentally created 300 comments about it. The first,one or two are fine....but by the 200th it gets a bit repetitive. I was hoping the disclaimer would put some people off...but it's had the reverse effect and made them more determined to tell me what I'm doing wrong. I would have liked to see some interesting c64 tips and chat...but it's just become a major electrical repair technique bore fest in the comments, so I'm closing my browser and watching the Westworld premier instead.
Techmoan
2016-10-05 18:00:03 +0000 UTCIt's unlikely - I think the last time I was there was in the 1980s shopping for school shoes (slip-on black ones with the gold chain across the front with a red 'jewel' in the middle)- but you never know, thanks for the offer.
Techmoan
2016-10-05 11:21:37 +0000 UTCEnjoyed this as usual Mat, if you're ever up Rossendale way (and you're allowed to "be with people") again feel free to drop in for a cuppa, I WFH most days.
Paul Stables
2016-10-05 10:47:58 +0000 UTCFor me this is probably the best outro I've done. The idea felt solid, the script was pretty tight, actual shooting and editing only took half a day, and there's a light hearted air about it that surely no generation snowflaker can feel threatened by.
Techmoan
2016-10-05 10:08:50 +0000 UTC"i don't watch the minecraft videos, so that doesn't leave an aweful lot left" hahaahaha
David Simmons
2016-10-05 09:55:34 +0000 UTCAt the moment, I'll just keep both - it would be best to sell the US machine, but after all that effort with the desoldering, I feel attached to it.
Techmoan
2016-10-05 09:51:55 +0000 UTCThe Sugru is a great idea - I've got plenty of it - but keep forgetting about it. I've also got a couple of new plugs coming from Germany - they're the only all plastic ones I've seen (at least that's what they look like on the pictures) - so unlike the metal ones they should cut down without disintegrating. I want to figure out the best way to construct a neat replacement cable, so I can share the tip with the C64 community, as a repayment for all the help I got with the problems I had.
Techmoan
2016-10-05 09:51:02 +0000 UTCYour videos truly makes me happy!!!
Cria Artem
2016-10-05 09:46:33 +0000 UTCI guess he does rub against the SX-64's housing as he repairs them.
Cria Artem
2016-10-05 09:44:58 +0000 UTCAlways wanted the SX 'back in the day'. Still want one .. but the prices still put me off :P
Michael Turner-Craig
2016-10-05 08:50:03 +0000 UTCLoved to see the vintage computer. Sadly I am old enough to remember playing the first version of sim city on a friends SX-64, on the built in screen, which was fascinating and headache inducing at the same time. This computer was somewhat relevant still in the mid 80s at this time. Nice to see it in action again, and the games seem to have better playability than I remember. I do remember my Dad getting our first computer as well a Sinclair ZX-81 with the 16K expansion ram. God I am getting old. Anyways enough nostalgia. I thoroughly enjoy your excellent videos and the trip down memory lane.
Vaughn B.
2016-10-05 02:25:35 +0000 UTCAwesome. I love to see you branching into more areas of vintage technology. I always wonder what you do with duplicate machines, whether you store them away or resell them on eBay.
Michael Archambault
2016-10-05 01:58:09 +0000 UTCAdmittedly my experience as a Youtuber is limited, but I honestly believe that a few commenters (maybe 25%?) are not earnest. The ones that go to lengths to point out minutiae like the "A or B" thing aren't there to help or even really criticise, they're there to stroke their own egos, to be "the one that pointed it out". I've literally seen comments that said "I don't like this particular thing that you do in a small subset of your videos, and if you do that particular thing ever again, I'll never watch your channel in future. Good video otherwise". Like.... WTF??
RetroSwim
2016-10-05 00:10:32 +0000 UTCI hate multi pin desoldering. No matter what flux, what wick, what desolder pump you use, it never works as you expect. That's when I bought a hot air rework station (see a yihua 8786d for a good cheap one). You can heat all of the pins at the same time and pull the chip out with your IC pullers. Regarding the keyboard cable, if you bought a short standard cable and removed all of the housing on each end, you could make smaller replacement shells from Sugru.
evilution
2016-10-04 23:44:42 +0000 UTCThe skit at the end is of course based upon what happened with the Laserdock video. When I uploaded it, all anyone commented on was that I said a USB A to B lead was a USB A to C lead. This was frustrating after all the effort getting the laser dock shipped from HK - paying a massive import duty fee, re-arranging the house for a day - editing for another two….but all anyone cared about was that I accidentally said the letter C rather than B Despite the fact it was a obvious slip of the tongue this was all anyone noticed about the whole video… well apart from the rest of the comments which were generally negative - the usual ‘you can get this cheaper elsewhere’, ‘it’s not very good’, ‘it doesn’t do X’ etc etc So I went into the youtube editor (which is awful) and snipped out approx half a second…the part where I said the letter C - I decided that a jump in the video was better than being corrected to death. So youtube sets about applying the fix..for no good reason it takes approx five hours for all the combined processing power of google to snip 0.5 seconds out of a 4K video when my laptop can do it in one second. However eventually the fix gets applied and the whole video turns a shade of pale white - for some unknown reason the brightness maxed out during the edit and made the video unwatchable. Complaints started coming in “Hey dude you’ve set the brightness wrong” “Does anyone have problems with the video” “This looks wrong” etc etc…. So I set the video as private to avoid anyone else seeing the fault. The youtube edit has a Revert button - but activating this suggests the edit will take another five hours. I decide I can upload a new version quicker than that. I take this opportunity to also re-edit the USB fauxpas - and then re-upload the 5GB 4K file. In the meantime all hell is breaking loose - people are complaining to me on Twitter - posing comments on my website - posting comments under other videos….”What’s he doing” “where’s the video, I was just going to comment on it”…..I renamed the private video THIS VIDEO IS FAULTY AND IS BEING RE-UPLOADED. Finally my re-upload completes and I managed to make the video live….. …and the first comment was one that someone had posted on the first video - saying that it was a rubbish and pointless product - the same person copied and pasted this back onto the new video that I’d worked on fixing all day…and the second comment was someone saying I’d uploaded it twice to get extra ad-revenue…and the third comment was someone saying that there was nothing up with the first video. All these were received within a minute of the video going live again after a 3 hour absence. The term ‘thankless task’ doesn’t even begin to do it justice. So as ludicrous and silly as the muppets outro seems - in reality it’s a watered down version of what really happened.
Techmoan
2016-10-04 22:31:26 +0000 UTCThis video is rubbish. ;)
Biskup
2016-10-04 21:56:00 +0000 UTCThanks everyone...I'm fine really, albeit my voice seems a bit weak in this video, it shouldn't be as they didn't go anywhere near this (but who really knows what happens when you're unconscious...)
Techmoan
2016-10-04 21:18:14 +0000 UTCNice one Mat. Hope you're on the mend.
Michael Keating
2016-10-04 21:08:14 +0000 UTCHave a speedy recovery!
Rudo de Jong
2016-10-04 20:14:23 +0000 UTCWow! I had no idea.
Terry Shepherd
2016-10-04 20:10:41 +0000 UTCI did...but it's not in the video, because it wasn't successful....there's about an hour of desoldering footage not there.
Techmoan
2016-10-04 19:19:23 +0000 UTCNext time you need to desolder, you might try a soldering wick. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htrcZuK_ZsY" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htrcZuK_ZsY</a>
Bruce Armstrong
2016-10-04 19:17:53 +0000 UTCgood luck with the reshoot.
Neil Butler
2016-10-04 19:13:41 +0000 UTC
