Datashed Retrocomputing Wiki - User contributions [en]

User:Jpw

2025-07-13T03:18:05Z

Jpw: /* Serena Willis */

==Serena Willis==

"It was then that I learned that #include was a preprocessor command! Then, when I was three..." - Joel Martinez, referring to Serena Willis

== Biography ==

My name is Serena Willis. I am a software developer, systems administrator, and business owner with 19 years of professional experience in computer technology. I am married, with two amazing daughters. In my free time, I enjoy spending time with family, gaming, reading, musing about philosophy and politics, collecting and restoring vintage computer systems, and working on my own personal programming projects. I began programming at the age of nine.

I am involved in three companies. The first, Coherent Logic Development, is my own software development firm that was founded in partnership with Joel Martinez, Jonathon Moon, and Adam Black in 1998, and incorporated in 2010. Under the auspices of CLD, I do contract software development for such clients as Systems Made Simple (a Lockheed Martin company), Sierra County, New Mexico, Twistle, and others.

The second company I am involved in is Fourth Watch Business Continuity Services Inc., a partnership between David Wicksell and myself. With Fourth Watch BCS, we provide production VistA support for large hospital enterprises.

User:Jpw

2025-07-13T03:17:51Z

Jpw:

==Serena Willis==

"It was then that I learned that #include was a preprocessor command! Then, when I was three..." - Joel Martinez, referring to John Willis

== Biography ==

My name is Serena Willis. I am a software developer, systems administrator, and business owner with 19 years of professional experience in computer technology. I am married, with two amazing daughters. In my free time, I enjoy spending time with family, gaming, reading, musing about philosophy and politics, collecting and restoring vintage computer systems, and working on my own personal programming projects. I began programming at the age of nine.

I am involved in three companies. The first, Coherent Logic Development, is my own software development firm that was founded in partnership with Joel Martinez, Jonathon Moon, and Adam Black in 1998, and incorporated in 2010. Under the auspices of CLD, I do contract software development for such clients as Systems Made Simple (a Lockheed Martin company), Sierra County, New Mexico, Twistle, and others.

The second company I am involved in is Fourth Watch Business Continuity Services Inc., a partnership between David Wicksell and myself. With Fourth Watch BCS, we provide production VistA support for large hospital enterprises.

Hesperos

2025-07-13T03:11:38Z

Jpw: /* Hesperos (G7) */

{{Infobox System
| name = hesperos
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| role = Various
| os = Various
| cpu = Various
| location = Various
| freq = Various
| acquired = 2000
| role = Various
}}

== Summary ==

Hesperos has been a steady staple in my computing lexicon since the G1 machine was built up in 2000. Having served multiple roles, from Oracle database server to Windows NT 4 domain controller to multitrack recording workstation to work machine, I have a deep fondness and sentimentality for the Hesperos name, much as [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]] has a fondness for [[athena]].

The article is divided into generations representing each substantial change to or replacement of the machine.

{{Clear}}
= DFI 486 (G0) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G0
| image = QuestionMark.jpg
| caption = No Photo Available
| vendor = DFI
| cpu = AMD 486DX4
| freq = 100MHz
| os = Windows 95/Solaris
| osver = RTM/7 (x86)
| acquired = 1998
| paid = $120
| acquired_from = University Presbyterian Church
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G1
| location = Durango Ct/Martinez Household
| role = Alternative Personal Workstation
}}

== Summary ==
This machine was purchased from University Presbyterian Church, where it had been used by Shelia Hornsby as a bookkeeping machine. I had payments for it deducted from my paycheck when I was working there as an administrative assistant.

== Naming ==

I have a theory that this generation was originally named davinci, but I'm not anywhere near sure about that. When I moved into the Martinez household, it definitely had an artist name (just as [[Poseidon (Original)]] was originally named picasso). At the time, I also had a machine named [[mozart]], so consistency in naming was nowhere near in place when I bought this machine.

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G1) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G1
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = DFI
| cpu = AMD 486DX4
| freq = 100MHz
| ram = 8MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G2
| os = Solaris
| osrel = 7 x86
| role = Oracle 7 Database Server
}}

== Summary ==
The first-gen Hesperos was built from the bones of the [[DFI 486]]. I had recently installed Solaris 7 for x86 on the DFI, and it proved unusably slow. My first step was to order a full-tower AT case from JDR Microdevices, and move the bones of the DFI into it. This provided no performance gains, for obvious reasons.

Unique to this machine was a QIC-80 tape drive that was intended to connect to the floppy drive controller. As I had both 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives in the machine, I never actually connected the tape drive, which ended up being there more for appearances than anything else.

The G1 machine was a short-lived part of the Hesperos story, and gave way to Hesperos (G2) as soon as funding was available for procuring upgraded components.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G2) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G2
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G3
| os = Solaris
| osver = 7/8
| role = Oracle 7 Database Server
}}

== Summary ==

In this incarnation, the machine was vested with an ATi Rage IIc video card, an 8GB HDD, and 32MB of RAM, and shortly upgraded from Solaris 7 to Solaris 8. I was never able to get the network card to work, as Solaris 8 wanted nothing to do with ISA NICs. This gave way to Hesperos G3.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G3) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G3
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2001
| relto = Hesperos G4
| os = Windows NT Server
| osver = 4.0
| role = Windows PDC/SQL Server
}}

This incarnation of the machine ran Windows NT Server 4 (from BackOffice 4.5), as [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]] acquired the installation media (along with copies of Microsoft Macro Assembler 6.11 and FrontPage Server Extensions) from the IT manager at Sendero Capital Management, his then-current workplace.

At the end of the G2 era, I moved out of the Martinez household. At this point, Hesperos G3 remained on-loan to Dr. and Mrs. Martinez so they could continue using it as a WinRoute Pro router sharing their dialup connection. When Dr. and Mrs. Martinez finally switched to ADSL, this machine went back to my mother's home and was wiped/reinstalled, giving away to Hesperos (G4).

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G4) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G4
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G4 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Durango Ct
| acquired = 2001
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2001
| relto = Hesperos G4
| os = Caldera OpenLinux
| osver = 2.3
| role = Linux Development
}}

== Summary ==

This generation of the machine was used to develop the C18POLL MODBUS polling app under Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, for Elephant Butte Irrigation District on a contract with Megahertz Computer Consulting. The roots of my "programming" playlist (including Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, the OST of ''Ah! My Goddess'', and many others) were formed under XMMS on this machine.

Once that contract was over, OpenLinux was disposed of. [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]], [[Jonathon Moon]] and I were also gearing up to begin our adventures in digital multitrack audio recording. This, in turn, gave birth to Hesperos (G5).

<gallery>
OpenLinux.jpg|Caldera OpenLinux 2.3
</gallery>

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G5) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G5
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G4 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Durango Ct
| acquired = 2001
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2003
| relto = Landfill
| os = Windows 98
| osver = RTM
| role = Digital Multitrack Recording
}}

== Summary ==

In this generation, Windows 98 RTM was installed on the machine, along with Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 (eventually upgraded to Sonar). We recorded such classics as Repent, Goddess Amongst Us, The Screamer, and Psychedelic Chocolate Beauty Sculpture on here.

It is somewhat related to [[Dimetrius (Original)]], in that that laptop was the first machine on which we tried multitrack recording (with n-Track Studio). That machine proved unable to produce synchronized multitrack audio, which inspired the build-up of Hesperos in its new role.

The Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 ISA sound board was incapable of functioning in full-duplex at its full quality, so the sound quality of headphone monitoring was terrible while simultaneously recording audio. It was also prone to 60-cycle hum and other EMI/RFI noise, which would harm the quality of its recordings. This prompted us to install a Yamaha XG sound card that Joel procured, which was able to handle full-duplex 16-bit/44kHz operation.

When we moved the studio out of my mother's house, this machine ended up being gutted for parts and its hulking, empty case left in her garage until it was run over. It was thus disposed of. The sad tale of its last days (written during the trailer era) follows in the section below.

== Historical Summary ==

''This section is included from my old home page, [http://www.chivanet.org/~jpw/vax/computer.html The VAX Pirate's Lair], and as such is not to be considered accurate or up-to-date.''

This machine is enormous. Not currently functional, as it is missing a hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM and memory. This is one of those massive full-tower monstrosities with 6 external 5.25" drive bays that only supports AT/Baby AT motherboards. It originally ran Solaris 7 for Intel. I plan to rebuild it as a Windows domain controller once I get the needed components.

== Historical Specifications ==

* Intel Pentium 233 MMX
* 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drive
* Internal QIC-80 tape backup unit

{{Clear}}
= Hiatus =

At this point, a hiatus in the Hesperos naming tradition began. The multitrack recording setup during the rest of the trailer era, and indeed, all the way into the early days of the Alamo St. era, was a horrific machine called [[music]]. That machine caused nothing but the worst problems until being retired around 2008 in favor of a Power Macintosh G5 2.0DP.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G6) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G6
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| vendor = Various
| cpu = Xeon E5645
| freq = 2.4GHz
| ram = 24GB
| location = Office
| acquired = 2013
| acquired_from = Various
| paid = $4000
| os = Debian Linux
| osver = 10
| role = Business Workstation
| video = NVIDIA GeForce GTX-1080 Founders Edition
}}

== Summary ==

Hesperos G6 began as my work desktop, and the most powerful computer that I had ever owned, being a worthy heir to the Hesperos legacy.

== Specifications ==
* Dual Intel Xeon E5645 CPUs at 2.4GHz (6 core, 12 thread)
* 24GB ECC RAM
* HIS AMD Radeon 7950 GPU
* Corsair AX1200i Power Supply (1200W)
* 2x 120GB SSD in RAID0
* 4x 2TB 10KRPM HDD
* EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard
* Dual-booting Debian 8 and Windows 7
* Four monitors

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G6.1) =

In 2017, the Radeon 7950 GPU was replaced with an NVIDIA GTX1080 Founders Edition.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G6.2) =

On October 23, 2019, Hesperos was upgraded thus:

* 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5645 CPUs were replaced with 3.3GHz Intel Xeon X5680 CPUs

The ultimate goal is to overclock the X5680s to 4.0GHz, though I've had no success so far. I may also add a second GTX1080 Founders Edition for SLI goodness. The machine is snappy as-is.

The machine has also been updated to run Debian 10, which was an exercise in frustration.
{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G7) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G7
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| vendor = Various
| cpu = AMD Ryzen 9 5950x
| freq = 4.9GHz
| ram = 64GB
| location = 1DCA
| acquired = 2024
| acquired_from = Various
| paid = $600
| os = FreeBSD
| osver = 13
| role = Business Workstation
| video = NVIDIA GeForce GTX-1080 Founders Edition
}}

In July/August 2024, Hesperos received the following parts replacements:

* Asus AM4 TUF Gaming X570-Plus (Wi-Fi) AM4 motherboard
* AMD Ryzen 9 5950x CPU
* G.Skill Ripjaws V Series DDR4 RAM (64GB)
* Crucial T500 2TB Gen4 NVMe M.2 Internal Gaming SSD

The machine dual-boots Arch Linux and FreeBSD.

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G8) (FUTURE BUILD) =

The next generation system will be built around one of the following platforms, listed in order of preference, most- to least-preferred:

* Raptor Talos II (Dual-Socket IBM POWER9)
* A next-generation dual-socket Intel Xeon platform
* AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro on an Asus SAGE board
Likely to be paired with high-end GPUs, and I'm considering workstation-class GPUs for this build.

Comcast Business

2025-02-11T02:10:43Z

Jpw:

{{stub}}
{{Infobox Circuit
| name = Xfinity Cable
| class = DOCSIS
| channels = 1
| bandwidth = 300Mbit/s (symmetric)
| termination = [[Arris Cable Modem]]
| ilec = Comcast
| provider = Comcast
}}

[[Category: IDF]]

Xfinity Cable

2025-02-11T02:10:21Z

Jpw: Jpw moved page Xfinity Cable to Comcast Business

#REDIRECT [[Comcast Business]]

Comcast Business

2025-02-11T02:10:19Z

Jpw: Jpw moved page Xfinity Cable to Comcast Business

{{stub}}
{{Infobox Circuit
| name = Xfinity Cable
| class = DOCSIS
| channels = 1
| bandwidth = 250Mbit/s
| termination = [[Arris Cable Modem]]
| ilec = Comcast
| provider = Comcast
}}

[[Category: IDF]]

Category:Storage Unit Tragedy of 2004

2025-01-30T15:50:11Z

Jpw:

{{stub}}
{{Infobox MassExtinction
| name = Storage Unit Tragedy of 2004
| year = 2004
| location = Pecos Self-Storage
| reason = Non-Payment
}}

== Summary ==
A devastating loss in which both myself and [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]] lost massive amounts of vintage computer gear, among other things. Spurred by my own youth, stupidity, poor money management, and pride, this event has left a mark on me which will never be forgotten.

== Notable Losses ==

=== Joel ===
* [[The Blessed Amiga]]

=== Serena ===
* [[VAX 11/750]], this one and the next have hurt the worst for me
* [[IBM PC 5150]], my much-beloved first computer
* [[Poseidon (Original)]], my IBM Aptiva 2144-A12
* Black Box 72" cabinet
* [[VAXstation 3100 Model 76]]
* [[VAXstation 2000]]
* [[Apple Macintosh Classic]]
* [[Apple Macintosh IIsi]]
* [[heimdal]], an Amiga 2000HD from Dan Miller
* A SPARCstation 20 acquired around 2002
* Full microfiche set of DEC field service documentation from Wyatt King
* Full set of DEC documentation from Rich Smith
* My full collection of 5.25" floppy disks
* My Fasco floor fan

Configuring VAX DSM

2025-01-14T16:08:10Z

Jpw: Created page with "This procedure assumes DSM is installed, and you are configuring it in an account that has not yet been used with DSM. The user account will need <code>SYSPRV</code> and <code..."

This procedure assumes DSM is installed, and you are configuring it in an account that has not yet been used with DSM. The user account will need <code>SYSPRV</code> and <code>TMPMBX</code> process privileges.
=Initializing User Account for DSM=

# Type <code>SET PROC/PRIV=(SYSPRV,TMPMBX)</code>
# Create a <code>DSM</code> subdirectory in your home directory (i.e., if your account name is <code>MYACCT</code> and your home directory is <code>DSA1:[MYACCT]</code>, type <code>CRE/DIR DSA1:[MYACCT.DSM]</code>
# Run <code>@SYS$MANAGER:DSM$INIT</code>
## Enter your username at the <code>Enter the account name to use with DSM ></code> prompt
## Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Do you want to continue [Y OR N] ? <Y></code> prompt
## Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Are there any additional Cluster members not currently booted that you would like to add to this list [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
## Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Create similar directories on other disk devices [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
## Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Press RETURN to continue listing ...</code> prompts until you reach the <code>Do you want to edit this command procedure [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
## Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Do you want to edit this command procedure [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
## Press <code>Y</code> and <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Do you want to run this command procedure now [Y OR N] ? ></code> prompt
## Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Account initialized - press return to continue</code> prompt

=Creating a DSM Volume Set=

# Type <code>@SYS$MANAGER:DSM$CONFIGURE</code>
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Do you want to create a new DSM database volume Set [Y OR N] ? <Y></code> prompt
# Enter a 3-character identifier at the <code>Enter the 3-character name for the volume set ></code> prompt (best to choose an identifier that makes sense for the application(s) to be hosted in this DSM configuration)
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Create a DSM Volume in which file ?</code> prompt
# Enter a block count at the <code>Enter desired size of this volume in 1 KB DSM blocks ></code> prompt (I typically start with 120000 blocks)
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Initialize as a SYSTEM or APPLICATION volume set [S or A] <s></code> prompt to create an <code>SYSTEM</code> volume set (<code>APPLICATION</code> volume sets are outside the scope of this article)
# Enter the maximum number of globals you'll use in the volume set at the <code>Enter the maximum number of globals allowable on this volume set <90></code>
# Enter <code>Y</code> at the <code>Allow expanded string lengths on this volume set [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
# Choose a volume label at the <code>What would you like the new label of this volume to be ? (up to 20 characters) ></code> prompt (again, it is best practice to choose a volume label that makes sense for the application(s))
# DSM will initialize the volume set at this point, which may take a few minutes, depending on the I/O performance of your VAX

=Defining a DSM Configuration=
This will happen automatically as soon as the volume set is configured.
# You can choose either <code>Y</code> or <code>N</code> at the <code>Would you like extended help [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Enter the configuration identifier <1></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>1 is not currently defined, define it now [Y OR N] ? <Y></code> prompt
# For disk buffers, I typically choose a small number to reduce memory footprint (say, 300), but you can go higher if memory capacity permits for increased performance
# I typically do NOT use nonpaged memory for these buffers, but again, for a performance-sensitive environment, I would recommend using nonpaged memory to avoid thrashing the swap volume
# Enter the desired number of maximum users at the <code>Enter the maximum number of DSM users <128></code> prompt (for a development system, I typically go with 10, but some applications may require more users to run at all)
# I typically answer <code>N</code> at the <code>Enable configuration access control [Y OR N] ? > </code> prompt for a dev system, but it is strongly recommended that you enable it for production usage, which is outside the scope of this article
# I typically choose <code>N</code> at the <code>Include support for Routine/Global Performance Histograms [Y OR N] ? <N></code>
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Number of database sets in this configuration <1></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Name of database set #1 ...</code> prompt (this prompt will also show the 3-character identifier chosen in step 3 of ''Creating a DSM Volume Set'')
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>NNN not defined. Define it now [Y OR N] ? <Y></code> prompt (where <code>NNN</code> represents the 3-character identifier of the volume set)
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Is this a VMS DSM, Transaction or DSM-11 database set [V, T or D] <V></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Mount NNN for READ-ONLY access [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
# Press <code>Y</code> and <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Mount NNN for clusterwide access [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Name of the volume set <NNN></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Enter the number of volumes in volume set NNN <1></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>File name of NNN volume 1</code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>BIJ Journal file name</code> prompt
# Press <code>Y</code> and <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Are you sure you want to include this file [Y OR N] ?</code> prompt (we will create the before-image journal in a future step)
# Press <code>Y</code> and <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Enable After-Image Journaling for this database set [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Number of AIJ journal files <1></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>File name of AIJ file #1</code> prompt
# Press <code>Y</code> and <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Are you sure you want to include this file [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt (we will create the after-image journal in a future step)
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Message text when closing this AIJ file ></code> prompt
# Press <code>Y</code> and <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Print console message when database set is nearly full [Y OR N] ? <N> </code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Send message at what percentage full <90></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Is this configuration a database set master for SMX [Y OR N] ? <Y></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Modify default After-Image Journaling characteristics [Y OR N] ? <N> </code> prompt
# Enter a 3-character name at the <code>Enter a unique 3 character DDP node name ></code> prompt (I use the same name as the volume set identifier, typically)
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Start DDP servers during configuration startup [Y OR N] ? <Y></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Enter the number of DDP servers to start ? <3></code>
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Send DDP status messages to the operator's console [Y OR N] ? <Y></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Enter DDP GROUPS to enable <0></code>, <code> Enter the REQUEST RETRY MAXIMUM <4></code>, <code>Enter the REQUEST RETRY INTERVAL <3></code>, <code>Enter the REQUEST CREDIT MAXIMUM <20></code>, and <code>Press <RETURN> to continue:</code> prompts
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Enter the TRANSMIT BUFFER DELAY increment <0></code>, <code>Enter the DDP MULTICAST ADVERTISING INTERVAL <6></code>, and <code>Include CIRCUIT CONNECTION SECURITY [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompts
# Enter <code>0</code> at the <code>Enter the number of DDP links in this configuration ></code> prompt (configuring non-dummy DDP links is outside the scope of this article)
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Modify GLOBAL characteristics [Y OR N] ? <N> </code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Include support for mapped routines [Y OR N] ? <N> </code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Modify DSM default command line qualifiers [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Modify Global Translation Tables [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Modify $H date for this configuration [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Show configuration memory requirements [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
# Enter <code>N</code> at the <code>Startup configuration 1 [Y OR N] ? ></code> prompt (we still need to create before-image and after-image journals before starting up the configuration)

=Defining After-Image Journals=

# At the DCL prompt, type <code>DSM/MANAGER</code>
# Type <code>D ^JRNINIT</code>
# At the <code>Initialize DSM After-Image Journal file for which volume set ></code> prompt, enter the 3-character volume set identifier you chose in step 3 of ''Creating a DSM Volume Set''
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>File name of DSM Volume 1</code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Enter the journal file name</code> prompt
# Enter <code>2000</code> or more at the <code>Enter the maximum size of this file in 512 byte blocks ></code> prompt
# Press <code>Y</code> and <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Are you sure you want to continue [Y OR N] ? <N></code> prompt
DSM will now initialize the after-image journal file, which may take a few moments.

=Defining Before-Image Journals=

# Type <code>D ^BIJINIT</code> at the DSM prompt
# At the <code>Initialize DSM Before-Image Journal file for which volume set ></code> prompt, enter the 3-character volume set identifier you chose in step 3 of ''Creating a DSM Volume Set''
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>File name of DSM Volume 1 for NNN</code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Name of BEFORE-IMAGE journal file for NNN</code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Enter the SIZE (in DSM 1024-byte blocks) of the file <8000></code> prompt
DSM will now initialize the before-image journal file, which may take a few moments.

=Starting the Configuration=
# At the DSM prompt, type <code>D ^STU</code>
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Enter the configuration identifier <1></code> prompt
# Press <code>ENTER</code> at the <code>Enable user logins on startup [Y OR N] ? <Y> </code> prompt

Enabling DECwindows with Xephyr

2025-01-04T18:30:09Z

Jpw:

Xephyr is a full X11 server that runs as an X11 client, allowing you to run multiple independent X sessions. This article will show you how to use Xephyr with DECwindows on OpenVMS.

= Installing DECwindows =

* Mount the OpenVMS installation media (this example assumes <code>DUA1</code> as the device containing the media):
<pre>
$ MOUNT/OVER=ID DUA1
</pre>
* Navigate to the kit:
<pre>
$ SET DEFAULT DUA1:[DWMOTIF_VAX126.KIT]
</pre>
* Install the kit:
<pre>
$ PRODUCT INSTALL *
</pre>

= Establishing Remote Display =

* On a remote UNIX system having Xephyr installed (on Arch Linux, this is done with <code>sudo pacman -S xorg-server-xephyr</code>), run the following command (you can change <code>1200x800</code> to your preferred resolution):
<pre>
$ Xephyr -ac -listen tcp -screen 1200x800 :1
</pre>
* On the VMS system, create the display (<code><xephyr-ip></code> represents the IP address of the system running Xephyr):
<pre>
$ SET DISPLAY/CREATE/NODE=<xephyr-ip>/TRANSPORT=TCPIP/SERVER=1
</pre>
Note that <code>/SERVER=1</code> in the DCL command correlates to the <code>:1</code> in the Xephyr command.

= Launching DECterm =
If all you want is a DEC terminal with no window manager or extra fluff, type the following command in VMS DCL:
<pre>
$ CREATE/TERM/DETACH
</pre>

= Launching Full DECwindows =
If you want to get the full DECwindows experience, type the following command in VMS DCL:
<pre>
$ RUN SYS$SYSTEM:DECW$STARTLOGIN.EXE
</pre>

The DECwindows login should appear in your Xephyr window.

[[Category:OpenVMS]]

Enabling DECwindows with Xephyr

2025-01-04T18:21:10Z

Jpw:

Xephyr is a full X11 server that runs as an X11 client, allowing you to run multiple independent X sessions. This article will show you how to use Xephyr with DECwindows on OpenVMS.

= Installing DECwindows =

* Mount the OpenVMS installation media (this example assumes <code>DUA1</code> as the device containing the media):
<pre>
$ MOUNT/OVER=ID DUA1
</pre>
* Navigate to the kit:
<pre>
$ SET DEFAULT DUA1:[DWMOTIF_VAX126.KIT]
</pre>
* Install the kit:
<pre>
$ PRODUCT INSTALL *
</pre>

= Establishing Remote Display =

* On a remote UNIX system having Xephyr installed, run the following command (you can change <code>1200x800</code> to your preferred resolution):
<pre>
$ Xephyr -ac -listen tcp -screen 1200x800 :1
</pre>
* On the VMS system, create the display (<code><xephyr-ip></code> represents the IP address of the system running Xephyr):
<pre>
$ SET DISPLAY/CREATE/NODE=<xephyr-ip>/TRANSPORT=TCPIP/SERVER=1
</pre>
Note that <code>/SERVER=1</code> in the DCL command correlates to the <code>:1</code> in the Xephyr command.

= Launching DECterm =
If all you want is a DEC terminal with no window manager or extra fluff, type the following command in VMS DCL:
<pre>
$ CREATE/TERM/DETACH
</pre>

= Launching Full DECwindows =
If you want to get the full DECwindows experience, type the following command in VMS DCL:
<pre>
$ RUN SYS$SYSTEM:DECW$STARTLOGIN.EXE
</pre>

The DECwindows login should appear in your Xephyr window.

[[Category:OpenVMS]]

Enabling DECwindows with Xephyr

2025-01-04T18:18:31Z

Jpw: /* Establishing Remote Display */

= Installing DECwindows =

* Mount the OpenVMS installation media (this example assumes <code>DUA1</code> as the device containing the media):
<pre>
$ MOUNT/OVER=ID DUA1
</pre>
* Navigate to the kit:
<pre>
$ SET DEFAULT DUA1:[DWMOTIF_VAX126.KIT]
</pre>
* Install the kit:
<pre>
$ PRODUCT INSTALL *
</pre>

= Establishing Remote Display =

* On a remote UNIX system having Xephyr installed, run the following command (you can change <code>1200x800</code> to your preferred resolution):
<pre>
$ Xephyr -ac -listen tcp -screen 1200x800 :1
</pre>
* On the VMS system, create the display (<code><xephyr-ip></code> represents the IP address of the system running Xephyr):
<pre>
$ SET DISPLAY/CREATE/NODE=<xephyr-ip>/TRANSPORT=TCPIP/SERVER=1
</pre>
Note that <code>/SERVER=1</code> in the DCL command correlates to the <code>:1</code> in the Xephyr command.

= Launching DECterm =
If all you want is a DEC terminal with no window manager or extra fluff, type the following command in VMS DCL:
<pre>
$ CREATE/TERM/DETACH
</pre>

= Launching Full DECwindows =
If you want to get the full DECwindows experience, type the following command in VMS DCL:
<pre>
$ RUN SYS$SYSTEM:DECW$STARTLOGIN.EXE
</pre>

The DECwindows login should appear in your Xephyr window.

[[Category:OpenVMS]]

Enabling DECwindows with Xephyr

2025-01-04T18:15:58Z

Jpw: Created page with "= Installing DECwindows = * Mount the OpenVMS installation media (this example assumes <code>DUA1</code> as the device containing the media): <pre> $ MOUNT/OVER=ID DUA1 </pre..."

= Installing DECwindows =

* Mount the OpenVMS installation media (this example assumes <code>DUA1</code> as the device containing the media):
<pre>
$ MOUNT/OVER=ID DUA1
</pre>
* Navigate to the kit:
<pre>
$ SET DEFAULT DUA1:[DWMOTIF_VAX126.KIT]
</pre>
* Install the kit:
<pre>
$ PRODUCT INSTALL *
</pre>

= Establishing Remote Display =

* On a remote UNIX system having Xephyr installed, run the following command (you can change <code>1200x800</code> to your preferred resolution):
<pre>
$ Xephyr -ac -listen tcp -screen 1200x800 :1
</pre>
* On the VMS system, create the display (<code><xephyr-ip></code> represents the IP address of the system running Xephyr):
<pre>
$ SET DISPLAY/CREATE/NODE=<xephyr-ip>/TRANSPORT=TCPIP/SERVER=1
</pre>

= Launching DECterm =
If all you want is a DEC terminal with no window manager or extra fluff, type the following command in VMS DCL:
<pre>
$ CREATE/TERM/DETACH
</pre>

= Launching Full DECwindows =
If you want to get the full DECwindows experience, type the following command in VMS DCL:
<pre>
$ RUN SYS$SYSTEM:DECW$STARTLOGIN.EXE
</pre>

The DECwindows login should appear in your Xephyr window.

[[Category:OpenVMS]]

Fjolnir

2024-07-20T23:43:47Z

Jpw:

{{Stub}}
{{Infobox System
| name = fjolnir
| image = fjolnir.jpg
| caption = Fjolnir
| vendor = Commodore Business Machines
| model = Amiga 500
| cpu = Motorola 68000
| freq = 7MHz
| ram = 1MB
| os = AmigaOS
| osver = 2.04
| bus = Zorro II
| location = 1DCA
| acquired = 2020
| acquired_from = Joel Cook on Twitter
| paid = Traded for IBM Model M Keyboard
| role = General-Purpose Amiga System
}}
== Upgrades ==

This machine includes an Individual Computers ACA500Plus.

It needs a new keyboard badly, needs a solution for Ethernet connectivity, and I have an internal GoTek FDD replacement that needs to be installed.

[[Category:AmigaOS]]

The Blessed Amiga

2024-07-20T23:41:57Z

Jpw:

{{stub}}
{{Infobox System
| name = The Blessed Amiga
| image = A2000cpu.jpg
| caption = I owe you one...
| location = Location Unknown
| relinquished = 2004
| relto = Rawson Self Storage Auction
| os = Amiga Workbench
| osver = 1.3
| cpu = Motorola 68000
| freq = 7.16MHz
| ram = 1MB
| vendor = Commodore Business Machines
| model = Amiga 2000
| role = Personal Workstation
}}

== Owner ==
Owned by [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]]. As the loss of this beautiful machine was my (John Willis's) fault, I have vowed to never purchase more Amiga computers until such time as I replace this one.

UPDATE: I replaced Joel's A2000 with an upgraded Amiga 500, and now have [[Fjolnir]] for myself.

== Summary ==
One of the Four Pillars:
* The Blessed Amiga
* Let's Go to The Square
* Ulterior Motives
* Let's Bust a Jam

[[Category: Storage Unit Tragedy of 2004]]
[[Category:Mass Extinctions of 2004]]
[[Category:Commodore Amiga]]

The Blessed Amiga

2024-07-20T23:41:36Z

Jpw:

{{stub}}
{{Infobox System
| name = The Blessed Amiga
| image = A2000cpu.jpg
| caption = I owe you one...
| location = Location Unknown
| relinquished = 2004
| relto = Rawson Self Storage Auction
| os = Amiga Workbench
| osver = 1.3
| cpu = Motorola 68000
| freq = 7.16MHz
| ram = 1MB
| vendor = Commodore Business Machines
| model = Amiga 2000
| role = Personal Workstation
}}

== Owner ==
Owned by [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]]. As the loss of this beautiful machine was my (John Willis's) fault, I have vowed to never purchase more Amiga computers until such time as I replace this one.

UPDATE: I replaced Joel's A2000 with an upgraded Amiga 500, and now have [Fjolnir] for myself.

== Summary ==
One of the Four Pillars:
* The Blessed Amiga
* Let's Go to The Square
* Ulterior Motives
* Let's Bust a Jam

[[Category: Storage Unit Tragedy of 2004]]
[[Category:Mass Extinctions of 2004]]
[[Category:Commodore Amiga]]

File:Fjolnir.jpg

2024-07-20T23:37:22Z

Jpw:

=={{int:filedesc}}==
{{Information
|description={{en|1=An Amiga 500 computer system.}}
|date=2020-08-14
|source={{own}}
|author=[[User:Jpw|John P. Willis]]
|permission=
|other versions=
}}
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Amiga]]
[[Category:AmigaOS]]
[[Category:Commodore Amiga]]
=={{int:license-header}}==
{{self|cc-by-sa-4.0}}

File:A4000Temp.jpg

2024-07-20T23:36:55Z

Jpw:

Amiga 4000 in Elbox PowerTower Case
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Amiga]]
[[Category:AmigaOS]]
[[Category:Commodore Business Machines]]
[[Category:Commodore Amiga]]

File:A4000Temp.jpg

2024-07-20T23:35:55Z

Jpw:

Amiga 4000 in Elbox PowerTower Case
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Amiga]]
[[Category:AmigaOS]]
[[Category:Commodore Business Machines]]

File:MicroVAX310030.jpg

2024-07-20T23:35:08Z

Jpw:

DEC MicroVAX 3100 m30
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Digital Equipment Corporation]]

File:Everex286.jpg

2024-07-20T23:34:33Z

Jpw:

Everex 286
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Everex]]

File:MicroVAX2000.jpg

2024-07-20T23:33:29Z

Jpw:

DEC MicroVAX 2000
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Digital Equipment Corporation]]

File:VS3100M76.jpg

2024-07-20T23:33:03Z

Jpw:

DEC VAXstation 3100 M76
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Digital Equipment Corporation]]

File:Artemis1.png

2024-07-20T23:32:27Z

Jpw:

Artemis (Original)
[[Category:Computers]]

File:IBM 5150 Front 1.jpg

2024-07-20T23:31:56Z

Jpw:

=={{int:filedesc}}==
{{Information
|description={{en|1=IBM 5150 with no display or keyboard, showing the two floppy drives exposed.}}
|date=2019-12-30 09:45:00
|source={{own}}
|author=[[User:Jpw|Jpw]]
|permission=
|other versions=
}}
{{Location|32.317269|-106.746506|heading:269.3760984182777}}
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:IBM]]
=={{int:license-header}}==
{{self|cc-by-sa-4.0}}

File:IBM 5150 Front 2.jpg

2024-07-20T23:31:27Z

Jpw:

=={{int:filedesc}}==
{{Information
|description={{en|1=With Sony TV}}
|date=2020-01-01 14:43:57
|source={{own}}
|author=[[User:Jpw|Jpw]]
|permission=
|other versions=
}}
{{Location|32.317261|-106.746514|heading:14.272430415176489}}
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:IBM]]
=={{int:license-header}}==
{{self|cc-by-sa-4.0}}

File:Fjolnir.jpg

2024-07-20T23:30:46Z

Jpw:

Fjolnir

2024-07-20T23:23:38Z

Jpw:

Fjolnir

2024-07-20T23:22:55Z

Jpw:

Fjolnir

2024-07-20T23:21:38Z

Jpw:

Hesperos

2024-07-20T23:20:31Z

Jpw: /* Hesperos (G7) */

{{Infobox System
| name = hesperos
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| role = Various
| os = Various
| cpu = Various
| location = Various
| freq = Various
| acquired = 2000
| role = Various
}}

== Summary ==

Hesperos has been a steady staple in my computing lexicon since the G1 machine was built up in 2000. Having served multiple roles, from Oracle database server to Windows NT 4 domain controller to multitrack recording workstation to work machine, I have a deep fondness and sentimentality for the Hesperos name, much as [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]] has a fondness for [[athena]].

The article is divided into generations representing each substantial change to or replacement of the machine.

{{Clear}}
= DFI 486 (G0) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G0
| image = QuestionMark.jpg
| caption = No Photo Available
| vendor = DFI
| cpu = AMD 486DX4
| freq = 100MHz
| os = Windows 95/Solaris
| osver = RTM/7 (x86)
| acquired = 1998
| paid = $120
| acquired_from = University Presbyterian Church
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G1
| location = Durango Ct/Martinez Household
| role = Alternative Personal Workstation
}}

== Summary ==
This machine was purchased from University Presbyterian Church, where it had been used by Shelia Hornsby as a bookkeeping machine. I had payments for it deducted from my paycheck when I was working there as an administrative assistant.

== Naming ==

I have a theory that this generation was originally named davinci, but I'm not anywhere near sure about that. When I moved into the Martinez household, it definitely had an artist name (just as [[Poseidon (Original)]] was originally named picasso). At the time, I also had a machine named [[mozart]], so consistency in naming was nowhere near in place when I bought this machine.

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G1) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G1
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = DFI
| cpu = AMD 486DX4
| freq = 100MHz
| ram = 8MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G2
| os = Solaris
| osrel = 7 x86
| role = Oracle 7 Database Server
}}

== Summary ==
The first-gen Hesperos was built from the bones of the [[DFI 486]]. I had recently installed Solaris 7 for x86 on the DFI, and it proved unusably slow. My first step was to order a full-tower AT case from JDR Microdevices, and move the bones of the DFI into it. This provided no performance gains, for obvious reasons.

Unique to this machine was a QIC-80 tape drive that was intended to connect to the floppy drive controller. As I had both 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives in the machine, I never actually connected the tape drive, which ended up being there more for appearances than anything else.

The G1 machine was a short-lived part of the Hesperos story, and gave way to Hesperos (G2) as soon as funding was available for procuring upgraded components.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G2) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G2
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G3
| os = Solaris
| osver = 7/8
| role = Oracle 7 Database Server
}}

== Summary ==

In this incarnation, the machine was vested with an ATi Rage IIc video card, an 8GB HDD, and 32MB of RAM, and shortly upgraded from Solaris 7 to Solaris 8. I was never able to get the network card to work, as Solaris 8 wanted nothing to do with ISA NICs. This gave way to Hesperos G3.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G3) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G3
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2001
| relto = Hesperos G4
| os = Windows NT Server
| osver = 4.0
| role = Windows PDC/SQL Server
}}

This incarnation of the machine ran Windows NT Server 4 (from BackOffice 4.5), as [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]] acquired the installation media (along with copies of Microsoft Macro Assembler 6.11 and FrontPage Server Extensions) from the IT manager at Sendero Capital Management, his then-current workplace.

At the end of the G2 era, I moved out of the Martinez household. At this point, Hesperos G3 remained on-loan to Dr. and Mrs. Martinez so they could continue using it as a WinRoute Pro router sharing their dialup connection. When Dr. and Mrs. Martinez finally switched to ADSL, this machine went back to my mother's home and was wiped/reinstalled, giving away to Hesperos (G4).

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G4) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G4
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G4 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Durango Ct
| acquired = 2001
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2001
| relto = Hesperos G4
| os = Caldera OpenLinux
| osver = 2.3
| role = Linux Development
}}

== Summary ==

This generation of the machine was used to develop the C18POLL MODBUS polling app under Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, for Elephant Butte Irrigation District on a contract with Megahertz Computer Consulting. The roots of my "programming" playlist (including Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, the OST of ''Ah! My Goddess'', and many others) were formed under XMMS on this machine.

Once that contract was over, OpenLinux was disposed of. [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]], [[Jonathon Moon]] and I were also gearing up to begin our adventures in digital multitrack audio recording. This, in turn, gave birth to Hesperos (G5).

<gallery>
OpenLinux.jpg|Caldera OpenLinux 2.3
</gallery>

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G5) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G5
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G4 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Durango Ct
| acquired = 2001
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2003
| relto = Landfill
| os = Windows 98
| osver = RTM
| role = Digital Multitrack Recording
}}

== Summary ==

In this generation, Windows 98 RTM was installed on the machine, along with Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 (eventually upgraded to Sonar). We recorded such classics as Repent, Goddess Amongst Us, The Screamer, and Psychedelic Chocolate Beauty Sculpture on here.

It is somewhat related to [[Dimetrius (Original)]], in that that laptop was the first machine on which we tried multitrack recording (with n-Track Studio). That machine proved unable to produce synchronized multitrack audio, which inspired the build-up of Hesperos in its new role.

The Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 ISA sound board was incapable of functioning in full-duplex at its full quality, so the sound quality of headphone monitoring was terrible while simultaneously recording audio. It was also prone to 60-cycle hum and other EMI/RFI noise, which would harm the quality of its recordings. This prompted us to install a Yamaha XG sound card that Joel procured, which was able to handle full-duplex 16-bit/44kHz operation.

When we moved the studio out of my mother's house, this machine ended up being gutted for parts and its hulking, empty case left in her garage until it was run over. It was thus disposed of. The sad tale of its last days (written during the trailer era) follows in the section below.

== Historical Summary ==

''This section is included from my old home page, [http://www.chivanet.org/~jpw/vax/computer.html The VAX Pirate's Lair], and as such is not to be considered accurate or up-to-date.''

This machine is enormous. Not currently functional, as it is missing a hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM and memory. This is one of those massive full-tower monstrosities with 6 external 5.25" drive bays that only supports AT/Baby AT motherboards. It originally ran Solaris 7 for Intel. I plan to rebuild it as a Windows domain controller once I get the needed components.

== Historical Specifications ==

* Intel Pentium 233 MMX
* 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drive
* Internal QIC-80 tape backup unit

{{Clear}}
= Hiatus =

At this point, a hiatus in the Hesperos naming tradition began. The multitrack recording setup during the rest of the trailer era, and indeed, all the way into the early days of the Alamo St. era, was a horrific machine called [[music]]. That machine caused nothing but the worst problems until being retired around 2008 in favor of a Power Macintosh G5 2.0DP.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G6) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G6
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| vendor = Various
| cpu = Xeon E5645
| freq = 2.4GHz
| ram = 24GB
| location = Office
| acquired = 2013
| acquired_from = Various
| paid = $4000
| os = Debian Linux
| osver = 10
| role = Business Workstation
| video = NVIDIA GeForce GTX-1080 Founders Edition
}}

== Summary ==

Hesperos G6 began as my work desktop, and the most powerful computer that I had ever owned, being a worthy heir to the Hesperos legacy.

== Specifications ==
* Dual Intel Xeon E5645 CPUs at 2.4GHz (6 core, 12 thread)
* 24GB ECC RAM
* HIS AMD Radeon 7950 GPU
* Corsair AX1200i Power Supply (1200W)
* 2x 120GB SSD in RAID0
* 4x 2TB 10KRPM HDD
* EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard
* Dual-booting Debian 8 and Windows 7
* Four monitors

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G6.1) =

In 2017, the Radeon 7950 GPU was replaced with an NVIDIA GTX1080 Founders Edition.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G6.2) =

On October 23, 2019, Hesperos was upgraded thus:

* 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5645 CPUs were replaced with 3.3GHz Intel Xeon X5680 CPUs

The ultimate goal is to overclock the X5680s to 4.0GHz, though I've had no success so far. I may also add a second GTX1080 Founders Edition for SLI goodness. The machine is snappy as-is.

The machine has also been updated to run Debian 10, which was an exercise in frustration.
{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G7) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G7
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| vendor = Various
| cpu = AMD Ryzen 9 5950x
| freq = 4.9GHz
| ram = 64GB
| location = 1DCA
| acquired = 2024
| acquired_from = Various
| paid = $600
| os = FreeBSD
| osver = 13
| role = Business Workstation
| video = NVIDIA GeForce GTX-1080 Founders Edition
}}

In July/August 2024, Hesperos will receive the following parts replacements:

* Asus AM4 TUF Gaming X570-Plus (Wi-Fi) AM4 motherboard
* AMD Ryzen 9 5950x CPU
* G.Skill Ripjaws V Series DDR4 RAM (64GB)
* Crucial T500 2TB Gen4 NVMe M.2 Internal Gaming SSD

The plan OS-wise is going to be to dual-boot Windows 10 and FreeBSD. We'll see how well I can make FreeBSD play.

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G8) (FUTURE BUILD) =

The next generation system will be built around one of the following platforms, listed in order of preference, most- to least-preferred:

* Raptor Talos II (Dual-Socket IBM POWER9)
* A next-generation dual-socket Intel Xeon platform
* AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro on an Asus SAGE board
Likely to be paired with high-end GPUs, and I'm considering workstation-class GPUs for this build.

Hesperos

2024-07-20T23:17:16Z

Jpw:

{{Infobox System
| name = hesperos
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| role = Various
| os = Various
| cpu = Various
| location = Various
| freq = Various
| acquired = 2000
| role = Various
}}

== Summary ==

Hesperos has been a steady staple in my computing lexicon since the G1 machine was built up in 2000. Having served multiple roles, from Oracle database server to Windows NT 4 domain controller to multitrack recording workstation to work machine, I have a deep fondness and sentimentality for the Hesperos name, much as [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]] has a fondness for [[athena]].

The article is divided into generations representing each substantial change to or replacement of the machine.

{{Clear}}
= DFI 486 (G0) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G0
| image = QuestionMark.jpg
| caption = No Photo Available
| vendor = DFI
| cpu = AMD 486DX4
| freq = 100MHz
| os = Windows 95/Solaris
| osver = RTM/7 (x86)
| acquired = 1998
| paid = $120
| acquired_from = University Presbyterian Church
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G1
| location = Durango Ct/Martinez Household
| role = Alternative Personal Workstation
}}

== Summary ==
This machine was purchased from University Presbyterian Church, where it had been used by Shelia Hornsby as a bookkeeping machine. I had payments for it deducted from my paycheck when I was working there as an administrative assistant.

== Naming ==

I have a theory that this generation was originally named davinci, but I'm not anywhere near sure about that. When I moved into the Martinez household, it definitely had an artist name (just as [[Poseidon (Original)]] was originally named picasso). At the time, I also had a machine named [[mozart]], so consistency in naming was nowhere near in place when I bought this machine.

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G1) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G1
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = DFI
| cpu = AMD 486DX4
| freq = 100MHz
| ram = 8MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G2
| os = Solaris
| osrel = 7 x86
| role = Oracle 7 Database Server
}}

== Summary ==
The first-gen Hesperos was built from the bones of the [[DFI 486]]. I had recently installed Solaris 7 for x86 on the DFI, and it proved unusably slow. My first step was to order a full-tower AT case from JDR Microdevices, and move the bones of the DFI into it. This provided no performance gains, for obvious reasons.

Unique to this machine was a QIC-80 tape drive that was intended to connect to the floppy drive controller. As I had both 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives in the machine, I never actually connected the tape drive, which ended up being there more for appearances than anything else.

The G1 machine was a short-lived part of the Hesperos story, and gave way to Hesperos (G2) as soon as funding was available for procuring upgraded components.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G2) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G2
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G3
| os = Solaris
| osver = 7/8
| role = Oracle 7 Database Server
}}

== Summary ==

In this incarnation, the machine was vested with an ATi Rage IIc video card, an 8GB HDD, and 32MB of RAM, and shortly upgraded from Solaris 7 to Solaris 8. I was never able to get the network card to work, as Solaris 8 wanted nothing to do with ISA NICs. This gave way to Hesperos G3.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G3) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G3
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2001
| relto = Hesperos G4
| os = Windows NT Server
| osver = 4.0
| role = Windows PDC/SQL Server
}}

This incarnation of the machine ran Windows NT Server 4 (from BackOffice 4.5), as [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]] acquired the installation media (along with copies of Microsoft Macro Assembler 6.11 and FrontPage Server Extensions) from the IT manager at Sendero Capital Management, his then-current workplace.

At the end of the G2 era, I moved out of the Martinez household. At this point, Hesperos G3 remained on-loan to Dr. and Mrs. Martinez so they could continue using it as a WinRoute Pro router sharing their dialup connection. When Dr. and Mrs. Martinez finally switched to ADSL, this machine went back to my mother's home and was wiped/reinstalled, giving away to Hesperos (G4).

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G4) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G4
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G4 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Durango Ct
| acquired = 2001
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2001
| relto = Hesperos G4
| os = Caldera OpenLinux
| osver = 2.3
| role = Linux Development
}}

== Summary ==

This generation of the machine was used to develop the C18POLL MODBUS polling app under Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, for Elephant Butte Irrigation District on a contract with Megahertz Computer Consulting. The roots of my "programming" playlist (including Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, the OST of ''Ah! My Goddess'', and many others) were formed under XMMS on this machine.

Once that contract was over, OpenLinux was disposed of. [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]], [[Jonathon Moon]] and I were also gearing up to begin our adventures in digital multitrack audio recording. This, in turn, gave birth to Hesperos (G5).

<gallery>
OpenLinux.jpg|Caldera OpenLinux 2.3
</gallery>

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G5) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G5
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G4 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Durango Ct
| acquired = 2001
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2003
| relto = Landfill
| os = Windows 98
| osver = RTM
| role = Digital Multitrack Recording
}}

== Summary ==

In this generation, Windows 98 RTM was installed on the machine, along with Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 (eventually upgraded to Sonar). We recorded such classics as Repent, Goddess Amongst Us, The Screamer, and Psychedelic Chocolate Beauty Sculpture on here.

It is somewhat related to [[Dimetrius (Original)]], in that that laptop was the first machine on which we tried multitrack recording (with n-Track Studio). That machine proved unable to produce synchronized multitrack audio, which inspired the build-up of Hesperos in its new role.

The Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 ISA sound board was incapable of functioning in full-duplex at its full quality, so the sound quality of headphone monitoring was terrible while simultaneously recording audio. It was also prone to 60-cycle hum and other EMI/RFI noise, which would harm the quality of its recordings. This prompted us to install a Yamaha XG sound card that Joel procured, which was able to handle full-duplex 16-bit/44kHz operation.

When we moved the studio out of my mother's house, this machine ended up being gutted for parts and its hulking, empty case left in her garage until it was run over. It was thus disposed of. The sad tale of its last days (written during the trailer era) follows in the section below.

== Historical Summary ==

''This section is included from my old home page, [http://www.chivanet.org/~jpw/vax/computer.html The VAX Pirate's Lair], and as such is not to be considered accurate or up-to-date.''

This machine is enormous. Not currently functional, as it is missing a hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM and memory. This is one of those massive full-tower monstrosities with 6 external 5.25" drive bays that only supports AT/Baby AT motherboards. It originally ran Solaris 7 for Intel. I plan to rebuild it as a Windows domain controller once I get the needed components.

== Historical Specifications ==

* Intel Pentium 233 MMX
* 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drive
* Internal QIC-80 tape backup unit

{{Clear}}
= Hiatus =

At this point, a hiatus in the Hesperos naming tradition began. The multitrack recording setup during the rest of the trailer era, and indeed, all the way into the early days of the Alamo St. era, was a horrific machine called [[music]]. That machine caused nothing but the worst problems until being retired around 2008 in favor of a Power Macintosh G5 2.0DP.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G6) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G6
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| vendor = Various
| cpu = Xeon E5645
| freq = 2.4GHz
| ram = 24GB
| location = Office
| acquired = 2013
| acquired_from = Various
| paid = $4000
| os = Debian Linux
| osver = 10
| role = Business Workstation
| video = NVIDIA GeForce GTX-1080 Founders Edition
}}

== Summary ==

Hesperos G6 began as my work desktop, and the most powerful computer that I had ever owned, being a worthy heir to the Hesperos legacy.

== Specifications ==
* Dual Intel Xeon E5645 CPUs at 2.4GHz (6 core, 12 thread)
* 24GB ECC RAM
* HIS AMD Radeon 7950 GPU
* Corsair AX1200i Power Supply (1200W)
* 2x 120GB SSD in RAID0
* 4x 2TB 10KRPM HDD
* EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard
* Dual-booting Debian 8 and Windows 7
* Four monitors

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G6.1) =

In 2017, the Radeon 7950 GPU was replaced with an NVIDIA GTX1080 Founders Edition.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G6.2) =

On October 23, 2019, Hesperos was upgraded thus:

* 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5645 CPUs were replaced with 3.3GHz Intel Xeon X5680 CPUs

The ultimate goal is to overclock the X5680s to 4.0GHz, though I've had no success so far. I may also add a second GTX1080 Founders Edition for SLI goodness. The machine is snappy as-is.

The machine has also been updated to run Debian 10, which was an exercise in frustration.
{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G7) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G7
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| vendor = Various
| cpu = AMD Ryzen 9 5950x
| freq = 4.9GHz
| ram = 64GB
| location = Datashed
| acquired = 2024
| acquired_from = Various
| paid = $600
| os = FreeBSD
| osver = 13
| role = Business Workstation
| video = NVIDIA GeForce GTX-1080 Founders Edition
}}

In July/August 2024, Hesperos will receive the following parts replacements:

* Asus AM4 TUF Gaming X570-Plus (Wi-Fi) AM4 motherboard
* AMD Ryzen 9 5950x CPU
* G.Skill Ripjaws V Series DDR4 RAM (64GB)
* Crucial T500 2TB Gen4 NVMe M.2 Internal Gaming SSD

The plan OS-wise is going to be to dual-boot Windows 10 and FreeBSD. We'll see how well I can make FreeBSD play.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G8) (FUTURE BUILD) =

The next generation system will be built around one of the following platforms, listed in order of preference, most- to least-preferred:

* Raptor Talos II (Dual-Socket IBM POWER9)
* A next-generation dual-socket Intel Xeon platform
* AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro on an Asus SAGE board
Likely to be paired with high-end GPUs, and I'm considering workstation-class GPUs for this build.

Hesperos

2024-07-20T23:11:24Z

Jpw: /* Summary */

{{Infobox System
| name = hesperos
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| role = Various
| os = Various
| cpu = Various
| location = Various
| freq = Various
| acquired = 2000
| role = Various
}}

== Summary ==

Hesperos has been a steady staple in my computing lexicon since the G1 machine was built up in 2000. Having served multiple roles, from Oracle database server to Windows NT 4 domain controller to multitrack recording workstation to work machine, I have a deep fondness and sentimentality for the Hesperos name, much as [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]] has a fondness for [[athena]].

The article is divided into generations representing each substantial change to or replacement of the machine.

{{Clear}}
= DFI 486 (G0) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G0
| image = QuestionMark.jpg
| caption = No Photo Available
| vendor = DFI
| cpu = AMD 486DX4
| freq = 100MHz
| os = Windows 95/Solaris
| osver = RTM/7 (x86)
| acquired = 1998
| paid = $120
| acquired_from = University Presbyterian Church
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G1
| location = Durango Ct/Martinez Household
| role = Alternative Personal Workstation
}}

== Summary ==
This machine was purchased from University Presbyterian Church, where it had been used by Shelia Hornsby as a bookkeeping machine. I had payments for it deducted from my paycheck when I was working there as an administrative assistant.

== Naming ==

I have a theory that this generation was originally named davinci, but I'm not anywhere near sure about that. When I moved into the Martinez household, it definitely had an artist name (just as [[Poseidon (Original)]] was originally named picasso). At the time, I also had a machine named [[mozart]], so consistency in naming was nowhere near in place when I bought this machine.

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G1) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G1
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = DFI
| cpu = AMD 486DX4
| freq = 100MHz
| ram = 8MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G2
| os = Solaris
| osrel = 7 x86
| role = Oracle 7 Database Server
}}

== Summary ==
The first-gen Hesperos was built from the bones of the [[DFI 486]]. I had recently installed Solaris 7 for x86 on the DFI, and it proved unusably slow. My first step was to order a full-tower AT case from JDR Microdevices, and move the bones of the DFI into it. This provided no performance gains, for obvious reasons.

Unique to this machine was a QIC-80 tape drive that was intended to connect to the floppy drive controller. As I had both 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives in the machine, I never actually connected the tape drive, which ended up being there more for appearances than anything else.

The G1 machine was a short-lived part of the Hesperos story, and gave way to Hesperos (G2) as soon as funding was available for procuring upgraded components.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G2) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G2
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G3
| os = Solaris
| osver = 7/8
| role = Oracle 7 Database Server
}}

== Summary ==

In this incarnation, the machine was vested with an ATi Rage IIc video card, an 8GB HDD, and 32MB of RAM, and shortly upgraded from Solaris 7 to Solaris 8. I was never able to get the network card to work, as Solaris 8 wanted nothing to do with ISA NICs. This gave way to Hesperos G3.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G3) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G3
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2001
| relto = Hesperos G4
| os = Windows NT Server
| osver = 4.0
| role = Windows PDC/SQL Server
}}

This incarnation of the machine ran Windows NT Server 4 (from BackOffice 4.5), as [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]] acquired the installation media (along with copies of Microsoft Macro Assembler 6.11 and FrontPage Server Extensions) from the IT manager at Sendero Capital Management, his then-current workplace.

At the end of the G2 era, I moved out of the Martinez household. At this point, Hesperos G3 remained on-loan to Dr. and Mrs. Martinez so they could continue using it as a WinRoute Pro router sharing their dialup connection. When Dr. and Mrs. Martinez finally switched to ADSL, this machine went back to my mother's home and was wiped/reinstalled, giving away to Hesperos (G4).

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G4) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G4
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G4 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Durango Ct
| acquired = 2001
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2001
| relto = Hesperos G4
| os = Caldera OpenLinux
| osver = 2.3
| role = Linux Development
}}

== Summary ==

This generation of the machine was used to develop the C18POLL MODBUS polling app under Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, for Elephant Butte Irrigation District on a contract with Megahertz Computer Consulting. The roots of my "programming" playlist (including Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, the OST of ''Ah! My Goddess'', and many others) were formed under XMMS on this machine.

Once that contract was over, OpenLinux was disposed of. [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]], [[Jonathon Moon]] and I were also gearing up to begin our adventures in digital multitrack audio recording. This, in turn, gave birth to Hesperos (G5).

<gallery>
OpenLinux.jpg|Caldera OpenLinux 2.3
</gallery>

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G5) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G5
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G4 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Durango Ct
| acquired = 2001
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2003
| relto = Landfill
| os = Windows 98
| osver = RTM
| role = Digital Multitrack Recording
}}

== Summary ==

In this generation, Windows 98 RTM was installed on the machine, along with Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 (eventually upgraded to Sonar). We recorded such classics as Repent, Goddess Amongst Us, The Screamer, and Psychedelic Chocolate Beauty Sculpture on here.

It is somewhat related to [[Dimetrius (Original)]], in that that laptop was the first machine on which we tried multitrack recording (with n-Track Studio). That machine proved unable to produce synchronized multitrack audio, which inspired the build-up of Hesperos in its new role.

The Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 ISA sound board was incapable of functioning in full-duplex at its full quality, so the sound quality of headphone monitoring was terrible while simultaneously recording audio. It was also prone to 60-cycle hum and other EMI/RFI noise, which would harm the quality of its recordings. This prompted us to install a Yamaha XG sound card that Joel procured, which was able to handle full-duplex 16-bit/44kHz operation.

When we moved the studio out of my mother's house, this machine ended up being gutted for parts and its hulking, empty case left in her garage until it was run over. It was thus disposed of. The sad tale of its last days (written during the trailer era) follows in the section below.

== Historical Summary ==

''This section is included from my old home page, [http://www.chivanet.org/~jpw/vax/computer.html The VAX Pirate's Lair], and as such is not to be considered accurate or up-to-date.''

This machine is enormous. Not currently functional, as it is missing a hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM and memory. This is one of those massive full-tower monstrosities with 6 external 5.25" drive bays that only supports AT/Baby AT motherboards. It originally ran Solaris 7 for Intel. I plan to rebuild it as a Windows domain controller once I get the needed components.

== Historical Specifications ==

* Intel Pentium 233 MMX
* 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drive
* Internal QIC-80 tape backup unit

{{Clear}}
= Hiatus =

At this point, a hiatus in the Hesperos naming tradition began. The multitrack recording setup during the rest of the trailer era, and indeed, all the way into the early days of the Alamo St. era, was a horrific machine called [[music]]. That machine caused nothing but the worst problems until being retired around 2008 in favor of a Power Macintosh G5 2.0DP.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G6) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G6
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| vendor = Various
| cpu = Xeon E5645
| freq = 2.4GHz
| ram = 24GB
| location = Office
| acquired = 2013
| acquired_from = Various
| paid = $4000
| os = Debian Linux
| osver = 10
| role = Business Workstation
| video = NVIDIA GeForce GTX-1080 Founders Edition
}}

== Summary ==

Hesperos G6 began as my work desktop, and the most powerful computer that I had ever owned, being a worthy heir to the Hesperos legacy.

== Specifications ==
* Dual Intel Xeon E5645 CPUs at 2.4GHz (6 core, 12 thread)
* 24GB ECC RAM
* HIS AMD Radeon 7950 GPU
* Corsair AX1200i Power Supply (1200W)
* 2x 120GB SSD in RAID0
* 4x 2TB 10KRPM HDD
* EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard
* Dual-booting Debian 8 and Windows 7
* Four monitors

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G6.1) =

In 2017, the Radeon 7950 GPU was replaced with an NVIDIA GTX1080 Founders Edition.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G6.2) =

On October 23, 2019, Hesperos was upgraded thus:

* 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5645 CPUs were replaced with 3.3GHz Intel Xeon X5680 CPUs

The ultimate goal is to overclock the X5680s to 4.0GHz, though I've had no success so far. I may also add a second GTX1080 Founders Edition for SLI goodness. The machine is snappy as-is.

The machine has also been updated to run Debian 10, which was an exercise in frustration.
{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G7) =

In July/August 2024, Hesperos will receive the following parts replacements:

* Asus AM4 TUF Gaming X570-Plus (Wi-Fi) AM4 motherboard
* AMD Ryzen 9 5950x CPU
* G.Skill Ripjaws V Series DDR4 RAM (64GB)
* Crucial T500 2TB Gen4 NVMe M.2 Internal Gaming SSD

The plan OS-wise is going to be to dual-boot Windows 10 and FreeBSD. We'll see how well I can make FreeBSD play.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G8) (FUTURE BUILD) =

The next generation system will be built around one of the following platforms, listed in order of preference, most- to least-preferred:

* Raptor Talos II (Dual-Socket IBM POWER9)
* A next-generation dual-socket Intel Xeon platform
* AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro on an Asus SAGE board
Likely to be paired with high-end GPUs, and I'm considering workstation-class GPUs for this build.

Hesperos

2024-07-20T23:08:34Z

Jpw:

{{Infobox System
| name = hesperos
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| role = Various
| os = Various
| cpu = Various
| location = Various
| freq = Various
| acquired = 2000
| role = Various
}}

== Summary ==

Hesperos has been a steady staple in my computing lexicon since the G1 machine was built up in 2000. Having served multiple roles, from Oracle database server to Windows NT 4 domain controller to multitrack recording workstation to work machine, I have a deep fondness and sentimentality for the Hesperos name, much as [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]] has a fondness for [[athena]].

The article is divided into generations representing each substantial change to or replacement of the machine.

{{Clear}}
= DFI 486 (G0) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G0
| image = QuestionMark.jpg
| caption = No Photo Available
| vendor = DFI
| cpu = AMD 486DX4
| freq = 100MHz
| os = Windows 95/Solaris
| osver = RTM/7 (x86)
| acquired = 1998
| paid = $120
| acquired_from = University Presbyterian Church
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G1
| location = Durango Ct/Martinez Household
| role = Alternative Personal Workstation
}}

== Summary ==
This machine was purchased from University Presbyterian Church, where it had been used by Shelia Hornsby as a bookkeeping machine. I had payments for it deducted from my paycheck when I was working there as an administrative assistant.

== Naming ==

I have a theory that this generation was originally named davinci, but I'm not anywhere near sure about that. When I moved into the Martinez household, it definitely had an artist name (just as [[Poseidon (Original)]] was originally named picasso). At the time, I also had a machine named [[mozart]], so consistency in naming was nowhere near in place when I bought this machine.

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G1) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G1
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = DFI
| cpu = AMD 486DX4
| freq = 100MHz
| ram = 8MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G2
| os = Solaris
| osrel = 7 x86
| role = Oracle 7 Database Server
}}

== Summary ==
The first-gen Hesperos was built from the bones of the [[DFI 486]]. I had recently installed Solaris 7 for x86 on the DFI, and it proved unusably slow. My first step was to order a full-tower AT case from JDR Microdevices, and move the bones of the DFI into it. This provided no performance gains, for obvious reasons.

Unique to this machine was a QIC-80 tape drive that was intended to connect to the floppy drive controller. As I had both 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives in the machine, I never actually connected the tape drive, which ended up being there more for appearances than anything else.

The G1 machine was a short-lived part of the Hesperos story, and gave way to Hesperos (G2) as soon as funding was available for procuring upgraded components.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G2) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G2
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2000
| relto = Hesperos G3
| os = Solaris
| osver = 7/8
| role = Oracle 7 Database Server
}}

== Summary ==

In this incarnation, the machine was vested with an ATi Rage IIc video card, an 8GB HDD, and 32MB of RAM, and shortly upgraded from Solaris 7 to Solaris 8. I was never able to get the network card to work, as Solaris 8 wanted nothing to do with ISA NICs. This gave way to Hesperos G3.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G3) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G3
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G1/G2 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Martinez Household
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2001
| relto = Hesperos G4
| os = Windows NT Server
| osver = 4.0
| role = Windows PDC/SQL Server
}}

This incarnation of the machine ran Windows NT Server 4 (from BackOffice 4.5), as [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]] acquired the installation media (along with copies of Microsoft Macro Assembler 6.11 and FrontPage Server Extensions) from the IT manager at Sendero Capital Management, his then-current workplace.

At the end of the G2 era, I moved out of the Martinez household. At this point, Hesperos G3 remained on-loan to Dr. and Mrs. Martinez so they could continue using it as a WinRoute Pro router sharing their dialup connection. When Dr. and Mrs. Martinez finally switched to ADSL, this machine went back to my mother's home and was wiped/reinstalled, giving away to Hesperos (G4).

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G4) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G4
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G4 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Durango Ct
| acquired = 2001
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2001
| relto = Hesperos G4
| os = Caldera OpenLinux
| osver = 2.3
| role = Linux Development
}}

== Summary ==

This generation of the machine was used to develop the C18POLL MODBUS polling app under Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, for Elephant Butte Irrigation District on a contract with Megahertz Computer Consulting. The roots of my "programming" playlist (including Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, the OST of ''Ah! My Goddess'', and many others) were formed under XMMS on this machine.

Once that contract was over, OpenLinux was disposed of. [[:User:Soundstains|Joel Martinez]], [[Jonathon Moon]] and I were also gearing up to begin our adventures in digital multitrack audio recording. This, in turn, gave birth to Hesperos (G5).

<gallery>
OpenLinux.jpg|Caldera OpenLinux 2.3
</gallery>

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G5) =
{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G5
| image = HesperosArtemisFront.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G4 (Right)
| vendor = JDR Microdevices
| cpu = Pentium MMX
| freq = 233MHz
| ram = 32MB
| location = Durango Ct
| acquired = 2001
| acquired_from = JDR Microdevices
| relinquished = 2003
| relto = Landfill
| os = Windows 98
| osver = RTM
| role = Digital Multitrack Recording
}}

== Summary ==

In this generation, Windows 98 RTM was installed on the machine, along with Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 (eventually upgraded to Sonar). We recorded such classics as Repent, Goddess Amongst Us, The Screamer, and Psychedelic Chocolate Beauty Sculpture on here.

It is somewhat related to [[Dimetrius (Original)]], in that that laptop was the first machine on which we tried multitrack recording (with n-Track Studio). That machine proved unable to produce synchronized multitrack audio, which inspired the build-up of Hesperos in its new role.

The Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 ISA sound board was incapable of functioning in full-duplex at its full quality, so the sound quality of headphone monitoring was terrible while simultaneously recording audio. It was also prone to 60-cycle hum and other EMI/RFI noise, which would harm the quality of its recordings. This prompted us to install a Yamaha XG sound card that Joel procured, which was able to handle full-duplex 16-bit/44kHz operation.

When we moved the studio out of my mother's house, this machine ended up being gutted for parts and its hulking, empty case left in her garage until it was run over. It was thus disposed of. The sad tale of its last days (written during the trailer era) follows in the section below.

== Historical Summary ==

''This section is included from my old home page, [http://www.chivanet.org/~jpw/vax/computer.html The VAX Pirate's Lair], and as such is not to be considered accurate or up-to-date.''

This machine is enormous. Not currently functional, as it is missing a hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM and memory. This is one of those massive full-tower monstrosities with 6 external 5.25" drive bays that only supports AT/Baby AT motherboards. It originally ran Solaris 7 for Intel. I plan to rebuild it as a Windows domain controller once I get the needed components.

== Historical Specifications ==

* Intel Pentium 233 MMX
* 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drive
* Internal QIC-80 tape backup unit

{{Clear}}
= Hiatus =

At this point, a hiatus in the Hesperos naming tradition began. The multitrack recording setup during the rest of the trailer era, and indeed, all the way into the early days of the Alamo St. era, was a horrific machine called [[music]]. That machine caused nothing but the worst problems until being retired around 2008 in favor of a Power Macintosh G5 2.0DP.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G6) =

{{Infobox System
| name = Hesperos G6
| image = HesperosG6.jpg
| caption = Hesperos G6
| vendor = Various
| cpu = Xeon E5645
| freq = 2.4GHz
| ram = 24GB
| location = Office
| acquired = 2013
| acquired_from = Various
| paid = $4000
| os = Debian Linux
| osver = 10
| role = Business Workstation
| video = NVIDIA GeForce GTX-1080 Founders Edition
}}

== Summary ==

Hesperos G6 began as my work desktop, and the most powerful computer that I had ever owned, being worthy heir to the Hesperos legacy.

== Specifications ==
* Dual Intel Xeon E5645 CPUs at 2.4GHz (6 core, 12 thread)
* 24GB ECC RAM
* HIS AMD Radeon 7950 GPU
* Corsair AX1200i Power Supply (1200W)
* 2x 120GB SSD in RAID0
* 4x 2TB 10KRPM HDD
* EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard
* Dual-booting Debian 8 and Windows 7
* Four monitors

{{Clear}}

= Hesperos (G6.1) =

In 2017, the Radeon 7950 GPU was replaced with an NVIDIA GTX1080 Founders Edition.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G6.2) =

On October 23, 2019, Hesperos was upgraded thus:

* 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5645 CPUs were replaced with 3.3GHz Intel Xeon X5680 CPUs

The ultimate goal is to overclock the X5680s to 4.0GHz, though I've had no success so far. I may also add a second GTX1080 Founders Edition for SLI goodness. The machine is snappy as-is.

The machine has also been updated to run Debian 10, which was an exercise in frustration.
{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G7) =

In July/August 2024, Hesperos will receive the following parts replacements:

* Asus AM4 TUF Gaming X570-Plus (Wi-Fi) AM4 motherboard
* AMD Ryzen 9 5950x CPU
* G.Skill Ripjaws V Series DDR4 RAM (64GB)
* Crucial T500 2TB Gen4 NVMe M.2 Internal Gaming SSD

The plan OS-wise is going to be to dual-boot Windows 10 and FreeBSD. We'll see how well I can make FreeBSD play.

{{Clear}}
= Hesperos (G8) (FUTURE BUILD) =

The next generation system will be built around one of the following platforms, listed in order of preference, most- to least-preferred:

* Raptor Talos II (Dual-Socket IBM POWER9)
* A next-generation dual-socket Intel Xeon platform
* AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro on an Asus SAGE board
Likely to be paired with high-end GPUs, and I'm considering workstation-class GPUs for this build.

Hemera

2020-10-26T14:19:25Z

Jpw:

{{Infobox System
| name = hemera
| image = HemeraHyperion.jpg
| caption = Hemera (bottom)
| vendor = Sun Microsystems
| model = SPARCserver 20
| cpu = Ross HyperSPARC
| bus = SBus
| freq = 125MHz
| ram = 512MB
| location = 1DCA.C01
| acquired = 2002
| acquired_from = Joel Martinez (On Loan)
| role = ChivaNet Web and Mail Server
| price = $0
| os = Solaris
| osver = 7 (11/99)
}}

== Summary ==
This lovely SPARCserver 20 is the ChivaNet web and mail server. It contains 2x 73.1GB U320SCSI hard drives, and mounts the storage server over NFS. It's bedecked with an SBus QFE (Quad Fast Ethernet) board, as it is multi-homed.

== Provenance ==
Joel Martinez acquired this machine in around 2002, and it involved a trip out to Truth or Consequences to be picked up. Included a DDS2 tape drive and external HDD enclosure, which were lost in the [[:Category:Storage Unit Tragedy of 2004|Storage Unit Tragedy of 2004]]. This machine was believed to have also been lost in that tragedy, but was found on the top shelf of the datashed at the beginning of its renovation, wrapped in black plastic bags. Still worked, but needed a new RTC chip.

== Gallery ==
<gallery>
HemeraHyperion.jpg|Hemera and Hyperion
Top_of_1DCA.C01.jpg|Side View
</gallery>

== External Links ==
* [http://www.chivanet.org Website hosted on Hemera]
* [http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/39663/Sun-SPARCserver-20/ SPARCserver 20 at the Centre for Computing History]

[[Category: Servers]]
[[Category: Workstations]]
[[Category: Computers]]
[[Category: Sun Microsystems]]
[[Category: 1DCA.C01]]
[[Category: Sun SPARC]]

Fjolnir

2020-08-23T18:19:28Z

Jpw:

{{Infobox System
| name = fjolnir
| image = fjolnir.jpg
| caption = Fjolnir
| vendor = Commodore Business Machines
| model = Amiga 500
| cpu = Motorola 68000
| freq = 7MHz
| ram = 1MB
| os = AmigaOS
| osver = 2.04
| bus = Zorro II
| location = 1DCA
| acquired = 2020
| acquired_from = Joel Cook on Twitter
| paid = Traded for IBM Model M Keyboard
| role = General-Purpose Amiga System
}}

File:Fjolnir.jpg

2020-08-23T18:18:49Z

Jpw: User created page with UploadWizard

Fjolnir

2020-08-23T18:12:07Z

Jpw: Created page with "{{Infobox System | name = fjolnir | image = A4000Temp.jpg | caption = Fjolnir | vendor = Commodore Business Machines | model = Amiga 500 | cpu = Motorola 68000 | freq = 7MHz |..."

{{Infobox System
| name = fjolnir
| image = A4000Temp.jpg
| caption = Fjolnir
| vendor = Commodore Business Machines
| model = Amiga 500
| cpu = Motorola 68000
| freq = 7MHz
| ram = 1MB
| os = AmigaOS
| osver = 2.04
| bus = Zorro II
| location = 1DCA
| acquired = 2020
| acquired_from = Joel Cook on Twitter
| paid = Traded for IBM Model M Keyboard
| role = General-Purpose Amiga System
}}

Loki

2020-08-23T18:08:44Z

Jpw:

{{Infobox System
| name = loki
| image = A4000Temp.jpg
| caption = Elbox PowerTower Case
| vendor = Amiga Technologies Ltd.
| model = Amiga 4000D
| cpu = Motorola 68060
| freq = 50MHz
| ram = 128MB
| os = AmigaOS
| osver = 3.9
| bus = Zorro III
| location = 1DCA
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = The Software Hut
| paid = $3999
| role = Creative Media Workstation
}}

== Summary ==

This machine was purchased new from The Software Hut in 2000. It was supposed to come with a phase5 Cyberstorm Mk-III 68060, but the charlatan who owned Software Hut silently exchanged it for a GVP T-Rex II, and also refused to support the machine after purchase, as it had reliability problems from the outset, which the owner basically said was my responsibility to deal with. Sadly, such behavior was rampant in the community in the first few years after Commodore's bankruptcy.

At one point, the PSU failed and was replaced with a PC-style ATX power supply. It was also re-capped in 2014, but the machine does not presently work. I believe the processor daughter card might be hosed.

The motherboard and CPU board are off for repairs as of 8/4/2020.

=== Update ===

The technician sent back the boards, citing a lack of time. Need to get close-ups of the capacitors and send them to Mech. (8/23/2020)

== Specifications ==

* Amiga 4000D System Board
* Elbox PowerTower Case
* Elbox Zorro III Bus Board
* GVP T-Rex II CPU board (50MHz 68060)
* NewTek Video Toaster 4000
* Individual Computers X-Surf Ethernet Interface
* 4.5GB IDE hard drive
* 40X IDE CD-ROM drive
* SyQuest EZ135 SCSI cartridge drive
* 1.76MB high-density floppy drive
* Kickstart 3.1 ROMs
* AmigaOS 3.9

== Historical Summary ==

{{HistoricalSummary}}

This Amiga is really really really nice. In fact, with the exception of the $800-plus PPC accelerators available, this Amiga has the fastest processor available on the platform. I bought this new in 2000, from Software Hut. It's a Gateway-era Amiga 4000D towerized in an Elbox PowerTower case with IDE support and AGA. Very nice machine. One of the gems of my collection.

== Historical Specifications ==

* Amiga 4000T
* Motorola MC68060 50MHz with MMU/FPU (this is on a GVP T-Rex II 68060 accelerator card with onboard SCSI)
* 2MB chip RAM, 20MB fast RAM
* Amiga AGA chipset architecture
* 4.5GB IDE hard disk
* Zorro-III bus
* X-Surf Zorro-II Ethernet card (10bt)
* 3.1 Kickstart ROMs
* 40X CD-ROM
* AmigaOS 3.5

[[Category:Commodore Amiga]]
[[Category:Amiga AGA Chipset]]

Loki

2020-08-05T04:02:57Z

Jpw:

{{Infobox System
| name = loki
| image = A4000Temp.jpg
| caption = Elbox PowerTower Case
| vendor = Amiga Technologies Ltd.
| model = Amiga 4000D
| cpu = Motorola 68060
| freq = 50MHz
| ram = 128MB
| os = AmigaOS
| osver = 3.9
| bus = Zorro III
| location = 1DCA
| acquired = 2000
| acquired_from = The Software Hut
| paid = $3999
| role = Creative Media Workstation
}}

== Summary ==

This machine was purchased new from The Software Hut in 2000. It was supposed to come with a phase5 Cyberstorm Mk-III 68060, but the charlatan who owned Software Hut silently exchanged it for a GVP T-Rex II, and also refused to support the machine after purchase, as it had reliability problems from the outset, which the owner basically said was my responsibility to deal with. Sadly, such behavior was rampant in the community in the first few years after Commodore's bankruptcy.

At one point, the PSU failed and was replaced with a PC-style ATX power supply. It was also re-capped in 2014, but the machine does not presently work. I believe the processor daughter card might be hosed.

The motherboard and CPU board are off for repairs as of 8/4/2020.

== Specifications ==

* Amiga 4000D System Board
* Elbox PowerTower Case
* Elbox Zorro III Bus Board
* GVP T-Rex II CPU board (50MHz 68060)
* NewTek Video Toaster 4000
* Individual Computers X-Surf Ethernet Interface
* 4.5GB IDE hard drive
* 40X IDE CD-ROM drive
* SyQuest EZ135 SCSI cartridge drive
* 1.76MB high-density floppy drive
* Kickstart 3.1 ROMs
* AmigaOS 3.9

== Historical Summary ==

{{HistoricalSummary}}

This Amiga is really really really nice. In fact, with the exception of the $800-plus PPC accelerators available, this Amiga has the fastest processor available on the platform. I bought this new in 2000, from Software Hut. It's a Gateway-era Amiga 4000D towerized in an Elbox PowerTower case with IDE support and AGA. Very nice machine. One of the gems of my collection.

== Historical Specifications ==

* Amiga 4000T
* Motorola MC68060 50MHz with MMU/FPU (this is on a GVP T-Rex II 68060 accelerator card with onboard SCSI)
* 2MB chip RAM, 20MB fast RAM
* Amiga AGA chipset architecture
* 4.5GB IDE hard disk
* Zorro-III bus
* X-Surf Zorro-II Ethernet card (10bt)
* 3.1 Kickstart ROMs
* 40X CD-ROM
* AmigaOS 3.5

[[Category:Commodore Amiga]]
[[Category:Amiga AGA Chipset]]

Loki

2020-08-05T02:21:15Z

Jpw:

Retrocomputing Beginner's Guide

2020-08-02T21:24:14Z

Jpw: /* Amiga Models */

This is Datashed Retrocomputing's guide for the aspiring retrocomputing collector. The goal is to give a few basic hints to keep frustration to a minimum, and help the aspiring collector find a positive direction in this highly-rewarding hobby.

This guide is geared toward those interested in collecting physical hardware, and as such, emulation options will not be covered here.

== General Hints ==

=== Pick a Platform, and Focus ===
Choose a platform or theme for your collection, and stick to it for awhile. You can always branch out later, but the aspiring collector will benefit from learning one type of system well, getting to know its quirks and all the ways to work around them. This will avoid frustrating and costly mistakes. It's easier, for instance, to learn Sun SPARC hardware on its own, than to be learning Sun, Commodore, DEC, and Apple gear all at once. I've seen beginners amass large and varied collections early on, only to give up in frustration and sell everything, or worse, scrap everything.

Here are a few platforms with some pros and cons for beginning collectors. I will give a "BFS" or "Beginner Friendliness Score" from 1 to 5, with higher numbers being more friendly:

==== Older x86 PCs/IBM Compatibles ====

This one is pretty much a no-brainer, and probably the easiest to start with. These machines are the ancestors of the Windows and Mac computers that are still on the market today. Popularity of the platform helps here, as so many have been made over the years that the supply of usable and fun machines is quite plentiful. Even if this category is not your primary focus, it is a good idea to have at least one or two 80486 or early Pentium-class machines with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives around, as they make great "gateway machines" to get software and data you download on your modern desktop or laptop onto your vintage machines--most vintage microcomputers (but not all) will have some means of reading IBM-compatible floppy disks.

There are several eras to cover here:

===== 8088/PC and PC XT Era =====
This covers the first machine that introduced the x86 platform, the IBM PC, model 5150, and its immediate successor the IBM PC XT, model 5160. These machines generally include MDA video boards with no graphics capability, or CGA video boards with limited graphics capability (320x200/4 color, or 640x200 monochrome).

These machines inspired a number of clones, of various faithfulness to full IBM compatibility.

The IBM PC 5150 and PC XT 5160 are relatively challenging and expensive to find in good working order, will require some level of specialized components to upgrade to a usable state, and are quite slow. They also typically used 360KB double sided/double density 5.25-inch floppy drives. Without a network card (itself sometimes tough to find, for at least the 8-bit ISA expansion slots of the 5150) or a suitable "gateway machine" from the 386, 486, or early Pentium era equipped with a compatible floppy drive, these systems can be challenging to get programs and data onto. An XT-IDE adapter is a must, as the MFM/RLL hard drives of the day have mostly failed nowadays, and the ones that haven't are ticking time bombs. You should also expect to replace the tantalum capacitors on the system planar (IBM terminology for "motherboard"), as they have a tendency to violently explode. For the 5150, a power supply upgrade may be needed to support hard drives, as the original 62.5W power supply is a bit underpowered for such tasks.

These machines can support up to 640KB of RAM, although RAM above 256KB must generally reside on an expansion card. Given the limit of five slots on the 5150, this can be a problem.

I have limited experience with clones from this era, though the Tandy 1000 series is often considered an excellent alternative to IBM's entries into this category.

I would not recommend an IBM 8088 as a first retro system, but they can be a lot of fun for intermediate collectors, and a Tandy 1000 of any stripe would be a good beginner's machine with which to play games from the era. As an added benefit, some models of Tandy 1000 could be fitted with a 3.5" floppy drive, making data transfer from modern systems somewhat easier, although in the case of 720KB DSDD 3.5" floppies, modern USB floppy drives cannot generally write to them. You'll still need a "gateway machine" with a genuine, on-board floppy drive.

BFS: 2 for IBM, 3 for Tandy 1000

===== 80286/AT Era =====
This covers the IBM PC AT (model 5170) and clones. They generally have CGA or EGA graphics and a hard disk drive; usually MFM/RLL or ESDI.

These machines expanded the memory addressing capability of the x86 platform from 20 bits to 24 bits, expanding addressable memory from 1MB to 16MB, and added multitasking and memory protection.

These systems are expensive enough and rare enough that I would personally recommend saving them for after you've picked up a 386, 486, or early Pentium machine. They also suffer from common hard drive failures, and can be difficult to get software onto, due to the 5.25" hard drives that were still ubiquitous. A gateway machine is advised.

There is also difficulty in these systems due to the fact that BIOS setup requires a boot floppy to access.

BFS: 2 for IBM

===== IBM PS/2 Range =====

The IBM PS/2 succeeded the PC, PC XT, and PC AT systems. With some exceptions, these systems include Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) expansion slots, VGA graphics, 1.44MB high-density or 2.88MB extended-density 3.5" floppy drives. The most useful of these machines (and the bulk of the range overall) are in the 386, 486, and early Pentium class.

In this range, we're getting into components (like the VGA graphics standard, PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors) that make interoperability with modern peripherals easier. However, many of these machines used ESDI hard drives which are extremely rare, expensive, and unreliable. SCSI-based machines are friendlier, with the addition of a SCSI2SD adapter for reliable fixed storage, but the Micro Channel expansion slots mean that upgrades can be expensive and difficult to find, especially when it comes to sound cards. Also, the PS/2 floppy drives tend to fail, and are somewhat non-standard and difficult to source, though workarounds of varying degrees of elegance do exist. You will need a floppy diskette containing Adapter Definition Files for each Micro Channel expansion card installed in your machine, and diagnostics/setup diskettes as well.

If you can get over the obstacles inherent in these machines, they can be incredibly rewarding to collect and use, especially in concert with the IBM OS/2 operating system they were designed to run.

Again, I'd put this off--but not for too long, as the supply of PS/2 systems has dwindled sharply, while prices have steadily increased.

BFS: 3

===== 80386 Era =====

In this era, you're looking at machines that can run a wide variety of operating systems, and the platform itself was beginning to coalesce around a few standards, at least among clone vendors. MFM/RLL hard drives were still common, though SCSI and IDE both began to get a foothold in this era. A good 386 clone can be a decent starter and gateway machine, though they can be a bit hard to source for a decent price in modern times. Look for a machine with SCSI or IDE support, and a firmware-based BIOS setup utility. CompactFlash-IDE adapters and SCSI2SD solutions really begin to shine in this era of machine, although in the case of on-board IDE, support for CompactFlash-IDE media can be spotty, and BIOS may or may not detect your storage devices, especially at larger sizes. Look for 2GB or smaller media. SCSI will have higher chances of working with more and larger mass storage devices.

These machines do an acceptable job running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows 95 runs, but 8MB of RAM should be considered a minimum, and even then it will not be very performant. Early versions of Linux will run quite well, as will OS/2, provided drivers are available for all attached peripherals.

BFS: 3.5

===== 80486 Era =====

The 486 machines really hit a sweet spot for ease of troubleshooting and initial setup for beginners, as machines equipped with multi I/O boards containing standard IDE ports were quite common and plentiful. Most will also have a decent ROM BIOS, such as the American Megatrends WinBIOS or a Phoenix BIOS. These have good hard disk autodetection for IDE, and work well with IDE/ATAPI optical drives. Most will have a selection of 16-bit ISA and 32-bit VESA Local Bus expansion slots, and some later motherboards also included PCI slots, and could be upgraded to Pentium-class CPUs via a Pentium OverDrive add-on.

The 486 will also run the widest range of MS-DOS software of all early x86 systems, with most having a "turbo" button that will underclock the CPU--sometimes as low as 8MHz--and disable CPU caches to bring performance closer to that of a later 80286 CPU, for the benefit of early, timing-sensitive games.

BFS: 4

===== Early P5 Pentiums =====

It's all about the Pentiums! The 60MHz-90MHz Pentiums are absolutely terrific for running Windows 3.11, Windows 95, OS/2, and some versions of UNIX and Linux. IDE support in this era is rock solid, PCI expansion slots begin to edge out 16-bit ISA, and plug-and-play begins to become more robust.

In this era, my most recommended machine for a beginner would be the Gateway 2000 P5-75. Driver support is easy in all operating systems I've tried, and they are still relatively reasonable in price if you are patient.

Compatibility for MS-DOS gaming is quite good, if you limit yourself to games that were released in around 1989 or later. Generally speaking, games with VGA or SVGA graphics will run beautifully on these machines, up to and including WarCraft III, Doom, Quake, etc.

If you're like me and enjoy playing with 1990s productivity and software development titles, these machines are fantastic for it. Throw in an Ethernet card, get it on the network, and play!

For beginners, I would recommend staying away from the Packard-Bell machines. Compaq, Dell, and HP have some reasonable entries in this category, however, that are worth looking into.

BFS: 5

==== Commodore 8-bit ====

===== Commodore PET =====

===== Commodore VIC-20 =====

===== Commodore 64 =====

===== Commodore 128 =====

Within the family of Commodore 8-bit machines, I would highly recommend a Commodore 128 with an SD2IEC adapter. It will run all Commodore 64 software perfectly, and as an added bonus, gives you access to Digital Research CP/M. Although slow, the Commodore 128's CP/M implementation provides the widest compatibility for reading and writing other CP/M systems' floppy diskette formats, making it an excellent gateway system for other CP/M systems you may end up collecting in the future. Its value proposition is quite impressive.

The SD2IEC adapter will make the use of oft-unreliable floppy disks less necessary, and will make the experience more seamless.

BFS: 4

==== Commodore Amiga ====

There are a few important concepts that an aspiring Amiga collector needs to be aware of:

* The Amiga range uses a variety of chipsets supporting various NTSC and multiscan graphics modes: OCS (Original Chip Set), ECS (Enhanced Chip Set), and AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture). Newer chipsets add more colors and resolutions, and generally attempt to remain backwards-compatible with prior chipsets. However, backwards compatibility in the Amiga range is far from perfect, especially in AGA-based machines. This can often be overcome for games by using WHDLoad. If you're looking to boot physical floppies, however, you will probably need to source an Amiga whose chipset matches the era when the game was released. Most games targeted OCS/ECS, as AGA only debuted two years prior to Commodore's bankruptcy.

* For a stock Amiga (and many accelerated Amigas), you will need some way of displaying video modes that use a 15kHz signal. There are passive Amiga video to VGA adapters, but where standard VGA modes use 31.5kHz signal timing, and work with flat-panel VGA monitors, most Amiga video modes require a monitor that can synchronize to a 15kHz scan rate, which is not commonly supported on flat-panel monitors. Exceptions do exist, and many "multiscan" CRT monitors will be able to handle NTSC 15kHz scan rates. It is possible to overcome this limitation with "display enhancer" or "scan-doubler" hardware, which takes 15kHz output, stores frames in a buffer, and outputs them at a doubled rate (i.e., 31.5kHz). This hardware will also remove flicker from "interlaced" modes, and the Amiga 3000 and 3000T include an integrated display enhancer and VGA port that will output scan-doubled graphics at 31.5kHz. Other options include Commodore RGB monitors such as the 1080, 1084, 1084S, M1438, and M1572 (although models prior to the M1438 will not display VGA-style "Productivity" mode and higher resolutions). Some Amiga systems include a composite video output for display on a standard television, though it will often be monochrome-only, as is the case with the Amiga 2000 family of systems.

* Another option for video is "RTG" or "ReTargetable Graphics" with a Zorro II, Zorro III, or accelerator-based graphics board. Examples include the Picasso II and Picasso IV from Village Tronic, the Cybervision 64 and Cybervision 3D from Phase5/DCE, and the onboard RTG graphics on the Apollo Vampire accelerators. Village Tronic and Phase5/DCE boards tend to be rare and highly expensive. Support for passing standard Amiga video modes through RTG boards varies. You will need either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX software in order to use RTG graphics boards. Both are readily available, though Picasso96 tends to be better-supported and more robust than CyberGraphX.

* Amiga floppy drives have the benefit of being able to read IBM-formatted floppy diskettes of the same density. However, IBM-compatible computers can neither read nor write Amiga-formatted floppy diskettes without the aid of special hardware, such as the Individual Computers Catweasel floppy controller.

* GoTek floppy emulators, flashed with an Amiga-compatible firmware such as FlashFloppy, make data transfer easy. This is facilitated by providing a standard 34-pin floppy connector on the back of the drive, and a readout, a type-A USB port for a USB memory key, and "up" and "down" buttons for selecting among the floppy disk images written to the USB key. These images normally come in "adf" format, and are readily available.

* Amiga computers (other than the A1000) have an upgradable ROM firmware known as the "Kickstart ROM". Generally speaking, a given AmigaOS version will need a ROM chip (or chips) installed in order to function, although in many cases, the ROM image can be soft-kicked from your Amiga hard drive at boot time, at the expense of delays in booting your machine.

* The Amiga operating system has been variously known as "Workbench" and "AmigaOS"
** Workbench, as an umbrella term for the operating system, is older, but Workbench is technically just the graphical interface and desktop/file manager of the operating system, powered by the "Intuition" graphics libraries.
** Access to on-disk data, as well as the command-line shell, are supplied by a component called "AmigaDOS" (not to be confused with "AmigaOS").
** Buttons, text editing controls, drop-down lists, and other visual components of the UI are termed "gadgets", and are supplied by "gadget libraries", such as ReAction, MUI, and GadTools.
** Directories, rather than being referred to as "directories" or "folders", are called "drawers" in the Workbench UI.
** There are two current strains of the AmigaOS operating system family, and one abandoned strain of development:
*** AmigaOS 3.1.4, released in 2018, is the latest version capable of running on Motorola 68K-based Amiga systems
*** AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition, released in 2016, is the latest version capable of running on IBM PowerPC-based Amiga systems, such as the AmigaOne range of machines from EyeTech, A-Eon, and other vendors
*** AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 were based on AmigaOS 3.1 (the final Commodore release) and were developed by Haage & Partner under contract from Amiga Inc. and did not form the basis of AmigaOS 3.1.4, which was developed once again from Commodore's AmigaOS 3.1 by Hyperion Entertainment
** I will not be covering AROS and MorphOS here, as I do not consider them to be legitimate Amiga operating systems, as they share no code with the official OS releases from the various owners of the Amiga intellectual properties

==== Amiga Models ====
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Model
! CPU
! Clock Rate
! Chipset
! Storage Bus
! Expansion Bus
! BFS
|-
| A1000
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS
| N/A
| A1000/A500 Sidecar
| 2
|-
| A500
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS
| N/A
| A1000/A500 Sidecar, A500 Trapdoor
| 4.6
|-
| A2000
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS/ECS
| None on system board; SCSI and others available via expansion boards
| Zorro II, A2000 CPU Slot, 8-bit ISA, 16-bit ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 3
|-
| A2000HD
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS/ECS
| A2091 SCSI (single-ended) standard
| Zorro II, A2000 CPU Slot, 8-bit ISA, 16-bit ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 3.5
|-
| A500+
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| ECS
| N/A
| A1000/A500 Sidecar, A500 Trapdoor
| 4.5
|-
| A600
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| ECS
| IDE
| Sidecar, Trapdoor, PCMCIA
| 4
|-
| A3000
| Motorola 68030
| 16MHz or 25MHz
| ECS
| SCSI (single-ended) on system board
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 3.6
|-
| A3000T
| Motorola 68030, Motorola 68040
| 25MHz
| ECS
| SCSI (single-ended) on system board
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 3.3
|-
| A3000UX
| Motorola 68030
| 25MHz
| ECS, Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture (TIGA; supported in Amiga UNIX only)
| SCSI (single-ended) on system board
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 2
|-
| A1200
| Motorola 68EC020
| 14MHz
| AGA
| IDE
| Sidecar, Trapdoor Expansion, PCMCIA
| 4.8
|-
| A4000
| Motorola 68EC030, Motorola 68040
| 25MHz
| AGA
| IDE
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 2.8
|-
| A4000T
| Motorola 68040, Motorola 68060
| 25MHz (68040), 50MHz (68060)
| AGA
| IDE, SCSI
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 2.5
|}

===== Amiga 1000 =====

The original Amiga system has often been considered a novelty only for serious collectors, given its lack of internal expansion capacity, hard disk support, and requirement of inserting a kickstart floppy to boot the system. However, most of these limitations have been overcome with the introduction of the Classic 520 accelerator, which provides hard disk support and an autoboot feature, obviating the need for a kickstart floppy, and additional fast memory.

Even with the Classic 520, bear in mind that chip memory is still limited to 512K, you will be restricted to only OCS (Original Chip Set) graphics modes, and the status of the A1000 as a serious collector's machine tends to keep prices quite high.

BFS: 2 (due to price of acquisition)

===== Amiga 500 =====

There was a time when I would have said that the Amiga 500 was a poor choice for beginners, but modern hardware expansions have overcome the many limitations of this system to the extent that I now believe it is a great first Amiga. As the bestselling Amiga model ever produced by Commodore, this machine is still in relatively plentiful supply, and can be acquired for $500 or less. Still not cheap, but compared to other Amiga models, it's a steal.

In its base configuration, the A500 comes with a 7MHz 68000 CPU, 512KB of chip RAM, and depending on the system board revision, the OCS or ECS chipset, and Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 ROMs.

The A500 includes a "trap door" expansion slot, commonly fitted with the A501 expansion board, adding a battery-backed realtime clock and 512K of additional "slow" or "trapdoor" RAM, bringing the system RAM total to 1MB. The battery on the A501 is of the rechargeable NiCd barrel or "Varta" type, and has a tendency to leak and damage the A501 board. Thankfully, the location of this battery reduces the chances of such leakage affecting the system board itself, and modern replacements for the A501 are available for $30 or less as of July 2020.

No hard drive or hard drive controller is present on the system, though one may be added to the expansion port on the side of the machine, via either an accelerator board or a "sidecar" expansion.

Modern accelerators developed in recent years can really breathe new life into the machine, including the Wicher, the Individual Computers ACA500+, and especially the Vampire 2, the latter of which brings the A500's performance far beyond even the most expanded Amiga 4000 from the top of the Amiga range, and adds hard drive support, HDMI video output, and both AGA and RTG-style graphics support.

A modern external case is available in the form of the Checkmate 1500 Plus, which converts the A500 into a machine bearing more than a slight resemblance to the Amiga 3000.

BFS: 4.6

===== Amiga 2000 =====

===== Amiga 3000 =====

===== Amiga 600 =====

===== Amiga 1200 =====

===== Amiga 4000 =====

===== CDTV =====

===== Amiga CD-32 =====

==== Apple 8-Bit ====

===== Apple II =====

===== Apple III =====

==== Apple IIgs Family ====

==== Apple Lisa ====

==== Apple Macintosh (68k) ====

==== Apple Macintosh (PowerPC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (68k) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (32-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Early 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Later 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== DEC VAX ====

==== DEC Alpha ====

==== Silicon Graphics (MIPS) ====

==== Acorn RISC Machines (ARM) ====

==== NeXT Workstations ====

==== Be Workstations ====

==== HP9000 ====

=== Find a Community ===

A collector is only as good as the communities in which they participate! Following are some suggestions. If you are an intolerant person--especially if you are chauvinistic, transphobic, homophobic, or have a problem with furry culture or anime--work on yourself before getting into this hobby. Such bigotry is not welcome in any of these communities.

==== CCTalk/CCTech/Usenet ====
Avoid posting to Usenet newsgroups and the CCTalk/CCTech mailing lists as a beginner. Do subscribe to CCTalk and CCTech early on, as they are bountiful treasure-troves of knowledge. However, some of these gurus tend to be as vintage and cranky as the computer systems we all love, and many of them have little patience for beginner-level questions. Being mocked and told to RTFM can be quite discouraging for newcomers to the hobby. Better to lurk here until you have built a certain level of knowledge and confidence, and can hang with the graybeards.

Every retrocomputing community has its share of cranky gurus and gatekeeping behavior, but these mailing lists and Usenet have a particularly high concentration. This is nothing against them--the beginner will eventually understand the reasons for it. One positive side effect of this gatekeeping is that the signal-to-noise ratio is quite excellent.

Read this right away, but save the posting for later.

==== Facebook ====
Facebook can be a good resource. Check out these groups to start out:

* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga Commodore Amiga]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintagePCEnthusiasts Vintage PC Enthusiasts]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintageUnixEnthusiasts Vintage UNIX Machine Enthusiasts]

The difficulty with Facebook groups is that they tend to have a rather high signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of silly flame wars (my platform is better than yours!) and low-knowledge trolls. But, with patience, and the right group moderators (such as those found in the aforementioned groups), they can be a goldmine.

==== Twitter ====
In my opinion, Twitter has the friendliest and most helpful group of retrocomputing enthusiasts on the Internet. Search for hashtags that are relevant to your particular retrocomputing interests, and be picky. Get your Twitter feed to only show you the good stuff.

==== Reddit ====
Typical retrocomputing subreddits (such as r/retrobattlestations) seem to have a signal-to-noise ratio that's somewhat better than Facebook, but somewhat worse than CCTalk/CCTech. As long as you comply with established rules in the subreddits you follow, and don't bother with those having capricious and overzealous moderators, a great deal of useful content can be found here.

==== Discord ====
Among modern chat platforms, Discord probably has the most retrocomputing resources, as well as the friendliest people. It tends to lean a bit gamer-centric, so if this is not your interest, it might be better to stick to IRC for chat, or just stick to less realtime-oriented platforms (forums, social media, etc.)

Finding a server can be challenging, but if you're on Reddit, many of its retrocomputing-centric subreddits have official Discord servers that dovetail well into their respective communities.

==== IRC ====
Freenode has a fair number of good channels for retrocomputing, but IRC overall suffers from a high level of gatekeeping and newcomer-unfriendly behavior. Freenode is somewhat better on this; EFnet is absolutely terrible in this regard. I have not dealt with UnderNet, DALnet, etc., so I cannot speak to their friendliness and/or usefulness to aspiring collectors.

Retrocomputing Beginner's Guide

2020-08-02T21:22:51Z

Jpw: /* Amiga Models */

This is Datashed Retrocomputing's guide for the aspiring retrocomputing collector. The goal is to give a few basic hints to keep frustration to a minimum, and help the aspiring collector find a positive direction in this highly-rewarding hobby.

This guide is geared toward those interested in collecting physical hardware, and as such, emulation options will not be covered here.

== General Hints ==

=== Pick a Platform, and Focus ===
Choose a platform or theme for your collection, and stick to it for awhile. You can always branch out later, but the aspiring collector will benefit from learning one type of system well, getting to know its quirks and all the ways to work around them. This will avoid frustrating and costly mistakes. It's easier, for instance, to learn Sun SPARC hardware on its own, than to be learning Sun, Commodore, DEC, and Apple gear all at once. I've seen beginners amass large and varied collections early on, only to give up in frustration and sell everything, or worse, scrap everything.

Here are a few platforms with some pros and cons for beginning collectors. I will give a "BFS" or "Beginner Friendliness Score" from 1 to 5, with higher numbers being more friendly:

==== Older x86 PCs/IBM Compatibles ====

This one is pretty much a no-brainer, and probably the easiest to start with. These machines are the ancestors of the Windows and Mac computers that are still on the market today. Popularity of the platform helps here, as so many have been made over the years that the supply of usable and fun machines is quite plentiful. Even if this category is not your primary focus, it is a good idea to have at least one or two 80486 or early Pentium-class machines with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives around, as they make great "gateway machines" to get software and data you download on your modern desktop or laptop onto your vintage machines--most vintage microcomputers (but not all) will have some means of reading IBM-compatible floppy disks.

There are several eras to cover here:

===== 8088/PC and PC XT Era =====
This covers the first machine that introduced the x86 platform, the IBM PC, model 5150, and its immediate successor the IBM PC XT, model 5160. These machines generally include MDA video boards with no graphics capability, or CGA video boards with limited graphics capability (320x200/4 color, or 640x200 monochrome).

These machines inspired a number of clones, of various faithfulness to full IBM compatibility.

The IBM PC 5150 and PC XT 5160 are relatively challenging and expensive to find in good working order, will require some level of specialized components to upgrade to a usable state, and are quite slow. They also typically used 360KB double sided/double density 5.25-inch floppy drives. Without a network card (itself sometimes tough to find, for at least the 8-bit ISA expansion slots of the 5150) or a suitable "gateway machine" from the 386, 486, or early Pentium era equipped with a compatible floppy drive, these systems can be challenging to get programs and data onto. An XT-IDE adapter is a must, as the MFM/RLL hard drives of the day have mostly failed nowadays, and the ones that haven't are ticking time bombs. You should also expect to replace the tantalum capacitors on the system planar (IBM terminology for "motherboard"), as they have a tendency to violently explode. For the 5150, a power supply upgrade may be needed to support hard drives, as the original 62.5W power supply is a bit underpowered for such tasks.

These machines can support up to 640KB of RAM, although RAM above 256KB must generally reside on an expansion card. Given the limit of five slots on the 5150, this can be a problem.

I have limited experience with clones from this era, though the Tandy 1000 series is often considered an excellent alternative to IBM's entries into this category.

I would not recommend an IBM 8088 as a first retro system, but they can be a lot of fun for intermediate collectors, and a Tandy 1000 of any stripe would be a good beginner's machine with which to play games from the era. As an added benefit, some models of Tandy 1000 could be fitted with a 3.5" floppy drive, making data transfer from modern systems somewhat easier, although in the case of 720KB DSDD 3.5" floppies, modern USB floppy drives cannot generally write to them. You'll still need a "gateway machine" with a genuine, on-board floppy drive.

BFS: 2 for IBM, 3 for Tandy 1000

===== 80286/AT Era =====
This covers the IBM PC AT (model 5170) and clones. They generally have CGA or EGA graphics and a hard disk drive; usually MFM/RLL or ESDI.

These machines expanded the memory addressing capability of the x86 platform from 20 bits to 24 bits, expanding addressable memory from 1MB to 16MB, and added multitasking and memory protection.

These systems are expensive enough and rare enough that I would personally recommend saving them for after you've picked up a 386, 486, or early Pentium machine. They also suffer from common hard drive failures, and can be difficult to get software onto, due to the 5.25" hard drives that were still ubiquitous. A gateway machine is advised.

There is also difficulty in these systems due to the fact that BIOS setup requires a boot floppy to access.

BFS: 2 for IBM

===== IBM PS/2 Range =====

The IBM PS/2 succeeded the PC, PC XT, and PC AT systems. With some exceptions, these systems include Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) expansion slots, VGA graphics, 1.44MB high-density or 2.88MB extended-density 3.5" floppy drives. The most useful of these machines (and the bulk of the range overall) are in the 386, 486, and early Pentium class.

In this range, we're getting into components (like the VGA graphics standard, PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors) that make interoperability with modern peripherals easier. However, many of these machines used ESDI hard drives which are extremely rare, expensive, and unreliable. SCSI-based machines are friendlier, with the addition of a SCSI2SD adapter for reliable fixed storage, but the Micro Channel expansion slots mean that upgrades can be expensive and difficult to find, especially when it comes to sound cards. Also, the PS/2 floppy drives tend to fail, and are somewhat non-standard and difficult to source, though workarounds of varying degrees of elegance do exist. You will need a floppy diskette containing Adapter Definition Files for each Micro Channel expansion card installed in your machine, and diagnostics/setup diskettes as well.

If you can get over the obstacles inherent in these machines, they can be incredibly rewarding to collect and use, especially in concert with the IBM OS/2 operating system they were designed to run.

Again, I'd put this off--but not for too long, as the supply of PS/2 systems has dwindled sharply, while prices have steadily increased.

BFS: 3

===== 80386 Era =====

In this era, you're looking at machines that can run a wide variety of operating systems, and the platform itself was beginning to coalesce around a few standards, at least among clone vendors. MFM/RLL hard drives were still common, though SCSI and IDE both began to get a foothold in this era. A good 386 clone can be a decent starter and gateway machine, though they can be a bit hard to source for a decent price in modern times. Look for a machine with SCSI or IDE support, and a firmware-based BIOS setup utility. CompactFlash-IDE adapters and SCSI2SD solutions really begin to shine in this era of machine, although in the case of on-board IDE, support for CompactFlash-IDE media can be spotty, and BIOS may or may not detect your storage devices, especially at larger sizes. Look for 2GB or smaller media. SCSI will have higher chances of working with more and larger mass storage devices.

These machines do an acceptable job running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows 95 runs, but 8MB of RAM should be considered a minimum, and even then it will not be very performant. Early versions of Linux will run quite well, as will OS/2, provided drivers are available for all attached peripherals.

BFS: 3.5

===== 80486 Era =====

The 486 machines really hit a sweet spot for ease of troubleshooting and initial setup for beginners, as machines equipped with multi I/O boards containing standard IDE ports were quite common and plentiful. Most will also have a decent ROM BIOS, such as the American Megatrends WinBIOS or a Phoenix BIOS. These have good hard disk autodetection for IDE, and work well with IDE/ATAPI optical drives. Most will have a selection of 16-bit ISA and 32-bit VESA Local Bus expansion slots, and some later motherboards also included PCI slots, and could be upgraded to Pentium-class CPUs via a Pentium OverDrive add-on.

The 486 will also run the widest range of MS-DOS software of all early x86 systems, with most having a "turbo" button that will underclock the CPU--sometimes as low as 8MHz--and disable CPU caches to bring performance closer to that of a later 80286 CPU, for the benefit of early, timing-sensitive games.

BFS: 4

===== Early P5 Pentiums =====

It's all about the Pentiums! The 60MHz-90MHz Pentiums are absolutely terrific for running Windows 3.11, Windows 95, OS/2, and some versions of UNIX and Linux. IDE support in this era is rock solid, PCI expansion slots begin to edge out 16-bit ISA, and plug-and-play begins to become more robust.

In this era, my most recommended machine for a beginner would be the Gateway 2000 P5-75. Driver support is easy in all operating systems I've tried, and they are still relatively reasonable in price if you are patient.

Compatibility for MS-DOS gaming is quite good, if you limit yourself to games that were released in around 1989 or later. Generally speaking, games with VGA or SVGA graphics will run beautifully on these machines, up to and including WarCraft III, Doom, Quake, etc.

If you're like me and enjoy playing with 1990s productivity and software development titles, these machines are fantastic for it. Throw in an Ethernet card, get it on the network, and play!

For beginners, I would recommend staying away from the Packard-Bell machines. Compaq, Dell, and HP have some reasonable entries in this category, however, that are worth looking into.

BFS: 5

==== Commodore 8-bit ====

===== Commodore PET =====

===== Commodore VIC-20 =====

===== Commodore 64 =====

===== Commodore 128 =====

Within the family of Commodore 8-bit machines, I would highly recommend a Commodore 128 with an SD2IEC adapter. It will run all Commodore 64 software perfectly, and as an added bonus, gives you access to Digital Research CP/M. Although slow, the Commodore 128's CP/M implementation provides the widest compatibility for reading and writing other CP/M systems' floppy diskette formats, making it an excellent gateway system for other CP/M systems you may end up collecting in the future. Its value proposition is quite impressive.

The SD2IEC adapter will make the use of oft-unreliable floppy disks less necessary, and will make the experience more seamless.

BFS: 4

==== Commodore Amiga ====

There are a few important concepts that an aspiring Amiga collector needs to be aware of:

* The Amiga range uses a variety of chipsets supporting various NTSC and multiscan graphics modes: OCS (Original Chip Set), ECS (Enhanced Chip Set), and AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture). Newer chipsets add more colors and resolutions, and generally attempt to remain backwards-compatible with prior chipsets. However, backwards compatibility in the Amiga range is far from perfect, especially in AGA-based machines. This can often be overcome for games by using WHDLoad. If you're looking to boot physical floppies, however, you will probably need to source an Amiga whose chipset matches the era when the game was released. Most games targeted OCS/ECS, as AGA only debuted two years prior to Commodore's bankruptcy.

* For a stock Amiga (and many accelerated Amigas), you will need some way of displaying video modes that use a 15kHz signal. There are passive Amiga video to VGA adapters, but where standard VGA modes use 31.5kHz signal timing, and work with flat-panel VGA monitors, most Amiga video modes require a monitor that can synchronize to a 15kHz scan rate, which is not commonly supported on flat-panel monitors. Exceptions do exist, and many "multiscan" CRT monitors will be able to handle NTSC 15kHz scan rates. It is possible to overcome this limitation with "display enhancer" or "scan-doubler" hardware, which takes 15kHz output, stores frames in a buffer, and outputs them at a doubled rate (i.e., 31.5kHz). This hardware will also remove flicker from "interlaced" modes, and the Amiga 3000 and 3000T include an integrated display enhancer and VGA port that will output scan-doubled graphics at 31.5kHz. Other options include Commodore RGB monitors such as the 1080, 1084, 1084S, M1438, and M1572 (although models prior to the M1438 will not display VGA-style "Productivity" mode and higher resolutions). Some Amiga systems include a composite video output for display on a standard television, though it will often be monochrome-only, as is the case with the Amiga 2000 family of systems.

* Another option for video is "RTG" or "ReTargetable Graphics" with a Zorro II, Zorro III, or accelerator-based graphics board. Examples include the Picasso II and Picasso IV from Village Tronic, the Cybervision 64 and Cybervision 3D from Phase5/DCE, and the onboard RTG graphics on the Apollo Vampire accelerators. Village Tronic and Phase5/DCE boards tend to be rare and highly expensive. Support for passing standard Amiga video modes through RTG boards varies. You will need either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX software in order to use RTG graphics boards. Both are readily available, though Picasso96 tends to be better-supported and more robust than CyberGraphX.

* Amiga floppy drives have the benefit of being able to read IBM-formatted floppy diskettes of the same density. However, IBM-compatible computers can neither read nor write Amiga-formatted floppy diskettes without the aid of special hardware, such as the Individual Computers Catweasel floppy controller.

* GoTek floppy emulators, flashed with an Amiga-compatible firmware such as FlashFloppy, make data transfer easy. This is facilitated by providing a standard 34-pin floppy connector on the back of the drive, and a readout, a type-A USB port for a USB memory key, and "up" and "down" buttons for selecting among the floppy disk images written to the USB key. These images normally come in "adf" format, and are readily available.

* Amiga computers (other than the A1000) have an upgradable ROM firmware known as the "Kickstart ROM". Generally speaking, a given AmigaOS version will need a ROM chip (or chips) installed in order to function, although in many cases, the ROM image can be soft-kicked from your Amiga hard drive at boot time, at the expense of delays in booting your machine.

* The Amiga operating system has been variously known as "Workbench" and "AmigaOS"
** Workbench, as an umbrella term for the operating system, is older, but Workbench is technically just the graphical interface and desktop/file manager of the operating system, powered by the "Intuition" graphics libraries.
** Access to on-disk data, as well as the command-line shell, are supplied by a component called "AmigaDOS" (not to be confused with "AmigaOS").
** Buttons, text editing controls, drop-down lists, and other visual components of the UI are termed "gadgets", and are supplied by "gadget libraries", such as ReAction, MUI, and GadTools.
** Directories, rather than being referred to as "directories" or "folders", are called "drawers" in the Workbench UI.
** There are two current strains of the AmigaOS operating system family, and one abandoned strain of development:
*** AmigaOS 3.1.4, released in 2018, is the latest version capable of running on Motorola 68K-based Amiga systems
*** AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition, released in 2016, is the latest version capable of running on IBM PowerPC-based Amiga systems, such as the AmigaOne range of machines from EyeTech, A-Eon, and other vendors
*** AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 were based on AmigaOS 3.1 (the final Commodore release) and were developed by Haage & Partner under contract from Amiga Inc. and did not form the basis of AmigaOS 3.1.4, which was developed once again from Commodore's AmigaOS 3.1 by Hyperion Entertainment
** I will not be covering AROS and MorphOS here, as I do not consider them to be legitimate Amiga operating systems, as they share no code with the official OS releases from the various owners of the Amiga intellectual properties

==== Amiga Models ====
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Model
! CPU
! Clock Rate
! Chipset
! Storage Bus
! Expansion Bus
! BFS
|-
| A1000
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS
| N/A
| A1000/A500 Sidecar
| 2
|-
| A500
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS
| N/A
| A1000/A500 Sidecar, A500 Trapdoor
| 4.6
|-
| A2000
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS/ECS
| None on system board; SCSI and others available via expansion boards
| Zorro II, A2000 CPU Slot, 8-bit ISA, 16-bit ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 3
|-
| A2000HD
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS/ECS
| A2091 SCSI (single-ended) standard
| Zorro II, A2000 CPU Slot, 8-bit ISA, 16-bit ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 3.5
|-
| A500+
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| ECS
| N/A
| A1000/A500 Sidecar, A500 Trapdoor
| 4.5
|-
| A600
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| ECS
| IDE
| Sidecar, Trapdoor, PCMCIA
| 4
|-
| A3000
| Motorola 68030
| 16MHz or 25MHz
| ECS
| SCSI (single-ended) on system board
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 3.6
|-
| A3000T
| Motorola 68030, Motorola 68040
| 25MHz
| ECS
| SCSI (single-ended) on system board
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 3.3
|-
| A3000UX
| Motorola 68030
| 25MHz
| ECS, Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture (TIGA)
| SCSI (single-ended) on system board
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 2
|-
| A1200
| Motorola 68EC020
| 14MHz
| AGA
| IDE
| Sidecar, Trapdoor Expansion, PCMCIA
| 4.8
|-
| A4000
| Motorola 68EC030, Motorola 68040
| 25MHz
| AGA
| IDE
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 2.8
|-
| A4000T
| Motorola 68040, Motorola 68060
| 25MHz (68040), 50MHz (68060)
| AGA
| IDE, SCSI
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 2.5
|}

===== Amiga 1000 =====

The original Amiga system has often been considered a novelty only for serious collectors, given its lack of internal expansion capacity, hard disk support, and requirement of inserting a kickstart floppy to boot the system. However, most of these limitations have been overcome with the introduction of the Classic 520 accelerator, which provides hard disk support and an autoboot feature, obviating the need for a kickstart floppy, and additional fast memory.

Even with the Classic 520, bear in mind that chip memory is still limited to 512K, you will be restricted to only OCS (Original Chip Set) graphics modes, and the status of the A1000 as a serious collector's machine tends to keep prices quite high.

BFS: 2 (due to price of acquisition)

===== Amiga 500 =====

There was a time when I would have said that the Amiga 500 was a poor choice for beginners, but modern hardware expansions have overcome the many limitations of this system to the extent that I now believe it is a great first Amiga. As the bestselling Amiga model ever produced by Commodore, this machine is still in relatively plentiful supply, and can be acquired for $500 or less. Still not cheap, but compared to other Amiga models, it's a steal.

In its base configuration, the A500 comes with a 7MHz 68000 CPU, 512KB of chip RAM, and depending on the system board revision, the OCS or ECS chipset, and Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 ROMs.

The A500 includes a "trap door" expansion slot, commonly fitted with the A501 expansion board, adding a battery-backed realtime clock and 512K of additional "slow" or "trapdoor" RAM, bringing the system RAM total to 1MB. The battery on the A501 is of the rechargeable NiCd barrel or "Varta" type, and has a tendency to leak and damage the A501 board. Thankfully, the location of this battery reduces the chances of such leakage affecting the system board itself, and modern replacements for the A501 are available for $30 or less as of July 2020.

No hard drive or hard drive controller is present on the system, though one may be added to the expansion port on the side of the machine, via either an accelerator board or a "sidecar" expansion.

Modern accelerators developed in recent years can really breathe new life into the machine, including the Wicher, the Individual Computers ACA500+, and especially the Vampire 2, the latter of which brings the A500's performance far beyond even the most expanded Amiga 4000 from the top of the Amiga range, and adds hard drive support, HDMI video output, and both AGA and RTG-style graphics support.

A modern external case is available in the form of the Checkmate 1500 Plus, which converts the A500 into a machine bearing more than a slight resemblance to the Amiga 3000.

BFS: 4.6

===== Amiga 2000 =====

===== Amiga 3000 =====

===== Amiga 600 =====

===== Amiga 1200 =====

===== Amiga 4000 =====

===== CDTV =====

===== Amiga CD-32 =====

==== Apple 8-Bit ====

===== Apple II =====

===== Apple III =====

==== Apple IIgs Family ====

==== Apple Lisa ====

==== Apple Macintosh (68k) ====

==== Apple Macintosh (PowerPC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (68k) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (32-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Early 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Later 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== DEC VAX ====

==== DEC Alpha ====

==== Silicon Graphics (MIPS) ====

==== Acorn RISC Machines (ARM) ====

==== NeXT Workstations ====

==== Be Workstations ====

==== HP9000 ====

=== Find a Community ===

A collector is only as good as the communities in which they participate! Following are some suggestions. If you are an intolerant person--especially if you are chauvinistic, transphobic, homophobic, or have a problem with furry culture or anime--work on yourself before getting into this hobby. Such bigotry is not welcome in any of these communities.

==== CCTalk/CCTech/Usenet ====
Avoid posting to Usenet newsgroups and the CCTalk/CCTech mailing lists as a beginner. Do subscribe to CCTalk and CCTech early on, as they are bountiful treasure-troves of knowledge. However, some of these gurus tend to be as vintage and cranky as the computer systems we all love, and many of them have little patience for beginner-level questions. Being mocked and told to RTFM can be quite discouraging for newcomers to the hobby. Better to lurk here until you have built a certain level of knowledge and confidence, and can hang with the graybeards.

Every retrocomputing community has its share of cranky gurus and gatekeeping behavior, but these mailing lists and Usenet have a particularly high concentration. This is nothing against them--the beginner will eventually understand the reasons for it. One positive side effect of this gatekeeping is that the signal-to-noise ratio is quite excellent.

Read this right away, but save the posting for later.

==== Facebook ====
Facebook can be a good resource. Check out these groups to start out:

* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga Commodore Amiga]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintagePCEnthusiasts Vintage PC Enthusiasts]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintageUnixEnthusiasts Vintage UNIX Machine Enthusiasts]

The difficulty with Facebook groups is that they tend to have a rather high signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of silly flame wars (my platform is better than yours!) and low-knowledge trolls. But, with patience, and the right group moderators (such as those found in the aforementioned groups), they can be a goldmine.

==== Twitter ====
In my opinion, Twitter has the friendliest and most helpful group of retrocomputing enthusiasts on the Internet. Search for hashtags that are relevant to your particular retrocomputing interests, and be picky. Get your Twitter feed to only show you the good stuff.

==== Reddit ====
Typical retrocomputing subreddits (such as r/retrobattlestations) seem to have a signal-to-noise ratio that's somewhat better than Facebook, but somewhat worse than CCTalk/CCTech. As long as you comply with established rules in the subreddits you follow, and don't bother with those having capricious and overzealous moderators, a great deal of useful content can be found here.

==== Discord ====
Among modern chat platforms, Discord probably has the most retrocomputing resources, as well as the friendliest people. It tends to lean a bit gamer-centric, so if this is not your interest, it might be better to stick to IRC for chat, or just stick to less realtime-oriented platforms (forums, social media, etc.)

Finding a server can be challenging, but if you're on Reddit, many of its retrocomputing-centric subreddits have official Discord servers that dovetail well into their respective communities.

==== IRC ====
Freenode has a fair number of good channels for retrocomputing, but IRC overall suffers from a high level of gatekeeping and newcomer-unfriendly behavior. Freenode is somewhat better on this; EFnet is absolutely terrible in this regard. I have not dealt with UnderNet, DALnet, etc., so I cannot speak to their friendliness and/or usefulness to aspiring collectors.

Retrocomputing Beginner's Guide

2020-08-02T00:50:07Z

Jpw: /* Amiga Models */

This is Datashed Retrocomputing's guide for the aspiring retrocomputing collector. The goal is to give a few basic hints to keep frustration to a minimum, and help the aspiring collector find a positive direction in this highly-rewarding hobby.

This guide is geared toward those interested in collecting physical hardware, and as such, emulation options will not be covered here.

== General Hints ==

=== Pick a Platform, and Focus ===
Choose a platform or theme for your collection, and stick to it for awhile. You can always branch out later, but the aspiring collector will benefit from learning one type of system well, getting to know its quirks and all the ways to work around them. This will avoid frustrating and costly mistakes. It's easier, for instance, to learn Sun SPARC hardware on its own, than to be learning Sun, Commodore, DEC, and Apple gear all at once. I've seen beginners amass large and varied collections early on, only to give up in frustration and sell everything, or worse, scrap everything.

Here are a few platforms with some pros and cons for beginning collectors. I will give a "BFS" or "Beginner Friendliness Score" from 1 to 5, with higher numbers being more friendly:

==== Older x86 PCs/IBM Compatibles ====

This one is pretty much a no-brainer, and probably the easiest to start with. These machines are the ancestors of the Windows and Mac computers that are still on the market today. Popularity of the platform helps here, as so many have been made over the years that the supply of usable and fun machines is quite plentiful. Even if this category is not your primary focus, it is a good idea to have at least one or two 80486 or early Pentium-class machines with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives around, as they make great "gateway machines" to get software and data you download on your modern desktop or laptop onto your vintage machines--most vintage microcomputers (but not all) will have some means of reading IBM-compatible floppy disks.

There are several eras to cover here:

===== 8088/PC and PC XT Era =====
This covers the first machine that introduced the x86 platform, the IBM PC, model 5150, and its immediate successor the IBM PC XT, model 5160. These machines generally include MDA video boards with no graphics capability, or CGA video boards with limited graphics capability (320x200/4 color, or 640x200 monochrome).

These machines inspired a number of clones, of various faithfulness to full IBM compatibility.

The IBM PC 5150 and PC XT 5160 are relatively challenging and expensive to find in good working order, will require some level of specialized components to upgrade to a usable state, and are quite slow. They also typically used 360KB double sided/double density 5.25-inch floppy drives. Without a network card (itself sometimes tough to find, for at least the 8-bit ISA expansion slots of the 5150) or a suitable "gateway machine" from the 386, 486, or early Pentium era equipped with a compatible floppy drive, these systems can be challenging to get programs and data onto. An XT-IDE adapter is a must, as the MFM/RLL hard drives of the day have mostly failed nowadays, and the ones that haven't are ticking time bombs. You should also expect to replace the tantalum capacitors on the system planar (IBM terminology for "motherboard"), as they have a tendency to violently explode. For the 5150, a power supply upgrade may be needed to support hard drives, as the original 62.5W power supply is a bit underpowered for such tasks.

These machines can support up to 640KB of RAM, although RAM above 256KB must generally reside on an expansion card. Given the limit of five slots on the 5150, this can be a problem.

I have limited experience with clones from this era, though the Tandy 1000 series is often considered an excellent alternative to IBM's entries into this category.

I would not recommend an IBM 8088 as a first retro system, but they can be a lot of fun for intermediate collectors, and a Tandy 1000 of any stripe would be a good beginner's machine with which to play games from the era. As an added benefit, some models of Tandy 1000 could be fitted with a 3.5" floppy drive, making data transfer from modern systems somewhat easier, although in the case of 720KB DSDD 3.5" floppies, modern USB floppy drives cannot generally write to them. You'll still need a "gateway machine" with a genuine, on-board floppy drive.

BFS: 2 for IBM, 3 for Tandy 1000

===== 80286/AT Era =====
This covers the IBM PC AT (model 5170) and clones. They generally have CGA or EGA graphics and a hard disk drive; usually MFM/RLL or ESDI.

These machines expanded the memory addressing capability of the x86 platform from 20 bits to 24 bits, expanding addressable memory from 1MB to 16MB, and added multitasking and memory protection.

These systems are expensive enough and rare enough that I would personally recommend saving them for after you've picked up a 386, 486, or early Pentium machine. They also suffer from common hard drive failures, and can be difficult to get software onto, due to the 5.25" hard drives that were still ubiquitous. A gateway machine is advised.

There is also difficulty in these systems due to the fact that BIOS setup requires a boot floppy to access.

BFS: 2 for IBM

===== IBM PS/2 Range =====

The IBM PS/2 succeeded the PC, PC XT, and PC AT systems. With some exceptions, these systems include Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) expansion slots, VGA graphics, 1.44MB high-density or 2.88MB extended-density 3.5" floppy drives. The most useful of these machines (and the bulk of the range overall) are in the 386, 486, and early Pentium class.

In this range, we're getting into components (like the VGA graphics standard, PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors) that make interoperability with modern peripherals easier. However, many of these machines used ESDI hard drives which are extremely rare, expensive, and unreliable. SCSI-based machines are friendlier, with the addition of a SCSI2SD adapter for reliable fixed storage, but the Micro Channel expansion slots mean that upgrades can be expensive and difficult to find, especially when it comes to sound cards. Also, the PS/2 floppy drives tend to fail, and are somewhat non-standard and difficult to source, though workarounds of varying degrees of elegance do exist. You will need a floppy diskette containing Adapter Definition Files for each Micro Channel expansion card installed in your machine, and diagnostics/setup diskettes as well.

If you can get over the obstacles inherent in these machines, they can be incredibly rewarding to collect and use, especially in concert with the IBM OS/2 operating system they were designed to run.

Again, I'd put this off--but not for too long, as the supply of PS/2 systems has dwindled sharply, while prices have steadily increased.

BFS: 3

===== 80386 Era =====

In this era, you're looking at machines that can run a wide variety of operating systems, and the platform itself was beginning to coalesce around a few standards, at least among clone vendors. MFM/RLL hard drives were still common, though SCSI and IDE both began to get a foothold in this era. A good 386 clone can be a decent starter and gateway machine, though they can be a bit hard to source for a decent price in modern times. Look for a machine with SCSI or IDE support, and a firmware-based BIOS setup utility. CompactFlash-IDE adapters and SCSI2SD solutions really begin to shine in this era of machine, although in the case of on-board IDE, support for CompactFlash-IDE media can be spotty, and BIOS may or may not detect your storage devices, especially at larger sizes. Look for 2GB or smaller media. SCSI will have higher chances of working with more and larger mass storage devices.

These machines do an acceptable job running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows 95 runs, but 8MB of RAM should be considered a minimum, and even then it will not be very performant. Early versions of Linux will run quite well, as will OS/2, provided drivers are available for all attached peripherals.

BFS: 3.5

===== 80486 Era =====

The 486 machines really hit a sweet spot for ease of troubleshooting and initial setup for beginners, as machines equipped with multi I/O boards containing standard IDE ports were quite common and plentiful. Most will also have a decent ROM BIOS, such as the American Megatrends WinBIOS or a Phoenix BIOS. These have good hard disk autodetection for IDE, and work well with IDE/ATAPI optical drives. Most will have a selection of 16-bit ISA and 32-bit VESA Local Bus expansion slots, and some later motherboards also included PCI slots, and could be upgraded to Pentium-class CPUs via a Pentium OverDrive add-on.

The 486 will also run the widest range of MS-DOS software of all early x86 systems, with most having a "turbo" button that will underclock the CPU--sometimes as low as 8MHz--and disable CPU caches to bring performance closer to that of a later 80286 CPU, for the benefit of early, timing-sensitive games.

BFS: 4

===== Early P5 Pentiums =====

It's all about the Pentiums! The 60MHz-90MHz Pentiums are absolutely terrific for running Windows 3.11, Windows 95, OS/2, and some versions of UNIX and Linux. IDE support in this era is rock solid, PCI expansion slots begin to edge out 16-bit ISA, and plug-and-play begins to become more robust.

In this era, my most recommended machine for a beginner would be the Gateway 2000 P5-75. Driver support is easy in all operating systems I've tried, and they are still relatively reasonable in price if you are patient.

Compatibility for MS-DOS gaming is quite good, if you limit yourself to games that were released in around 1989 or later. Generally speaking, games with VGA or SVGA graphics will run beautifully on these machines, up to and including WarCraft III, Doom, Quake, etc.

If you're like me and enjoy playing with 1990s productivity and software development titles, these machines are fantastic for it. Throw in an Ethernet card, get it on the network, and play!

For beginners, I would recommend staying away from the Packard-Bell machines. Compaq, Dell, and HP have some reasonable entries in this category, however, that are worth looking into.

BFS: 5

==== Commodore 8-bit ====

===== Commodore PET =====

===== Commodore VIC-20 =====

===== Commodore 64 =====

===== Commodore 128 =====

Within the family of Commodore 8-bit machines, I would highly recommend a Commodore 128 with an SD2IEC adapter. It will run all Commodore 64 software perfectly, and as an added bonus, gives you access to Digital Research CP/M. Although slow, the Commodore 128's CP/M implementation provides the widest compatibility for reading and writing other CP/M systems' floppy diskette formats, making it an excellent gateway system for other CP/M systems you may end up collecting in the future. Its value proposition is quite impressive.

The SD2IEC adapter will make the use of oft-unreliable floppy disks less necessary, and will make the experience more seamless.

BFS: 4

==== Commodore Amiga ====

There are a few important concepts that an aspiring Amiga collector needs to be aware of:

* The Amiga range uses a variety of chipsets supporting various NTSC and multiscan graphics modes: OCS (Original Chip Set), ECS (Enhanced Chip Set), and AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture). Newer chipsets add more colors and resolutions, and generally attempt to remain backwards-compatible with prior chipsets. However, backwards compatibility in the Amiga range is far from perfect, especially in AGA-based machines. This can often be overcome for games by using WHDLoad. If you're looking to boot physical floppies, however, you will probably need to source an Amiga whose chipset matches the era when the game was released. Most games targeted OCS/ECS, as AGA only debuted two years prior to Commodore's bankruptcy.

* For a stock Amiga (and many accelerated Amigas), you will need some way of displaying video modes that use a 15kHz signal. There are passive Amiga video to VGA adapters, but where standard VGA modes use 31.5kHz signal timing, and work with flat-panel VGA monitors, most Amiga video modes require a monitor that can synchronize to a 15kHz scan rate, which is not commonly supported on flat-panel monitors. Exceptions do exist, and many "multiscan" CRT monitors will be able to handle NTSC 15kHz scan rates. It is possible to overcome this limitation with "display enhancer" or "scan-doubler" hardware, which takes 15kHz output, stores frames in a buffer, and outputs them at a doubled rate (i.e., 31.5kHz). This hardware will also remove flicker from "interlaced" modes, and the Amiga 3000 and 3000T include an integrated display enhancer and VGA port that will output scan-doubled graphics at 31.5kHz. Other options include Commodore RGB monitors such as the 1080, 1084, 1084S, M1438, and M1572 (although models prior to the M1438 will not display VGA-style "Productivity" mode and higher resolutions). Some Amiga systems include a composite video output for display on a standard television, though it will often be monochrome-only, as is the case with the Amiga 2000 family of systems.

* Another option for video is "RTG" or "ReTargetable Graphics" with a Zorro II, Zorro III, or accelerator-based graphics board. Examples include the Picasso II and Picasso IV from Village Tronic, the Cybervision 64 and Cybervision 3D from Phase5/DCE, and the onboard RTG graphics on the Apollo Vampire accelerators. Village Tronic and Phase5/DCE boards tend to be rare and highly expensive. Support for passing standard Amiga video modes through RTG boards varies. You will need either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX software in order to use RTG graphics boards. Both are readily available, though Picasso96 tends to be better-supported and more robust than CyberGraphX.

* Amiga floppy drives have the benefit of being able to read IBM-formatted floppy diskettes of the same density. However, IBM-compatible computers can neither read nor write Amiga-formatted floppy diskettes without the aid of special hardware, such as the Individual Computers Catweasel floppy controller.

* GoTek floppy emulators, flashed with an Amiga-compatible firmware such as FlashFloppy, make data transfer easy. This is facilitated by providing a standard 34-pin floppy connector on the back of the drive, and a readout, a type-A USB port for a USB memory key, and "up" and "down" buttons for selecting among the floppy disk images written to the USB key. These images normally come in "adf" format, and are readily available.

* Amiga computers (other than the A1000) have an upgradable ROM firmware known as the "Kickstart ROM". Generally speaking, a given AmigaOS version will need a ROM chip (or chips) installed in order to function, although in many cases, the ROM image can be soft-kicked from your Amiga hard drive at boot time, at the expense of delays in booting your machine.

* The Amiga operating system has been variously known as "Workbench" and "AmigaOS"
** Workbench, as an umbrella term for the operating system, is older, but Workbench is technically just the graphical interface and desktop/file manager of the operating system, powered by the "Intuition" graphics libraries.
** Access to on-disk data, as well as the command-line shell, are supplied by a component called "AmigaDOS" (not to be confused with "AmigaOS").
** Buttons, text editing controls, drop-down lists, and other visual components of the UI are termed "gadgets", and are supplied by "gadget libraries", such as ReAction, MUI, and GadTools.
** Directories, rather than being referred to as "directories" or "folders", are called "drawers" in the Workbench UI.
** There are two current strains of the AmigaOS operating system family, and one abandoned strain of development:
*** AmigaOS 3.1.4, released in 2018, is the latest version capable of running on Motorola 68K-based Amiga systems
*** AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition, released in 2016, is the latest version capable of running on IBM PowerPC-based Amiga systems, such as the AmigaOne range of machines from EyeTech, A-Eon, and other vendors
*** AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 were based on AmigaOS 3.1 (the final Commodore release) and were developed by Haage & Partner under contract from Amiga Inc. and did not form the basis of AmigaOS 3.1.4, which was developed once again from Commodore's AmigaOS 3.1 by Hyperion Entertainment
** I will not be covering AROS and MorphOS here, as I do not consider them to be legitimate Amiga operating systems, as they share no code with the official OS releases from the various owners of the Amiga intellectual properties

==== Amiga Models ====
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Model
! CPU
! Clock Rate
! Chipset
! Storage Bus
! Expansion Bus
! BFS
|-
| A1000
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS
| N/A
| A1000/A500 Sidecar
| 2
|-
| A500
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS
| N/A
| A1000/A500 Sidecar, A500 Trapdoor
| 4.6
|-
| A2000
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS/ECS
| None on system board; SCSI and others available via expansion boards
| Zorro II, A2000 CPU Slot, 8-bit ISA, 16-bit ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 3
|-
| A2000HD
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS/ECS
| A2091 SCSI (single-ended) standard
| Zorro II, A2000 CPU Slot, 8-bit ISA, 16-bit ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 3.5
|-
| A500+
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| ECS
| N/A
| A1000/A500 Sidecar, A500 Trapdoor
| 4.5
|-
| A600
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| ECS
| IDE
| Sidecar, Trapdoor, PCMCIA
| 4
|-
| A3000
| Motorola 68030
| 16MHz or 25MHz
| ECS
| SCSI (single-ended) on system board
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 3.6
|-
| A3000T
| Motorola 68030, Motorola 68040
| 25MHz
| ECS
| SCSI (single-ended) on system board
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 3.3
|-
| A3000UX
| Motorola 68030
| 25MHz
| ECS, Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture (TIGA)
| SCSI (single-ended) on system board
| Zorro III, CPU "Fast" Slot, ISA, Amiga Video Slot
| 2
|}

===== Amiga 1000 =====

The original Amiga system has often been considered a novelty only for serious collectors, given its lack of internal expansion capacity, hard disk support, and requirement of inserting a kickstart floppy to boot the system. However, most of these limitations have been overcome with the introduction of the Classic 520 accelerator, which provides hard disk support and an autoboot feature, obviating the need for a kickstart floppy, and additional fast memory.

Even with the Classic 520, bear in mind that chip memory is still limited to 512K, you will be restricted to only OCS (Original Chip Set) graphics modes, and the status of the A1000 as a serious collector's machine tends to keep prices quite high.

BFS: 2 (due to price of acquisition)

===== Amiga 500 =====

There was a time when I would have said that the Amiga 500 was a poor choice for beginners, but modern hardware expansions have overcome the many limitations of this system to the extent that I now believe it is a great first Amiga. As the bestselling Amiga model ever produced by Commodore, this machine is still in relatively plentiful supply, and can be acquired for $500 or less. Still not cheap, but compared to other Amiga models, it's a steal.

In its base configuration, the A500 comes with a 7MHz 68000 CPU, 512KB of chip RAM, and depending on the system board revision, the OCS or ECS chipset, and Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 ROMs.

The A500 includes a "trap door" expansion slot, commonly fitted with the A501 expansion board, adding a battery-backed realtime clock and 512K of additional "slow" or "trapdoor" RAM, bringing the system RAM total to 1MB. The battery on the A501 is of the rechargeable NiCd barrel or "Varta" type, and has a tendency to leak and damage the A501 board. Thankfully, the location of this battery reduces the chances of such leakage affecting the system board itself, and modern replacements for the A501 are available for $30 or less as of July 2020.

No hard drive or hard drive controller is present on the system, though one may be added to the expansion port on the side of the machine, via either an accelerator board or a "sidecar" expansion.

Modern accelerators developed in recent years can really breathe new life into the machine, including the Wicher, the Individual Computers ACA500+, and especially the Vampire 2, the latter of which brings the A500's performance far beyond even the most expanded Amiga 4000 from the top of the Amiga range, and adds hard drive support, HDMI video output, and both AGA and RTG-style graphics support.

A modern external case is available in the form of the Checkmate 1500 Plus, which converts the A500 into a machine bearing more than a slight resemblance to the Amiga 3000.

BFS: 4.6

===== Amiga 2000 =====

===== Amiga 3000 =====

===== Amiga 600 =====

===== Amiga 1200 =====

===== Amiga 4000 =====

===== CDTV =====

===== Amiga CD-32 =====

==== Apple 8-Bit ====

===== Apple II =====

===== Apple III =====

==== Apple IIgs Family ====

==== Apple Lisa ====

==== Apple Macintosh (68k) ====

==== Apple Macintosh (PowerPC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (68k) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (32-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Early 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Later 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== DEC VAX ====

==== DEC Alpha ====

==== Silicon Graphics (MIPS) ====

==== Acorn RISC Machines (ARM) ====

==== NeXT Workstations ====

==== Be Workstations ====

==== HP9000 ====

=== Find a Community ===

A collector is only as good as the communities in which they participate! Following are some suggestions. If you are an intolerant person--especially if you are chauvinistic, transphobic, homophobic, or have a problem with furry culture or anime--work on yourself before getting into this hobby. Such bigotry is not welcome in any of these communities.

==== CCTalk/CCTech/Usenet ====
Avoid posting to Usenet newsgroups and the CCTalk/CCTech mailing lists as a beginner. Do subscribe to CCTalk and CCTech early on, as they are bountiful treasure-troves of knowledge. However, some of these gurus tend to be as vintage and cranky as the computer systems we all love, and many of them have little patience for beginner-level questions. Being mocked and told to RTFM can be quite discouraging for newcomers to the hobby. Better to lurk here until you have built a certain level of knowledge and confidence, and can hang with the graybeards.

Every retrocomputing community has its share of cranky gurus and gatekeeping behavior, but these mailing lists and Usenet have a particularly high concentration. This is nothing against them--the beginner will eventually understand the reasons for it. One positive side effect of this gatekeeping is that the signal-to-noise ratio is quite excellent.

Read this right away, but save the posting for later.

==== Facebook ====
Facebook can be a good resource. Check out these groups to start out:

* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga Commodore Amiga]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintagePCEnthusiasts Vintage PC Enthusiasts]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintageUnixEnthusiasts Vintage UNIX Machine Enthusiasts]

The difficulty with Facebook groups is that they tend to have a rather high signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of silly flame wars (my platform is better than yours!) and low-knowledge trolls. But, with patience, and the right group moderators (such as those found in the aforementioned groups), they can be a goldmine.

==== Twitter ====
In my opinion, Twitter has the friendliest and most helpful group of retrocomputing enthusiasts on the Internet. Search for hashtags that are relevant to your particular retrocomputing interests, and be picky. Get your Twitter feed to only show you the good stuff.

==== Reddit ====
Typical retrocomputing subreddits (such as r/retrobattlestations) seem to have a signal-to-noise ratio that's somewhat better than Facebook, but somewhat worse than CCTalk/CCTech. As long as you comply with established rules in the subreddits you follow, and don't bother with those having capricious and overzealous moderators, a great deal of useful content can be found here.

==== Discord ====
Among modern chat platforms, Discord probably has the most retrocomputing resources, as well as the friendliest people. It tends to lean a bit gamer-centric, so if this is not your interest, it might be better to stick to IRC for chat, or just stick to less realtime-oriented platforms (forums, social media, etc.)

Finding a server can be challenging, but if you're on Reddit, many of its retrocomputing-centric subreddits have official Discord servers that dovetail well into their respective communities.

==== IRC ====
Freenode has a fair number of good channels for retrocomputing, but IRC overall suffers from a high level of gatekeeping and newcomer-unfriendly behavior. Freenode is somewhat better on this; EFnet is absolutely terrible in this regard. I have not dealt with UnderNet, DALnet, etc., so I cannot speak to their friendliness and/or usefulness to aspiring collectors.

Retrocomputing Beginner's Guide

2020-08-02T00:37:59Z

Jpw: /* Commodore Amiga */

This is Datashed Retrocomputing's guide for the aspiring retrocomputing collector. The goal is to give a few basic hints to keep frustration to a minimum, and help the aspiring collector find a positive direction in this highly-rewarding hobby.

This guide is geared toward those interested in collecting physical hardware, and as such, emulation options will not be covered here.

== General Hints ==

=== Pick a Platform, and Focus ===
Choose a platform or theme for your collection, and stick to it for awhile. You can always branch out later, but the aspiring collector will benefit from learning one type of system well, getting to know its quirks and all the ways to work around them. This will avoid frustrating and costly mistakes. It's easier, for instance, to learn Sun SPARC hardware on its own, than to be learning Sun, Commodore, DEC, and Apple gear all at once. I've seen beginners amass large and varied collections early on, only to give up in frustration and sell everything, or worse, scrap everything.

Here are a few platforms with some pros and cons for beginning collectors. I will give a "BFS" or "Beginner Friendliness Score" from 1 to 5, with higher numbers being more friendly:

==== Older x86 PCs/IBM Compatibles ====

This one is pretty much a no-brainer, and probably the easiest to start with. These machines are the ancestors of the Windows and Mac computers that are still on the market today. Popularity of the platform helps here, as so many have been made over the years that the supply of usable and fun machines is quite plentiful. Even if this category is not your primary focus, it is a good idea to have at least one or two 80486 or early Pentium-class machines with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives around, as they make great "gateway machines" to get software and data you download on your modern desktop or laptop onto your vintage machines--most vintage microcomputers (but not all) will have some means of reading IBM-compatible floppy disks.

There are several eras to cover here:

===== 8088/PC and PC XT Era =====
This covers the first machine that introduced the x86 platform, the IBM PC, model 5150, and its immediate successor the IBM PC XT, model 5160. These machines generally include MDA video boards with no graphics capability, or CGA video boards with limited graphics capability (320x200/4 color, or 640x200 monochrome).

These machines inspired a number of clones, of various faithfulness to full IBM compatibility.

The IBM PC 5150 and PC XT 5160 are relatively challenging and expensive to find in good working order, will require some level of specialized components to upgrade to a usable state, and are quite slow. They also typically used 360KB double sided/double density 5.25-inch floppy drives. Without a network card (itself sometimes tough to find, for at least the 8-bit ISA expansion slots of the 5150) or a suitable "gateway machine" from the 386, 486, or early Pentium era equipped with a compatible floppy drive, these systems can be challenging to get programs and data onto. An XT-IDE adapter is a must, as the MFM/RLL hard drives of the day have mostly failed nowadays, and the ones that haven't are ticking time bombs. You should also expect to replace the tantalum capacitors on the system planar (IBM terminology for "motherboard"), as they have a tendency to violently explode. For the 5150, a power supply upgrade may be needed to support hard drives, as the original 62.5W power supply is a bit underpowered for such tasks.

These machines can support up to 640KB of RAM, although RAM above 256KB must generally reside on an expansion card. Given the limit of five slots on the 5150, this can be a problem.

I have limited experience with clones from this era, though the Tandy 1000 series is often considered an excellent alternative to IBM's entries into this category.

I would not recommend an IBM 8088 as a first retro system, but they can be a lot of fun for intermediate collectors, and a Tandy 1000 of any stripe would be a good beginner's machine with which to play games from the era. As an added benefit, some models of Tandy 1000 could be fitted with a 3.5" floppy drive, making data transfer from modern systems somewhat easier, although in the case of 720KB DSDD 3.5" floppies, modern USB floppy drives cannot generally write to them. You'll still need a "gateway machine" with a genuine, on-board floppy drive.

BFS: 2 for IBM, 3 for Tandy 1000

===== 80286/AT Era =====
This covers the IBM PC AT (model 5170) and clones. They generally have CGA or EGA graphics and a hard disk drive; usually MFM/RLL or ESDI.

These machines expanded the memory addressing capability of the x86 platform from 20 bits to 24 bits, expanding addressable memory from 1MB to 16MB, and added multitasking and memory protection.

These systems are expensive enough and rare enough that I would personally recommend saving them for after you've picked up a 386, 486, or early Pentium machine. They also suffer from common hard drive failures, and can be difficult to get software onto, due to the 5.25" hard drives that were still ubiquitous. A gateway machine is advised.

There is also difficulty in these systems due to the fact that BIOS setup requires a boot floppy to access.

BFS: 2 for IBM

===== IBM PS/2 Range =====

The IBM PS/2 succeeded the PC, PC XT, and PC AT systems. With some exceptions, these systems include Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) expansion slots, VGA graphics, 1.44MB high-density or 2.88MB extended-density 3.5" floppy drives. The most useful of these machines (and the bulk of the range overall) are in the 386, 486, and early Pentium class.

In this range, we're getting into components (like the VGA graphics standard, PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors) that make interoperability with modern peripherals easier. However, many of these machines used ESDI hard drives which are extremely rare, expensive, and unreliable. SCSI-based machines are friendlier, with the addition of a SCSI2SD adapter for reliable fixed storage, but the Micro Channel expansion slots mean that upgrades can be expensive and difficult to find, especially when it comes to sound cards. Also, the PS/2 floppy drives tend to fail, and are somewhat non-standard and difficult to source, though workarounds of varying degrees of elegance do exist. You will need a floppy diskette containing Adapter Definition Files for each Micro Channel expansion card installed in your machine, and diagnostics/setup diskettes as well.

If you can get over the obstacles inherent in these machines, they can be incredibly rewarding to collect and use, especially in concert with the IBM OS/2 operating system they were designed to run.

Again, I'd put this off--but not for too long, as the supply of PS/2 systems has dwindled sharply, while prices have steadily increased.

BFS: 3

===== 80386 Era =====

In this era, you're looking at machines that can run a wide variety of operating systems, and the platform itself was beginning to coalesce around a few standards, at least among clone vendors. MFM/RLL hard drives were still common, though SCSI and IDE both began to get a foothold in this era. A good 386 clone can be a decent starter and gateway machine, though they can be a bit hard to source for a decent price in modern times. Look for a machine with SCSI or IDE support, and a firmware-based BIOS setup utility. CompactFlash-IDE adapters and SCSI2SD solutions really begin to shine in this era of machine, although in the case of on-board IDE, support for CompactFlash-IDE media can be spotty, and BIOS may or may not detect your storage devices, especially at larger sizes. Look for 2GB or smaller media. SCSI will have higher chances of working with more and larger mass storage devices.

These machines do an acceptable job running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows 95 runs, but 8MB of RAM should be considered a minimum, and even then it will not be very performant. Early versions of Linux will run quite well, as will OS/2, provided drivers are available for all attached peripherals.

BFS: 3.5

===== 80486 Era =====

The 486 machines really hit a sweet spot for ease of troubleshooting and initial setup for beginners, as machines equipped with multi I/O boards containing standard IDE ports were quite common and plentiful. Most will also have a decent ROM BIOS, such as the American Megatrends WinBIOS or a Phoenix BIOS. These have good hard disk autodetection for IDE, and work well with IDE/ATAPI optical drives. Most will have a selection of 16-bit ISA and 32-bit VESA Local Bus expansion slots, and some later motherboards also included PCI slots, and could be upgraded to Pentium-class CPUs via a Pentium OverDrive add-on.

The 486 will also run the widest range of MS-DOS software of all early x86 systems, with most having a "turbo" button that will underclock the CPU--sometimes as low as 8MHz--and disable CPU caches to bring performance closer to that of a later 80286 CPU, for the benefit of early, timing-sensitive games.

BFS: 4

===== Early P5 Pentiums =====

It's all about the Pentiums! The 60MHz-90MHz Pentiums are absolutely terrific for running Windows 3.11, Windows 95, OS/2, and some versions of UNIX and Linux. IDE support in this era is rock solid, PCI expansion slots begin to edge out 16-bit ISA, and plug-and-play begins to become more robust.

In this era, my most recommended machine for a beginner would be the Gateway 2000 P5-75. Driver support is easy in all operating systems I've tried, and they are still relatively reasonable in price if you are patient.

Compatibility for MS-DOS gaming is quite good, if you limit yourself to games that were released in around 1989 or later. Generally speaking, games with VGA or SVGA graphics will run beautifully on these machines, up to and including WarCraft III, Doom, Quake, etc.

If you're like me and enjoy playing with 1990s productivity and software development titles, these machines are fantastic for it. Throw in an Ethernet card, get it on the network, and play!

For beginners, I would recommend staying away from the Packard-Bell machines. Compaq, Dell, and HP have some reasonable entries in this category, however, that are worth looking into.

BFS: 5

==== Commodore 8-bit ====

===== Commodore PET =====

===== Commodore VIC-20 =====

===== Commodore 64 =====

===== Commodore 128 =====

Within the family of Commodore 8-bit machines, I would highly recommend a Commodore 128 with an SD2IEC adapter. It will run all Commodore 64 software perfectly, and as an added bonus, gives you access to Digital Research CP/M. Although slow, the Commodore 128's CP/M implementation provides the widest compatibility for reading and writing other CP/M systems' floppy diskette formats, making it an excellent gateway system for other CP/M systems you may end up collecting in the future. Its value proposition is quite impressive.

The SD2IEC adapter will make the use of oft-unreliable floppy disks less necessary, and will make the experience more seamless.

BFS: 4

==== Commodore Amiga ====

There are a few important concepts that an aspiring Amiga collector needs to be aware of:

* The Amiga range uses a variety of chipsets supporting various NTSC and multiscan graphics modes: OCS (Original Chip Set), ECS (Enhanced Chip Set), and AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture). Newer chipsets add more colors and resolutions, and generally attempt to remain backwards-compatible with prior chipsets. However, backwards compatibility in the Amiga range is far from perfect, especially in AGA-based machines. This can often be overcome for games by using WHDLoad. If you're looking to boot physical floppies, however, you will probably need to source an Amiga whose chipset matches the era when the game was released. Most games targeted OCS/ECS, as AGA only debuted two years prior to Commodore's bankruptcy.

* For a stock Amiga (and many accelerated Amigas), you will need some way of displaying video modes that use a 15kHz signal. There are passive Amiga video to VGA adapters, but where standard VGA modes use 31.5kHz signal timing, and work with flat-panel VGA monitors, most Amiga video modes require a monitor that can synchronize to a 15kHz scan rate, which is not commonly supported on flat-panel monitors. Exceptions do exist, and many "multiscan" CRT monitors will be able to handle NTSC 15kHz scan rates. It is possible to overcome this limitation with "display enhancer" or "scan-doubler" hardware, which takes 15kHz output, stores frames in a buffer, and outputs them at a doubled rate (i.e., 31.5kHz). This hardware will also remove flicker from "interlaced" modes, and the Amiga 3000 and 3000T include an integrated display enhancer and VGA port that will output scan-doubled graphics at 31.5kHz. Other options include Commodore RGB monitors such as the 1080, 1084, 1084S, M1438, and M1572 (although models prior to the M1438 will not display VGA-style "Productivity" mode and higher resolutions). Some Amiga systems include a composite video output for display on a standard television, though it will often be monochrome-only, as is the case with the Amiga 2000 family of systems.

* Another option for video is "RTG" or "ReTargetable Graphics" with a Zorro II, Zorro III, or accelerator-based graphics board. Examples include the Picasso II and Picasso IV from Village Tronic, the Cybervision 64 and Cybervision 3D from Phase5/DCE, and the onboard RTG graphics on the Apollo Vampire accelerators. Village Tronic and Phase5/DCE boards tend to be rare and highly expensive. Support for passing standard Amiga video modes through RTG boards varies. You will need either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX software in order to use RTG graphics boards. Both are readily available, though Picasso96 tends to be better-supported and more robust than CyberGraphX.

* Amiga floppy drives have the benefit of being able to read IBM-formatted floppy diskettes of the same density. However, IBM-compatible computers can neither read nor write Amiga-formatted floppy diskettes without the aid of special hardware, such as the Individual Computers Catweasel floppy controller.

* GoTek floppy emulators, flashed with an Amiga-compatible firmware such as FlashFloppy, make data transfer easy. This is facilitated by providing a standard 34-pin floppy connector on the back of the drive, and a readout, a type-A USB port for a USB memory key, and "up" and "down" buttons for selecting among the floppy disk images written to the USB key. These images normally come in "adf" format, and are readily available.

* Amiga computers (other than the A1000) have an upgradable ROM firmware known as the "Kickstart ROM". Generally speaking, a given AmigaOS version will need a ROM chip (or chips) installed in order to function, although in many cases, the ROM image can be soft-kicked from your Amiga hard drive at boot time, at the expense of delays in booting your machine.

* The Amiga operating system has been variously known as "Workbench" and "AmigaOS"
** Workbench, as an umbrella term for the operating system, is older, but Workbench is technically just the graphical interface and desktop/file manager of the operating system, powered by the "Intuition" graphics libraries.
** Access to on-disk data, as well as the command-line shell, are supplied by a component called "AmigaDOS" (not to be confused with "AmigaOS").
** Buttons, text editing controls, drop-down lists, and other visual components of the UI are termed "gadgets", and are supplied by "gadget libraries", such as ReAction, MUI, and GadTools.
** Directories, rather than being referred to as "directories" or "folders", are called "drawers" in the Workbench UI.
** There are two current strains of the AmigaOS operating system family, and one abandoned strain of development:
*** AmigaOS 3.1.4, released in 2018, is the latest version capable of running on Motorola 68K-based Amiga systems
*** AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition, released in 2016, is the latest version capable of running on IBM PowerPC-based Amiga systems, such as the AmigaOne range of machines from EyeTech, A-Eon, and other vendors
*** AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 were based on AmigaOS 3.1 (the final Commodore release) and were developed by Haage & Partner under contract from Amiga Inc. and did not form the basis of AmigaOS 3.1.4, which was developed once again from Commodore's AmigaOS 3.1 by Hyperion Entertainment
** I will not be covering AROS and MorphOS here, as I do not consider them to be legitimate Amiga operating systems, as they share no code with the official OS releases from the various owners of the Amiga intellectual properties

==== Amiga Models ====
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Model
! CPU
! Clock Rate
! Chipset
! Storage Bus
! Expansion Bus
! BFS
|-
| A1000
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS
| N/A
| A1000/A500 Sidecar
| 2
|-
| A500
| Motorola 68000
| 7MHz
| OCS
| N/A
| A1000/A500 Sidecar, A500 Trapdoor
| 4.6
|}

===== Amiga 1000 =====

The original Amiga system has often been considered a novelty only for serious collectors, given its lack of internal expansion capacity, hard disk support, and requirement of inserting a kickstart floppy to boot the system. However, most of these limitations have been overcome with the introduction of the Classic 520 accelerator, which provides hard disk support and an autoboot feature, obviating the need for a kickstart floppy, and additional fast memory.

Even with the Classic 520, bear in mind that chip memory is still limited to 512K, you will be restricted to only OCS (Original Chip Set) graphics modes, and the status of the A1000 as a serious collector's machine tends to keep prices quite high.

BFS: 2 (due to price of acquisition)

===== Amiga 500 =====

There was a time when I would have said that the Amiga 500 was a poor choice for beginners, but modern hardware expansions have overcome the many limitations of this system to the extent that I now believe it is a great first Amiga. As the bestselling Amiga model ever produced by Commodore, this machine is still in relatively plentiful supply, and can be acquired for $500 or less. Still not cheap, but compared to other Amiga models, it's a steal.

In its base configuration, the A500 comes with a 7MHz 68000 CPU, 512KB of chip RAM, and depending on the system board revision, the OCS or ECS chipset, and Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 ROMs.

The A500 includes a "trap door" expansion slot, commonly fitted with the A501 expansion board, adding a battery-backed realtime clock and 512K of additional "slow" or "trapdoor" RAM, bringing the system RAM total to 1MB. The battery on the A501 is of the rechargeable NiCd barrel or "Varta" type, and has a tendency to leak and damage the A501 board. Thankfully, the location of this battery reduces the chances of such leakage affecting the system board itself, and modern replacements for the A501 are available for $30 or less as of July 2020.

No hard drive or hard drive controller is present on the system, though one may be added to the expansion port on the side of the machine, via either an accelerator board or a "sidecar" expansion.

Modern accelerators developed in recent years can really breathe new life into the machine, including the Wicher, the Individual Computers ACA500+, and especially the Vampire 2, the latter of which brings the A500's performance far beyond even the most expanded Amiga 4000 from the top of the Amiga range, and adds hard drive support, HDMI video output, and both AGA and RTG-style graphics support.

A modern external case is available in the form of the Checkmate 1500 Plus, which converts the A500 into a machine bearing more than a slight resemblance to the Amiga 3000.

BFS: 4.6

===== Amiga 2000 =====

===== Amiga 3000 =====

===== Amiga 600 =====

===== Amiga 1200 =====

===== Amiga 4000 =====

===== CDTV =====

===== Amiga CD-32 =====

==== Apple 8-Bit ====

===== Apple II =====

===== Apple III =====

==== Apple IIgs Family ====

==== Apple Lisa ====

==== Apple Macintosh (68k) ====

==== Apple Macintosh (PowerPC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (68k) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (32-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Early 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Later 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== DEC VAX ====

==== DEC Alpha ====

==== Silicon Graphics (MIPS) ====

==== Acorn RISC Machines (ARM) ====

==== NeXT Workstations ====

==== Be Workstations ====

==== HP9000 ====

=== Find a Community ===

A collector is only as good as the communities in which they participate! Following are some suggestions. If you are an intolerant person--especially if you are chauvinistic, transphobic, homophobic, or have a problem with furry culture or anime--work on yourself before getting into this hobby. Such bigotry is not welcome in any of these communities.

==== CCTalk/CCTech/Usenet ====
Avoid posting to Usenet newsgroups and the CCTalk/CCTech mailing lists as a beginner. Do subscribe to CCTalk and CCTech early on, as they are bountiful treasure-troves of knowledge. However, some of these gurus tend to be as vintage and cranky as the computer systems we all love, and many of them have little patience for beginner-level questions. Being mocked and told to RTFM can be quite discouraging for newcomers to the hobby. Better to lurk here until you have built a certain level of knowledge and confidence, and can hang with the graybeards.

Every retrocomputing community has its share of cranky gurus and gatekeeping behavior, but these mailing lists and Usenet have a particularly high concentration. This is nothing against them--the beginner will eventually understand the reasons for it. One positive side effect of this gatekeeping is that the signal-to-noise ratio is quite excellent.

Read this right away, but save the posting for later.

==== Facebook ====
Facebook can be a good resource. Check out these groups to start out:

* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga Commodore Amiga]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintagePCEnthusiasts Vintage PC Enthusiasts]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintageUnixEnthusiasts Vintage UNIX Machine Enthusiasts]

The difficulty with Facebook groups is that they tend to have a rather high signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of silly flame wars (my platform is better than yours!) and low-knowledge trolls. But, with patience, and the right group moderators (such as those found in the aforementioned groups), they can be a goldmine.

==== Twitter ====
In my opinion, Twitter has the friendliest and most helpful group of retrocomputing enthusiasts on the Internet. Search for hashtags that are relevant to your particular retrocomputing interests, and be picky. Get your Twitter feed to only show you the good stuff.

==== Reddit ====
Typical retrocomputing subreddits (such as r/retrobattlestations) seem to have a signal-to-noise ratio that's somewhat better than Facebook, but somewhat worse than CCTalk/CCTech. As long as you comply with established rules in the subreddits you follow, and don't bother with those having capricious and overzealous moderators, a great deal of useful content can be found here.

==== Discord ====
Among modern chat platforms, Discord probably has the most retrocomputing resources, as well as the friendliest people. It tends to lean a bit gamer-centric, so if this is not your interest, it might be better to stick to IRC for chat, or just stick to less realtime-oriented platforms (forums, social media, etc.)

Finding a server can be challenging, but if you're on Reddit, many of its retrocomputing-centric subreddits have official Discord servers that dovetail well into their respective communities.

==== IRC ====
Freenode has a fair number of good channels for retrocomputing, but IRC overall suffers from a high level of gatekeeping and newcomer-unfriendly behavior. Freenode is somewhat better on this; EFnet is absolutely terrible in this regard. I have not dealt with UnderNet, DALnet, etc., so I cannot speak to their friendliness and/or usefulness to aspiring collectors.

Retrocomputing Beginner's Guide

2020-07-25T01:29:12Z

Jpw:

This is Datashed Retrocomputing's guide for the aspiring retrocomputing collector. The goal is to give a few basic hints to keep frustration to a minimum, and help the aspiring collector find a positive direction in this highly-rewarding hobby.

This guide is geared toward those interested in collecting physical hardware, and as such, emulation options will not be covered here.

== General Hints ==

=== Pick a Platform, and Focus ===
Choose a platform or theme for your collection, and stick to it for awhile. You can always branch out later, but the aspiring collector will benefit from learning one type of system well, getting to know its quirks and all the ways to work around them. This will avoid frustrating and costly mistakes. It's easier, for instance, to learn Sun SPARC hardware on its own, than to be learning Sun, Commodore, DEC, and Apple gear all at once. I've seen beginners amass large and varied collections early on, only to give up in frustration and sell everything, or worse, scrap everything.

Here are a few platforms with some pros and cons for beginning collectors. I will give a "BFS" or "Beginner Friendliness Score" from 1 to 5, with higher numbers being more friendly:

==== Older x86 PCs/IBM Compatibles ====

This one is pretty much a no-brainer, and probably the easiest to start with. These machines are the ancestors of the Windows and Mac computers that are still on the market today. Popularity of the platform helps here, as so many have been made over the years that the supply of usable and fun machines is quite plentiful. Even if this category is not your primary focus, it is a good idea to have at least one or two 80486 or early Pentium-class machines with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives around, as they make great "gateway machines" to get software and data you download on your modern desktop or laptop onto your vintage machines--most vintage microcomputers (but not all) will have some means of reading IBM-compatible floppy disks.

There are several eras to cover here:

===== 8088/PC and PC XT Era =====
This covers the first machine that introduced the x86 platform, the IBM PC, model 5150, and its immediate successor the IBM PC XT, model 5160. These machines generally include MDA video boards with no graphics capability, or CGA video boards with limited graphics capability (320x200/4 color, or 640x200 monochrome).

These machines inspired a number of clones, of various faithfulness to full IBM compatibility.

The IBM PC 5150 and PC XT 5160 are relatively challenging and expensive to find in good working order, will require some level of specialized components to upgrade to a usable state, and are quite slow. They also typically used 360KB double sided/double density 5.25-inch floppy drives. Without a network card (itself sometimes tough to find, for at least the 8-bit ISA expansion slots of the 5150) or a suitable "gateway machine" from the 386, 486, or early Pentium era equipped with a compatible floppy drive, these systems can be challenging to get programs and data onto. An XT-IDE adapter is a must, as the MFM/RLL hard drives of the day have mostly failed nowadays, and the ones that haven't are ticking time bombs. You should also expect to replace the tantalum capacitors on the system planar (IBM terminology for "motherboard"), as they have a tendency to violently explode. For the 5150, a power supply upgrade may be needed to support hard drives, as the original 62.5W power supply is a bit underpowered for such tasks.

These machines can support up to 640KB of RAM, although RAM above 256KB must generally reside on an expansion card. Given the limit of five slots on the 5150, this can be a problem.

I have limited experience with clones from this era, though the Tandy 1000 series is often considered an excellent alternative to IBM's entries into this category.

I would not recommend an IBM 8088 as a first retro system, but they can be a lot of fun for intermediate collectors, and a Tandy 1000 of any stripe would be a good beginner's machine with which to play games from the era. As an added benefit, some models of Tandy 1000 could be fitted with a 3.5" floppy drive, making data transfer from modern systems somewhat easier, although in the case of 720KB DSDD 3.5" floppies, modern USB floppy drives cannot generally write to them. You'll still need a "gateway machine" with a genuine, on-board floppy drive.

BFS: 2 for IBM, 3 for Tandy 1000

===== 80286/AT Era =====
This covers the IBM PC AT (model 5170) and clones. They generally have CGA or EGA graphics and a hard disk drive; usually MFM/RLL or ESDI.

These machines expanded the memory addressing capability of the x86 platform from 20 bits to 24 bits, expanding addressable memory from 1MB to 16MB, and added multitasking and memory protection.

These systems are expensive enough and rare enough that I would personally recommend saving them for after you've picked up a 386, 486, or early Pentium machine. They also suffer from common hard drive failures, and can be difficult to get software onto, due to the 5.25" hard drives that were still ubiquitous. A gateway machine is advised.

There is also difficulty in these systems due to the fact that BIOS setup requires a boot floppy to access.

BFS: 2 for IBM

===== IBM PS/2 Range =====

The IBM PS/2 succeeded the PC, PC XT, and PC AT systems. With some exceptions, these systems include Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) expansion slots, VGA graphics, 1.44MB high-density or 2.88MB extended-density 3.5" floppy drives. The most useful of these machines (and the bulk of the range overall) are in the 386, 486, and early Pentium class.

In this range, we're getting into components (like the VGA graphics standard, PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors) that make interoperability with modern peripherals easier. However, many of these machines used ESDI hard drives which are extremely rare, expensive, and unreliable. SCSI-based machines are friendlier, with the addition of a SCSI2SD adapter for reliable fixed storage, but the Micro Channel expansion slots mean that upgrades can be expensive and difficult to find, especially when it comes to sound cards. Also, the PS/2 floppy drives tend to fail, and are somewhat non-standard and difficult to source, though workarounds of varying degrees of elegance do exist. You will need a floppy diskette containing Adapter Definition Files for each Micro Channel expansion card installed in your machine, and diagnostics/setup diskettes as well.

If you can get over the obstacles inherent in these machines, they can be incredibly rewarding to collect and use, especially in concert with the IBM OS/2 operating system they were designed to run.

Again, I'd put this off--but not for too long, as the supply of PS/2 systems has dwindled sharply, while prices have steadily increased.

BFS: 3

===== 80386 Era =====

In this era, you're looking at machines that can run a wide variety of operating systems, and the platform itself was beginning to coalesce around a few standards, at least among clone vendors. MFM/RLL hard drives were still common, though SCSI and IDE both began to get a foothold in this era. A good 386 clone can be a decent starter and gateway machine, though they can be a bit hard to source for a decent price in modern times. Look for a machine with SCSI or IDE support, and a firmware-based BIOS setup utility. CompactFlash-IDE adapters and SCSI2SD solutions really begin to shine in this era of machine, although in the case of on-board IDE, support for CompactFlash-IDE media can be spotty, and BIOS may or may not detect your storage devices, especially at larger sizes. Look for 2GB or smaller media. SCSI will have higher chances of working with more and larger mass storage devices.

These machines do an acceptable job running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows 95 runs, but 8MB of RAM should be considered a minimum, and even then it will not be very performant. Early versions of Linux will run quite well, as will OS/2, provided drivers are available for all attached peripherals.

BFS: 3.5

===== 80486 Era =====

The 486 machines really hit a sweet spot for ease of troubleshooting and initial setup for beginners, as machines equipped with multi I/O boards containing standard IDE ports were quite common and plentiful. Most will also have a decent ROM BIOS, such as the American Megatrends WinBIOS or a Phoenix BIOS. These have good hard disk autodetection for IDE, and work well with IDE/ATAPI optical drives. Most will have a selection of 16-bit ISA and 32-bit VESA Local Bus expansion slots, and some later motherboards also included PCI slots, and could be upgraded to Pentium-class CPUs via a Pentium OverDrive add-on.

The 486 will also run the widest range of MS-DOS software of all early x86 systems, with most having a "turbo" button that will underclock the CPU--sometimes as low as 8MHz--and disable CPU caches to bring performance closer to that of a later 80286 CPU, for the benefit of early, timing-sensitive games.

BFS: 4

===== Early P5 Pentiums =====

It's all about the Pentiums! The 60MHz-90MHz Pentiums are absolutely terrific for running Windows 3.11, Windows 95, OS/2, and some versions of UNIX and Linux. IDE support in this era is rock solid, PCI expansion slots begin to edge out 16-bit ISA, and plug-and-play begins to become more robust.

In this era, my most recommended machine for a beginner would be the Gateway 2000 P5-75. Driver support is easy in all operating systems I've tried, and they are still relatively reasonable in price if you are patient.

Compatibility for MS-DOS gaming is quite good, if you limit yourself to games that were released in around 1989 or later. Generally speaking, games with VGA or SVGA graphics will run beautifully on these machines, up to and including WarCraft III, Doom, Quake, etc.

If you're like me and enjoy playing with 1990s productivity and software development titles, these machines are fantastic for it. Throw in an Ethernet card, get it on the network, and play!

For beginners, I would recommend staying away from the Packard-Bell machines. Compaq, Dell, and HP have some reasonable entries in this category, however, that are worth looking into.

BFS: 5

==== Commodore 8-bit ====

===== Commodore PET =====

===== Commodore VIC-20 =====

===== Commodore 64 =====

===== Commodore 128 =====

Within the family of Commodore 8-bit machines, I would highly recommend a Commodore 128 with an SD2IEC adapter. It will run all Commodore 64 software perfectly, and as an added bonus, gives you access to Digital Research CP/M. Although slow, the Commodore 128's CP/M implementation provides the widest compatibility for reading and writing other CP/M systems' floppy diskette formats, making it an excellent gateway system for other CP/M systems you may end up collecting in the future. Its value proposition is quite impressive.

The SD2IEC adapter will make the use of oft-unreliable floppy disks less necessary, and will make the experience more seamless.

BFS: 4

==== Commodore Amiga ====

There are a few important concepts that an aspiring Amiga collector needs to be aware of:

* The Amiga range uses a variety of chipsets supporting various NTSC and multiscan graphics modes: OCS (Original Chip Set), ECS (Enhanced Chip Set), and AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture). Newer chipsets add more colors and resolutions, and generally attempt to remain backwards-compatible with prior chipsets. However, backwards compatibility in the Amiga range is far from perfect, especially in AGA-based machines. This can often be overcome for games by using WHDLoad. If you're looking to boot physical floppies, however, you will probably need to source an Amiga whose chipset matches the era when the game was released. Most games targeted OCS/ECS, as AGA only debuted two years prior to Commodore's bankruptcy.

* For a stock Amiga (and many accelerated Amigas), you will need some way of displaying video modes that use a 15kHz signal. There are passive Amiga video to VGA adapters, but where standard VGA modes use 31.5kHz signal timing, and work with flat-panel VGA monitors, most Amiga video modes require a monitor that can synchronize to a 15kHz scan rate, which is not commonly supported on flat-panel monitors. Exceptions do exist, and many "multiscan" CRT monitors will be able to handle NTSC 15kHz scan rates. It is possible to overcome this limitation with "display enhancer" or "scan-doubler" hardware, which takes 15kHz output, stores frames in a buffer, and outputs them at a doubled rate (i.e., 31.5kHz). This hardware will also remove flicker from "interlaced" modes, and the Amiga 3000 and 3000T include an integrated display enhancer and VGA port that will output scan-doubled graphics at 31.5kHz. Other options include Commodore RGB monitors such as the 1080, 1084, 1084S, M1438, and M1572 (although models prior to the M1438 will not display VGA-style "Productivity" mode and higher resolutions). Some Amiga systems include a composite video output for display on a standard television, though it will often be monochrome-only, as is the case with the Amiga 2000 family of systems.

* Another option for video is "RTG" or "ReTargetable Graphics" with a Zorro II, Zorro III, or accelerator-based graphics board. Examples include the Picasso II and Picasso IV from Village Tronic, the Cybervision 64 and Cybervision 3D from Phase5/DCE, and the onboard RTG graphics on the Apollo Vampire accelerators. Village Tronic and Phase5/DCE boards tend to be rare and highly expensive. Support for passing standard Amiga video modes through RTG boards varies. You will need either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX software in order to use RTG graphics boards. Both are readily available, though Picasso96 tends to be better-supported and more robust than CyberGraphX.

* Amiga floppy drives have the benefit of being able to read IBM-formatted floppy diskettes of the same density. However, IBM-compatible computers can neither read nor write Amiga-formatted floppy diskettes without the aid of special hardware, such as the Individual Computers Catweasel floppy controller.

* GoTek floppy emulators, flashed with an Amiga-compatible firmware such as FlashFloppy, make data transfer easy. This is facilitated by providing a standard 34-pin floppy connector on the back of the drive, and a readout, a type-A USB port for a USB memory key, and "up" and "down" buttons for selecting among the floppy disk images written to the USB key. These images normally come in "adf" format, and are readily available.

* Amiga computers (other than the A1000) have an upgradable ROM firmware known as the "Kickstart ROM". Generally speaking, a given AmigaOS version will need a ROM chip (or chips) installed in order to function, although in many cases, the ROM image can be soft-kicked from your Amiga hard drive at boot time, at the expense of delays in booting your machine.

* The Amiga operating system has been variously known as "Workbench" and "AmigaOS"
** Workbench, as an umbrella term for the operating system, is older, but Workbench is technically just the graphical interface and desktop/file manager of the operating system, powered by the "Intuition" graphics libraries.
** Access to on-disk data, as well as the command-line shell, are supplied by a component called "AmigaDOS" (not to be confused with "AmigaOS").
** Buttons, text editing controls, drop-down lists, and other visual components of the UI are termed "gadgets", and are supplied by "gadget libraries", such as ReAction, MUI, and GadTools.
** Directories, rather than being referred to as "directories" or "folders", are called "drawers" in the Workbench UI.
** There are two current strains of the AmigaOS operating system family, and one abandoned strain of development:
*** AmigaOS 3.1.4, released in 2018, is the latest version capable of running on Motorola 68K-based Amiga systems
*** AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition, released in 2016, is the latest version capable of running on IBM PowerPC-based Amiga systems, such as the AmigaOne range of machines from EyeTech, A-Eon, and other vendors
*** AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 were based on AmigaOS 3.1 (the final Commodore release) and were developed by Haage & Partner under contract from Amiga Inc. and did not form the basis of AmigaOS 3.1.4, which was developed once again from Commodore's AmigaOS 3.1 by Hyperion Entertainment
** I will not be covering AROS and MorphOS here, as I do not consider them to be legitimate Amiga operating systems, as they share no code with the official OS releases from the various owners of the Amiga intellectual properties

===== Amiga 1000 =====

The original Amiga system has often been considered a novelty only for serious collectors, given its lack of internal expansion capacity, hard disk support, and requirement of inserting a kickstart floppy to boot the system. However, most of these limitations have been overcome with the introduction of the Classic 520 accelerator, which provides hard disk support and an autoboot feature, obviating the need for a kickstart floppy, and additional fast memory.

Even with the Classic 520, bear in mind that chip memory is still limited to 512K, you will be restricted to only OCS (Original Chip Set) graphics modes, and the status of the A1000 as a serious collector's machine tends to keep prices quite high.

BFS: 2 (due to price of acquisition)

===== Amiga 500 =====

There was a time when I would have said that the Amiga 500 was a poor choice for beginners, but modern hardware expansions have overcome the many limitations of this system to the extent that I now believe it is a great first Amiga. As the bestselling Amiga model ever produced by Commodore, this machine is still in relatively plentiful supply, and can be acquired for $500 or less. Still not cheap, but compared to other Amiga models, it's a steal.

In its base configuration, the A500 comes with a 7MHz 68000 CPU, 512KB of chip RAM, and depending on the system board revision, the OCS or ECS chipset, and Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 ROMs.

The A500 includes a "trap door" expansion slot, commonly fitted with the A501 expansion board, adding a battery-backed realtime clock and 512K of additional "slow" or "trapdoor" RAM, bringing the system RAM total to 1MB. The battery on the A501 is of the rechargeable NiCd barrel or "Varta" type, and has a tendency to leak and damage the A501 board. Thankfully, the location of this battery reduces the chances of such leakage affecting the system board itself, and modern replacements for the A501 are available for $30 or less as of July 2020.

No hard drive or hard drive controller is present on the system, though one may be added to the expansion port on the side of the machine, via either an accelerator board or a "sidecar" expansion.

Modern accelerators developed in recent years can really breathe new life into the machine, including the Wicher, the Individual Computers ACA500+, and especially the Vampire 2, the latter of which brings the A500's performance far beyond even the most expanded Amiga 4000 from the top of the Amiga range, and adds hard drive support, HDMI video output, and both AGA and RTG-style graphics support.

A modern external case is available in the form of the Checkmate 1500 Plus, which converts the A500 into a machine bearing more than a slight resemblance to the Amiga 3000.

BFS: 4.6

===== Amiga 2000 =====

===== Amiga 3000 =====

===== Amiga 600 =====

===== Amiga 1200 =====

===== Amiga 4000 =====

===== CDTV =====

===== Amiga CD-32 =====

==== Apple 8-Bit ====

===== Apple II =====

===== Apple III =====

==== Apple IIgs Family ====

==== Apple Lisa ====

==== Apple Macintosh (68k) ====

==== Apple Macintosh (PowerPC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (68k) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (32-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Early 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Later 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== DEC VAX ====

==== DEC Alpha ====

==== Silicon Graphics (MIPS) ====

==== Acorn RISC Machines (ARM) ====

==== NeXT Workstations ====

==== Be Workstations ====

==== HP9000 ====

=== Find a Community ===

A collector is only as good as the communities in which they participate! Following are some suggestions. If you are an intolerant person--especially if you are chauvinistic, transphobic, homophobic, or have a problem with furry culture or anime--work on yourself before getting into this hobby. Such bigotry is not welcome in any of these communities.

==== CCTalk/CCTech/Usenet ====
Avoid posting to Usenet newsgroups and the CCTalk/CCTech mailing lists as a beginner. Do subscribe to CCTalk and CCTech early on, as they are bountiful treasure-troves of knowledge. However, some of these gurus tend to be as vintage and cranky as the computer systems we all love, and many of them have little patience for beginner-level questions. Being mocked and told to RTFM can be quite discouraging for newcomers to the hobby. Better to lurk here until you have built a certain level of knowledge and confidence, and can hang with the graybeards.

Every retrocomputing community has its share of cranky gurus and gatekeeping behavior, but these mailing lists and Usenet have a particularly high concentration. This is nothing against them--the beginner will eventually understand the reasons for it. One positive side effect of this gatekeeping is that the signal-to-noise ratio is quite excellent.

Read this right away, but save the posting for later.

==== Facebook ====
Facebook can be a good resource. Check out these groups to start out:

* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga Commodore Amiga]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintagePCEnthusiasts Vintage PC Enthusiasts]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintageUnixEnthusiasts Vintage UNIX Machine Enthusiasts]

The difficulty with Facebook groups is that they tend to have a rather high signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of silly flame wars (my platform is better than yours!) and low-knowledge trolls. But, with patience, and the right group moderators (such as those found in the aforementioned groups), they can be a goldmine.

==== Twitter ====
In my opinion, Twitter has the friendliest and most helpful group of retrocomputing enthusiasts on the Internet. Search for hashtags that are relevant to your particular retrocomputing interests, and be picky. Get your Twitter feed to only show you the good stuff.

==== Reddit ====
Typical retrocomputing subreddits (such as r/retrobattlestations) seem to have a signal-to-noise ratio that's somewhat better than Facebook, but somewhat worse than CCTalk/CCTech. As long as you comply with established rules in the subreddits you follow, and don't bother with those having capricious and overzealous moderators, a great deal of useful content can be found here.

==== Discord ====
Among modern chat platforms, Discord probably has the most retrocomputing resources, as well as the friendliest people. It tends to lean a bit gamer-centric, so if this is not your interest, it might be better to stick to IRC for chat, or just stick to less realtime-oriented platforms (forums, social media, etc.)

Finding a server can be challenging, but if you're on Reddit, many of its retrocomputing-centric subreddits have official Discord servers that dovetail well into their respective communities.

==== IRC ====
Freenode has a fair number of good channels for retrocomputing, but IRC overall suffers from a high level of gatekeeping and newcomer-unfriendly behavior. Freenode is somewhat better on this; EFnet is absolutely terrible in this regard. I have not dealt with UnderNet, DALnet, etc., so I cannot speak to their friendliness and/or usefulness to aspiring collectors.

Retrocomputing Beginner's Guide

2020-07-21T01:57:30Z

Jpw: /* Commodore 128 */

This is Datashed Retrocomputing's guide for the aspiring retrocomputing collector. The goal is to give a few basic hints to keep frustration to a minimum, and help the aspiring collector find a positive direction in this highly-rewarding hobby.

This guide is geared toward those interested in collecting physical hardware, and as such, emulation options will not be covered here.

== General Hints ==

=== Pick a Platform, and Focus ===
Choose a platform or theme for your collection, and stick to it for awhile. You can always branch out later, but the aspiring collector will benefit from learning one type of system well, getting to know its quirks and all the ways to work around them. This will avoid frustrating and costly mistakes. It's easier, for instance, to learn Sun SPARC hardware on its own, than to be learning Sun, Commodore, DEC, and Apple gear all at once. I've seen beginners amass large and varied collections early on, only to give up in frustration and sell everything, or worse, scrap everything.

Here are a few platforms with some pros and cons for beginning collectors. I will give a "BFS" or "Beginner Friendliness Score" from 1 to 5, with higher numbers being more friendly:

==== Older x86 PCs/IBM Compatibles ====

This one is pretty much a no-brainer, and probably the easiest to start with. These machines are the ancestors of the Windows and Mac computers that are still on the market today. Popularity of the platform helps here, as so many have been made over the years that the supply of usable and fun machines is quite plentiful. Even if this category is not your primary focus, it is a good idea to have at least one or two 80486 or early Pentium-class machines with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives around, as they make great "gateway machines" to get software and data you download on your modern desktop or laptop onto your vintage machines--most vintage microcomputers (but not all) will have some means of reading IBM-compatible floppy disks.

There are several eras to cover here:

===== 8088/PC and PC XT Era =====
This covers the first machine that introduced the x86 platform, the IBM PC, model 5150, and its immediate successor the IBM PC XT, model 5160. These machines generally include MDA video boards with no graphics capability, or CGA video boards with limited graphics capability (320x200/4 color, or 640x200 monochrome).

These machines inspired a number of clones, of various faithfulness to full IBM compatibility.

The IBM PC 5150 and PC XT 5160 are relatively challenging and expensive to find in good working order, will require some level of specialized components to upgrade to a usable state, and are quite slow. They also typically used 360KB double sided/double density 5.25-inch floppy drives. Without a network card (itself sometimes tough to find, for at least the 8-bit ISA expansion slots of the 5150) or a suitable "gateway machine" from the 386, 486, or early Pentium era equipped with a compatible floppy drive, these systems can be challenging to get programs and data onto. An XT-IDE adapter is a must, as the MFM/RLL hard drives of the day have mostly failed nowadays, and the ones that haven't are ticking time bombs. You should also expect to replace the tantalum capacitors on the system planar (IBM terminology for "motherboard"), as they have a tendency to violently explode. For the 5150, a power supply upgrade may be needed to support hard drives, as the original 62.5W power supply is a bit underpowered for such tasks.

These machines can support up to 640KB of RAM, although RAM above 256KB must generally reside on an expansion card. Given the limit of five slots on the 5150, this can be a problem.

I have limited experience with clones from this era, though the Tandy 1000 series is often considered an excellent alternative to IBM's entries into this category.

I would not recommend an IBM 8088 as a first retro system, but they can be a lot of fun for intermediate collectors, and a Tandy 1000 of any stripe would be a good beginner's machine with which to play games from the era. As an added benefit, some models of Tandy 1000 could be fitted with a 3.5" floppy drive, making data transfer from modern systems somewhat easier, although in the case of 720KB DSDD 3.5" floppies, modern USB floppy drives cannot generally write to them. You'll still need a "gateway machine" with a genuine, on-board floppy drive.

BFS: 2 for IBM, 3 for Tandy 1000

===== 80286/AT Era =====
This covers the IBM PC AT (model 5170) and clones. They generally have CGA or EGA graphics and a hard disk drive; usually MFM/RLL or ESDI.

These machines expanded the memory addressing capability of the x86 platform from 20 bits to 24 bits, expanding addressable memory from 1MB to 16MB, and added multitasking and memory protection.

These systems are expensive enough and rare enough that I would personally recommend saving them for after you've picked up a 386, 486, or early Pentium machine. They also suffer from common hard drive failures, and can be difficult to get software onto, due to the 5.25" hard drives that were still ubiquitous. A gateway machine is advised.

There is also difficulty in these systems due to the fact that BIOS setup requires a boot floppy to access.

BFS: 2 for IBM

===== IBM PS/2 Range =====

The IBM PS/2 succeeded the PC, PC XT, and PC AT systems. With some exceptions, these systems include Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) expansion slots, VGA graphics, 1.44MB high-density or 2.88MB extended-density 3.5" floppy drives. The most useful of these machines (and the bulk of the range overall) are in the 386, 486, and early Pentium class.

In this range, we're getting into components (like the VGA graphics standard, PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors) that make interoperability with modern peripherals easier. However, many of these machines used ESDI hard drives which are extremely rare, expensive, and unreliable. SCSI-based machines are friendlier, with the addition of a SCSI2SD adapter for reliable fixed storage, but the Micro Channel expansion slots mean that upgrades can be expensive and difficult to find, especially when it comes to sound cards. Also, the PS/2 floppy drives tend to fail, and are somewhat non-standard and difficult to source, though workarounds of varying degrees of elegance do exist. You will need a floppy diskette containing Adapter Definition Files for each Micro Channel expansion card installed in your machine, and diagnostics/setup diskettes as well.

If you can get over the obstacles inherent in these machines, they can be incredibly rewarding to collect and use, especially in concert with the IBM OS/2 operating system they were designed to run.

Again, I'd put this off--but not for too long, as the supply of PS/2 systems has dwindled sharply, while prices have steadily increased.

BFS: 3

===== 80386 Era =====

In this era, you're looking at machines that can run a wide variety of operating systems, and the platform itself was beginning to coalesce around a few standards, at least among clone vendors. MFM/RLL hard drives were still common, though SCSI and IDE both began to get a foothold in this era. A good 386 clone can be a decent starter and gateway machine, though they can be a bit hard to source for a decent price in modern times. Look for a machine with SCSI or IDE support, and a firmware-based BIOS setup utility. CompactFlash-IDE adapters and SCSI2SD solutions really begin to shine in this era of machine, although in the case of on-board IDE, support for CompactFlash-IDE media can be spotty, and BIOS may or may not detect your storage devices, especially at larger sizes. Look for 2GB or smaller media. SCSI will have higher chances of working with more and larger mass storage devices.

These machines do an acceptable job running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows 95 runs, but 8MB of RAM should be considered a minimum, and even then it will not be very performant. Early versions of Linux will run quite well, as will OS/2, provided drivers are available for all attached peripherals.

BFS: 3.5

===== 80486 Era =====

The 486 machines really hit a sweet spot for ease of troubleshooting and initial setup for beginners, as machines equipped with multi I/O boards containing standard IDE ports were quite common and plentiful. Most will also have a decent ROM BIOS, such as the American Megatrends WinBIOS or a Phoenix BIOS. These have good hard disk autodetection for IDE, and work well with IDE/ATAPI optical drives. Most will have a selection of 16-bit ISA and 32-bit VESA Local Bus expansion slots, and some later motherboards also included PCI slots, and could be upgraded to Pentium-class CPUs via a Pentium OverDrive add-on.

The 486 will also run the widest range of MS-DOS software of all early x86 systems, with most having a "turbo" button that will underclock the CPU--sometimes as low as 8MHz--and disable CPU caches to bring performance closer to that of a later 80286 CPU, for the benefit of early, timing-sensitive games.

BFS: 4

===== Early P5 Pentiums =====

It's all about the Pentiums! The 60MHz-90MHz Pentiums are absolutely terrific for running Windows 3.11, Windows 95, OS/2, and some versions of UNIX and Linux. IDE support in this era is rock solid, PCI expansion slots begin to edge out 16-bit ISA, and plug-and-play begins to become more robust.

In this era, my most recommended machine for a beginner would be the Gateway 2000 P5-75. Driver support is easy in all operating systems I've tried, and they are still relatively reasonable in price if you are patient.

Compatibility for MS-DOS gaming is quite good, if you limit yourself to games that were released in around 1989 or later. Generally speaking, games with VGA or SVGA graphics will run beautifully on these machines, up to and including WarCraft III, Doom, Quake, etc.

If you're like me and enjoy playing with 1990s productivity and software development titles, these machines are fantastic for it. Throw in an Ethernet card, get it on the network, and play!

For beginners, I would recommend staying away from the Packard-Bell machines. Compaq, Dell, and HP have some reasonable entries in this category, however, that are worth looking into.

BFS: 5

==== Commodore 8-bit ====

===== Commodore PET =====

===== Commodore VIC-20 =====

===== Commodore 64 =====

===== Commodore 128 =====

Within the family of Commodore 8-bit machines, I would highly recommend a Commodore 128 with an SD2IEC adapter. It will run all Commodore 64 software perfectly, and as an added bonus, gives you access to Digital Research CP/M. Although slow, the Commodore 128's CP/M implementation provides the widest compatibility for reading and writing other CP/M systems' floppy diskette formats, making it an excellent gateway system for other CP/M systems you may end up collecting in the future. Its value proposition is quite impressive.

The SD2IEC adapter will make the use of oft-unreliable floppy disks less necessary, and will make the experience more seamless.

BFS: 4

==== Commodore Amiga ====

There are a few important concepts that an aspiring Amiga collector needs to be aware of:

* The Amiga range uses a variety of chipsets supporting various NTSC and multiscan graphics modes: OCS (Original Chip Set), ECS (Enhanced Chip Set), and AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture). Newer chipsets add more colors and resolutions, and generally attempt to remain backwards-compatible with prior chipsets. However, backwards compatibility in the Amiga range is far from perfect, especially in AGA-based machines. This can often be overcome for games by using WHDLoad. If you're looking to boot physical floppies, however, you will probably need to source an Amiga whose chipset matches the era when the game was released. Most games targeted OCS/ECS, as AGA only debuted two years prior to Commodore's bankruptcy.

* For a stock Amiga (and many accelerated Amigas), you will need some way of displaying video modes that use a 15kHz signal. There are passive Amiga video to VGA adapters, but where standard VGA modes use 31.5kHz signal timing, and work with flat-panel VGA monitors, most Amiga video modes require a monitor that can synchronize to a 15kHz scan rate, which is not commonly supported on flat-panel monitors. Exceptions do exist, and many "multiscan" CRT monitors will be able to handle NTSC 15kHz scan rates. It is possible to overcome this limitation with "display enhancer" or "scan-doubler" hardware, which takes 15kHz output, stores frames in a buffer, and outputs them at a doubled rate (i.e., 31.5kHz). This hardware will also remove flicker from "interlaced" modes, and the Amiga 3000 and 3000T include an integrated display enhancer and VGA port that will output scan-doubled graphics at 31.5kHz. Other options include Commodore RGB monitors such as the 1080, 1084, 1084S, M1438, and M1572 (although models prior to the M1438 will not display VGA-style "Productivity" mode and higher resolutions). Some Amiga systems include a composite video output for display on a standard television, though it will often be monochrome-only, as is the case with the Amiga 2000 family of systems.

* Another option for video is "RTG" or "ReTargetable Graphics" with a Zorro II, Zorro III, or accelerator-based graphics board. Examples include the Picasso II and Picasso IV from Village Tronic, the Cybervision 64 and Cybervision 3D from Phase5/DCE, and the onboard RTG graphics on the Apollo Vampire accelerators. Village Tronic and Phase5/DCE boards tend to be rare and highly expensive. Support for passing standard Amiga video modes through RTG boards varies. You will need either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX software in order to use RTG graphics boards. Both are readily available, though Picasso96 tends to be better-supported and more robust than CyberGraphX.

* Amiga floppy drives have the benefit of being able to read IBM-formatted floppy diskettes of the same density. However, IBM-compatible computers can neither read nor write Amiga-formatted floppy diskettes without the aid of special hardware, such as the Individual Computers Catweasel floppy controller.

* GoTek floppy emulators, flashed with an Amiga-compatible firmware such as FlashFloppy, make data transfer easy. This is facilitated by providing a standard 34-pin floppy connector on the back of the drive, and a readout, a type-A USB port for a USB memory key, and "up" and "down" buttons for selecting among the floppy disk images written to the USB key. These images normally come in "adf" format, and are readily available.

* Amiga computers (other than the A1000) have an upgradable ROM firmware known as the "Kickstart ROM". Generally speaking, a given AmigaOS version will need a ROM chip (or chips) installed in order to function, although in many cases, the ROM image can be soft-kicked from your Amiga hard drive at boot time, at the expense of delays in booting your machine.

* The Amiga operating system has been variously known as "Workbench" and "AmigaOS"
** Workbench, as an umbrella term for the operating system, is older, but Workbench is technically just the graphical interface and desktop/file manager of the operating system, powered by the "Intuition" graphics libraries.
** Access to on-disk data, as well as the command-line shell, are supplied by a component called "AmigaDOS" (not to be confused with "AmigaOS").
** Buttons, text editing controls, drop-down lists, and other visual components of the UI are termed "gadgets", and are supplied by "gadget libraries", such as ReAction, MUI, and GadTools.
** Directories, rather than being referred to as "directories" or "folders", are called "drawers" in the Workbench UI.
** There are two current strains of the AmigaOS operating system family, and one abandoned strain of development:
*** AmigaOS 3.1.4, released in 2018, is the latest version capable of running on Motorola 68K-based Amiga systems
*** AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition, released in 2016, is the latest version capable of running on IBM PowerPC-based Amiga systems, such as the AmigaOne range of machines from EyeTech, A-Eon, and other vendors
*** AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 were based on AmigaOS 3.1 (the final Commodore release) and were developed by Haage & Partner under contract from Amiga Inc. and did not form the basis of AmigaOS 3.1.4, which was developed once again from Commodore's AmigaOS 3.1 by Hyperion Entertainment
** I will not be covering AROS and MorphOS here, as I do not consider them to be legitimate Amiga operating systems, as they share no code with the official OS releases from the various owners of the Amiga intellectual properties

===== Amiga 1000 =====

The original Amiga system has often been considered a novelty only for serious collectors, given its lack of internal expansion capacity, hard disk support, and requirement of inserting a kickstart floppy to boot the system. However, most of these limitations have been overcome with the introduction of the Classic 520 accelerator, which provides hard disk support and an autoboot feature, obviating the need for a kickstart floppy, and additional fast memory.

Even with the Classic 520, bear in mind that chip memory is still limited to 512K, you will be restricted to only OCS (Original Chip Set) graphics modes, and the status of the A1000 as a serious collector's machine tends to keep prices quite high.

BFS: 2 (due to price of acquisition)

===== Amiga 500 =====

===== Amiga 2000 =====

===== Amiga 3000 =====

===== Amiga 600 =====

===== Amiga 1200 =====

===== Amiga 4000 =====

===== CDTV =====

===== Amiga CD-32 =====

==== Apple 8-Bit ====

===== Apple II =====

===== Apple III =====

==== Apple IIgs Family ====

==== Apple Lisa ====

==== Apple Macintosh (68k) ====

==== Apple Macintosh (PowerPC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (68k) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (32-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Early 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Later 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== DEC VAX ====

==== DEC Alpha ====

==== Silicon Graphics (MIPS) ====

==== Acorn RISC Machines (ARM) ====

==== NeXT Workstations ====

==== Be Workstations ====

==== HP9000 ====

=== Find a Community ===

A collector is only as good as the communities in which they participate! Following are some suggestions. If you are an intolerant person--especially if you are chauvinistic, transphobic, homophobic, or have a problem with furry culture or anime--work on yourself before getting into this hobby. Such bigotry is not welcome in any of these communities.

==== CCTalk/CCTech/Usenet ====
Avoid posting to Usenet newsgroups and the CCTalk/CCTech mailing lists as a beginner. Do subscribe to CCTalk and CCTech early on, as they are bountiful treasure-troves of knowledge. However, some of these gurus tend to be as vintage and cranky as the computer systems we all love, and many of them have little patience for beginner-level questions. Being mocked and told to RTFM can be quite discouraging for newcomers to the hobby. Better to lurk here until you have built a certain level of knowledge and confidence, and can hang with the graybeards.

Every retrocomputing community has its share of cranky gurus and gatekeeping behavior, but these mailing lists and Usenet have a particularly high concentration. This is nothing against them--the beginner will eventually understand the reasons for it. One positive side effect of this gatekeeping is that the signal-to-noise ratio is quite excellent.

Read this right away, but save the posting for later.

==== Facebook ====
Facebook can be a good resource. Check out these groups to start out:

* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga Commodore Amiga]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintagePCEnthusiasts Vintage PC Enthusiasts]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintageUnixEnthusiasts Vintage UNIX Machine Enthusiasts]

The difficulty with Facebook groups is that they tend to have a rather high signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of silly flame wars (my platform is better than yours!) and low-knowledge trolls. But, with patience, and the right group moderators (such as those found in the aforementioned groups), they can be a goldmine.

==== Twitter ====
In my opinion, Twitter has the friendliest and most helpful group of retrocomputing enthusiasts on the Internet. Search for hashtags that are relevant to your particular retrocomputing interests, and be picky. Get your Twitter feed to only show you the good stuff.

==== Reddit ====
Typical retrocomputing subreddits (such as r/retrobattlestations) seem to have a signal-to-noise ratio that's somewhat better than Facebook, but somewhat worse than CCTalk/CCTech. As long as you comply with established rules in the subreddits you follow, and don't bother with those having capricious and overzealous moderators, a great deal of useful content can be found here.

==== Discord ====
Among modern chat platforms, Discord probably has the most retrocomputing resources, as well as the friendliest people. It tends to lean a bit gamer-centric, so if this is not your interest, it might be better to stick to IRC for chat, or just stick to less realtime-oriented platforms (forums, social media, etc.)

Finding a server can be challenging, but if you're on Reddit, many of its retrocomputing-centric subreddits have official Discord servers that dovetail well into their respective communities.

==== IRC ====
Freenode has a fair number of good channels for retrocomputing, but IRC overall suffers from a high level of gatekeeping and newcomer-unfriendly behavior. Freenode is somewhat better on this; EFnet is absolutely terrible in this regard. I have not dealt with UnderNet, DALnet, etc., so I cannot speak to their friendliness and/or usefulness to aspiring collectors.

Retrocomputing Beginner's Guide

2020-07-21T01:55:39Z

Jpw: /* Commodore Amiga */

This is Datashed Retrocomputing's guide for the aspiring retrocomputing collector. The goal is to give a few basic hints to keep frustration to a minimum, and help the aspiring collector find a positive direction in this highly-rewarding hobby.

This guide is geared toward those interested in collecting physical hardware, and as such, emulation options will not be covered here.

== General Hints ==

=== Pick a Platform, and Focus ===
Choose a platform or theme for your collection, and stick to it for awhile. You can always branch out later, but the aspiring collector will benefit from learning one type of system well, getting to know its quirks and all the ways to work around them. This will avoid frustrating and costly mistakes. It's easier, for instance, to learn Sun SPARC hardware on its own, than to be learning Sun, Commodore, DEC, and Apple gear all at once. I've seen beginners amass large and varied collections early on, only to give up in frustration and sell everything, or worse, scrap everything.

Here are a few platforms with some pros and cons for beginning collectors. I will give a "BFS" or "Beginner Friendliness Score" from 1 to 5, with higher numbers being more friendly:

==== Older x86 PCs/IBM Compatibles ====

This one is pretty much a no-brainer, and probably the easiest to start with. These machines are the ancestors of the Windows and Mac computers that are still on the market today. Popularity of the platform helps here, as so many have been made over the years that the supply of usable and fun machines is quite plentiful. Even if this category is not your primary focus, it is a good idea to have at least one or two 80486 or early Pentium-class machines with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives around, as they make great "gateway machines" to get software and data you download on your modern desktop or laptop onto your vintage machines--most vintage microcomputers (but not all) will have some means of reading IBM-compatible floppy disks.

There are several eras to cover here:

===== 8088/PC and PC XT Era =====
This covers the first machine that introduced the x86 platform, the IBM PC, model 5150, and its immediate successor the IBM PC XT, model 5160. These machines generally include MDA video boards with no graphics capability, or CGA video boards with limited graphics capability (320x200/4 color, or 640x200 monochrome).

These machines inspired a number of clones, of various faithfulness to full IBM compatibility.

The IBM PC 5150 and PC XT 5160 are relatively challenging and expensive to find in good working order, will require some level of specialized components to upgrade to a usable state, and are quite slow. They also typically used 360KB double sided/double density 5.25-inch floppy drives. Without a network card (itself sometimes tough to find, for at least the 8-bit ISA expansion slots of the 5150) or a suitable "gateway machine" from the 386, 486, or early Pentium era equipped with a compatible floppy drive, these systems can be challenging to get programs and data onto. An XT-IDE adapter is a must, as the MFM/RLL hard drives of the day have mostly failed nowadays, and the ones that haven't are ticking time bombs. You should also expect to replace the tantalum capacitors on the system planar (IBM terminology for "motherboard"), as they have a tendency to violently explode. For the 5150, a power supply upgrade may be needed to support hard drives, as the original 62.5W power supply is a bit underpowered for such tasks.

These machines can support up to 640KB of RAM, although RAM above 256KB must generally reside on an expansion card. Given the limit of five slots on the 5150, this can be a problem.

I have limited experience with clones from this era, though the Tandy 1000 series is often considered an excellent alternative to IBM's entries into this category.

I would not recommend an IBM 8088 as a first retro system, but they can be a lot of fun for intermediate collectors, and a Tandy 1000 of any stripe would be a good beginner's machine with which to play games from the era. As an added benefit, some models of Tandy 1000 could be fitted with a 3.5" floppy drive, making data transfer from modern systems somewhat easier, although in the case of 720KB DSDD 3.5" floppies, modern USB floppy drives cannot generally write to them. You'll still need a "gateway machine" with a genuine, on-board floppy drive.

BFS: 2 for IBM, 3 for Tandy 1000

===== 80286/AT Era =====
This covers the IBM PC AT (model 5170) and clones. They generally have CGA or EGA graphics and a hard disk drive; usually MFM/RLL or ESDI.

These machines expanded the memory addressing capability of the x86 platform from 20 bits to 24 bits, expanding addressable memory from 1MB to 16MB, and added multitasking and memory protection.

These systems are expensive enough and rare enough that I would personally recommend saving them for after you've picked up a 386, 486, or early Pentium machine. They also suffer from common hard drive failures, and can be difficult to get software onto, due to the 5.25" hard drives that were still ubiquitous. A gateway machine is advised.

There is also difficulty in these systems due to the fact that BIOS setup requires a boot floppy to access.

BFS: 2 for IBM

===== IBM PS/2 Range =====

The IBM PS/2 succeeded the PC, PC XT, and PC AT systems. With some exceptions, these systems include Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) expansion slots, VGA graphics, 1.44MB high-density or 2.88MB extended-density 3.5" floppy drives. The most useful of these machines (and the bulk of the range overall) are in the 386, 486, and early Pentium class.

In this range, we're getting into components (like the VGA graphics standard, PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors) that make interoperability with modern peripherals easier. However, many of these machines used ESDI hard drives which are extremely rare, expensive, and unreliable. SCSI-based machines are friendlier, with the addition of a SCSI2SD adapter for reliable fixed storage, but the Micro Channel expansion slots mean that upgrades can be expensive and difficult to find, especially when it comes to sound cards. Also, the PS/2 floppy drives tend to fail, and are somewhat non-standard and difficult to source, though workarounds of varying degrees of elegance do exist. You will need a floppy diskette containing Adapter Definition Files for each Micro Channel expansion card installed in your machine, and diagnostics/setup diskettes as well.

If you can get over the obstacles inherent in these machines, they can be incredibly rewarding to collect and use, especially in concert with the IBM OS/2 operating system they were designed to run.

Again, I'd put this off--but not for too long, as the supply of PS/2 systems has dwindled sharply, while prices have steadily increased.

BFS: 3

===== 80386 Era =====

In this era, you're looking at machines that can run a wide variety of operating systems, and the platform itself was beginning to coalesce around a few standards, at least among clone vendors. MFM/RLL hard drives were still common, though SCSI and IDE both began to get a foothold in this era. A good 386 clone can be a decent starter and gateway machine, though they can be a bit hard to source for a decent price in modern times. Look for a machine with SCSI or IDE support, and a firmware-based BIOS setup utility. CompactFlash-IDE adapters and SCSI2SD solutions really begin to shine in this era of machine, although in the case of on-board IDE, support for CompactFlash-IDE media can be spotty, and BIOS may or may not detect your storage devices, especially at larger sizes. Look for 2GB or smaller media. SCSI will have higher chances of working with more and larger mass storage devices.

These machines do an acceptable job running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows 95 runs, but 8MB of RAM should be considered a minimum, and even then it will not be very performant. Early versions of Linux will run quite well, as will OS/2, provided drivers are available for all attached peripherals.

BFS: 3.5

===== 80486 Era =====

The 486 machines really hit a sweet spot for ease of troubleshooting and initial setup for beginners, as machines equipped with multi I/O boards containing standard IDE ports were quite common and plentiful. Most will also have a decent ROM BIOS, such as the American Megatrends WinBIOS or a Phoenix BIOS. These have good hard disk autodetection for IDE, and work well with IDE/ATAPI optical drives. Most will have a selection of 16-bit ISA and 32-bit VESA Local Bus expansion slots, and some later motherboards also included PCI slots, and could be upgraded to Pentium-class CPUs via a Pentium OverDrive add-on.

The 486 will also run the widest range of MS-DOS software of all early x86 systems, with most having a "turbo" button that will underclock the CPU--sometimes as low as 8MHz--and disable CPU caches to bring performance closer to that of a later 80286 CPU, for the benefit of early, timing-sensitive games.

BFS: 4

===== Early P5 Pentiums =====

It's all about the Pentiums! The 60MHz-90MHz Pentiums are absolutely terrific for running Windows 3.11, Windows 95, OS/2, and some versions of UNIX and Linux. IDE support in this era is rock solid, PCI expansion slots begin to edge out 16-bit ISA, and plug-and-play begins to become more robust.

In this era, my most recommended machine for a beginner would be the Gateway 2000 P5-75. Driver support is easy in all operating systems I've tried, and they are still relatively reasonable in price if you are patient.

Compatibility for MS-DOS gaming is quite good, if you limit yourself to games that were released in around 1989 or later. Generally speaking, games with VGA or SVGA graphics will run beautifully on these machines, up to and including WarCraft III, Doom, Quake, etc.

If you're like me and enjoy playing with 1990s productivity and software development titles, these machines are fantastic for it. Throw in an Ethernet card, get it on the network, and play!

For beginners, I would recommend staying away from the Packard-Bell machines. Compaq, Dell, and HP have some reasonable entries in this category, however, that are worth looking into.

BFS: 5

==== Commodore 8-bit ====

===== Commodore PET =====

===== Commodore VIC-20 =====

===== Commodore 64 =====

===== Commodore 128 =====

In this family, I would highly recommend a Commodore 128 with an SD2IEC adapter. It will run all Commodore 64 software perfectly, and as an added bonus, gives you access to Digital Research CP/M. Although slow, the Commodore 128's CP/M implementation provides the widest compatibility for reading and writing other CP/M systems' floppy diskette formats, making it an excellent gateway system for other CP/M systems you may end up collecting in the future. Its value proposition is quite impressive.

The SD2IEC adapter will make the use of oft-unreliable floppy disks less necessary, and will make the experience more seamless.

BFS: 4

==== Commodore Amiga ====

There are a few important concepts that an aspiring Amiga collector needs to be aware of:

* The Amiga range uses a variety of chipsets supporting various NTSC and multiscan graphics modes: OCS (Original Chip Set), ECS (Enhanced Chip Set), and AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture). Newer chipsets add more colors and resolutions, and generally attempt to remain backwards-compatible with prior chipsets. However, backwards compatibility in the Amiga range is far from perfect, especially in AGA-based machines. This can often be overcome for games by using WHDLoad. If you're looking to boot physical floppies, however, you will probably need to source an Amiga whose chipset matches the era when the game was released. Most games targeted OCS/ECS, as AGA only debuted two years prior to Commodore's bankruptcy.

* For a stock Amiga (and many accelerated Amigas), you will need some way of displaying video modes that use a 15kHz signal. There are passive Amiga video to VGA adapters, but where standard VGA modes use 31.5kHz signal timing, and work with flat-panel VGA monitors, most Amiga video modes require a monitor that can synchronize to a 15kHz scan rate, which is not commonly supported on flat-panel monitors. Exceptions do exist, and many "multiscan" CRT monitors will be able to handle NTSC 15kHz scan rates. It is possible to overcome this limitation with "display enhancer" or "scan-doubler" hardware, which takes 15kHz output, stores frames in a buffer, and outputs them at a doubled rate (i.e., 31.5kHz). This hardware will also remove flicker from "interlaced" modes, and the Amiga 3000 and 3000T include an integrated display enhancer and VGA port that will output scan-doubled graphics at 31.5kHz. Other options include Commodore RGB monitors such as the 1080, 1084, 1084S, M1438, and M1572 (although models prior to the M1438 will not display VGA-style "Productivity" mode and higher resolutions). Some Amiga systems include a composite video output for display on a standard television, though it will often be monochrome-only, as is the case with the Amiga 2000 family of systems.

* Another option for video is "RTG" or "ReTargetable Graphics" with a Zorro II, Zorro III, or accelerator-based graphics board. Examples include the Picasso II and Picasso IV from Village Tronic, the Cybervision 64 and Cybervision 3D from Phase5/DCE, and the onboard RTG graphics on the Apollo Vampire accelerators. Village Tronic and Phase5/DCE boards tend to be rare and highly expensive. Support for passing standard Amiga video modes through RTG boards varies. You will need either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX software in order to use RTG graphics boards. Both are readily available, though Picasso96 tends to be better-supported and more robust than CyberGraphX.

* Amiga floppy drives have the benefit of being able to read IBM-formatted floppy diskettes of the same density. However, IBM-compatible computers can neither read nor write Amiga-formatted floppy diskettes without the aid of special hardware, such as the Individual Computers Catweasel floppy controller.

* GoTek floppy emulators, flashed with an Amiga-compatible firmware such as FlashFloppy, make data transfer easy. This is facilitated by providing a standard 34-pin floppy connector on the back of the drive, and a readout, a type-A USB port for a USB memory key, and "up" and "down" buttons for selecting among the floppy disk images written to the USB key. These images normally come in "adf" format, and are readily available.

* Amiga computers (other than the A1000) have an upgradable ROM firmware known as the "Kickstart ROM". Generally speaking, a given AmigaOS version will need a ROM chip (or chips) installed in order to function, although in many cases, the ROM image can be soft-kicked from your Amiga hard drive at boot time, at the expense of delays in booting your machine.

* The Amiga operating system has been variously known as "Workbench" and "AmigaOS"
** Workbench, as an umbrella term for the operating system, is older, but Workbench is technically just the graphical interface and desktop/file manager of the operating system, powered by the "Intuition" graphics libraries.
** Access to on-disk data, as well as the command-line shell, are supplied by a component called "AmigaDOS" (not to be confused with "AmigaOS").
** Buttons, text editing controls, drop-down lists, and other visual components of the UI are termed "gadgets", and are supplied by "gadget libraries", such as ReAction, MUI, and GadTools.
** Directories, rather than being referred to as "directories" or "folders", are called "drawers" in the Workbench UI.
** There are two current strains of the AmigaOS operating system family, and one abandoned strain of development:
*** AmigaOS 3.1.4, released in 2018, is the latest version capable of running on Motorola 68K-based Amiga systems
*** AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition, released in 2016, is the latest version capable of running on IBM PowerPC-based Amiga systems, such as the AmigaOne range of machines from EyeTech, A-Eon, and other vendors
*** AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 were based on AmigaOS 3.1 (the final Commodore release) and were developed by Haage & Partner under contract from Amiga Inc. and did not form the basis of AmigaOS 3.1.4, which was developed once again from Commodore's AmigaOS 3.1 by Hyperion Entertainment
** I will not be covering AROS and MorphOS here, as I do not consider them to be legitimate Amiga operating systems, as they share no code with the official OS releases from the various owners of the Amiga intellectual properties

===== Amiga 1000 =====

The original Amiga system has often been considered a novelty only for serious collectors, given its lack of internal expansion capacity, hard disk support, and requirement of inserting a kickstart floppy to boot the system. However, most of these limitations have been overcome with the introduction of the Classic 520 accelerator, which provides hard disk support and an autoboot feature, obviating the need for a kickstart floppy, and additional fast memory.

Even with the Classic 520, bear in mind that chip memory is still limited to 512K, you will be restricted to only OCS (Original Chip Set) graphics modes, and the status of the A1000 as a serious collector's machine tends to keep prices quite high.

BFS: 2 (due to price of acquisition)

===== Amiga 500 =====

===== Amiga 2000 =====

===== Amiga 3000 =====

===== Amiga 600 =====

===== Amiga 1200 =====

===== Amiga 4000 =====

===== CDTV =====

===== Amiga CD-32 =====

==== Apple 8-Bit ====

===== Apple II =====

===== Apple III =====

==== Apple IIgs Family ====

==== Apple Lisa ====

==== Apple Macintosh (68k) ====

==== Apple Macintosh (PowerPC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (68k) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (32-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Early 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Later 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== DEC VAX ====

==== DEC Alpha ====

==== Silicon Graphics (MIPS) ====

==== Acorn RISC Machines (ARM) ====

==== NeXT Workstations ====

==== Be Workstations ====

==== HP9000 ====

=== Find a Community ===

A collector is only as good as the communities in which they participate! Following are some suggestions. If you are an intolerant person--especially if you are chauvinistic, transphobic, homophobic, or have a problem with furry culture or anime--work on yourself before getting into this hobby. Such bigotry is not welcome in any of these communities.

==== CCTalk/CCTech/Usenet ====
Avoid posting to Usenet newsgroups and the CCTalk/CCTech mailing lists as a beginner. Do subscribe to CCTalk and CCTech early on, as they are bountiful treasure-troves of knowledge. However, some of these gurus tend to be as vintage and cranky as the computer systems we all love, and many of them have little patience for beginner-level questions. Being mocked and told to RTFM can be quite discouraging for newcomers to the hobby. Better to lurk here until you have built a certain level of knowledge and confidence, and can hang with the graybeards.

Every retrocomputing community has its share of cranky gurus and gatekeeping behavior, but these mailing lists and Usenet have a particularly high concentration. This is nothing against them--the beginner will eventually understand the reasons for it. One positive side effect of this gatekeeping is that the signal-to-noise ratio is quite excellent.

Read this right away, but save the posting for later.

==== Facebook ====
Facebook can be a good resource. Check out these groups to start out:

* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga Commodore Amiga]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintagePCEnthusiasts Vintage PC Enthusiasts]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintageUnixEnthusiasts Vintage UNIX Machine Enthusiasts]

The difficulty with Facebook groups is that they tend to have a rather high signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of silly flame wars (my platform is better than yours!) and low-knowledge trolls. But, with patience, and the right group moderators (such as those found in the aforementioned groups), they can be a goldmine.

==== Twitter ====
In my opinion, Twitter has the friendliest and most helpful group of retrocomputing enthusiasts on the Internet. Search for hashtags that are relevant to your particular retrocomputing interests, and be picky. Get your Twitter feed to only show you the good stuff.

==== Reddit ====
Typical retrocomputing subreddits (such as r/retrobattlestations) seem to have a signal-to-noise ratio that's somewhat better than Facebook, but somewhat worse than CCTalk/CCTech. As long as you comply with established rules in the subreddits you follow, and don't bother with those having capricious and overzealous moderators, a great deal of useful content can be found here.

==== Discord ====
Among modern chat platforms, Discord probably has the most retrocomputing resources, as well as the friendliest people. It tends to lean a bit gamer-centric, so if this is not your interest, it might be better to stick to IRC for chat, or just stick to less realtime-oriented platforms (forums, social media, etc.)

Finding a server can be challenging, but if you're on Reddit, many of its retrocomputing-centric subreddits have official Discord servers that dovetail well into their respective communities.

==== IRC ====
Freenode has a fair number of good channels for retrocomputing, but IRC overall suffers from a high level of gatekeeping and newcomer-unfriendly behavior. Freenode is somewhat better on this; EFnet is absolutely terrible in this regard. I have not dealt with UnderNet, DALnet, etc., so I cannot speak to their friendliness and/or usefulness to aspiring collectors.

Retrocomputing Beginner's Guide

2020-07-21T01:54:19Z

Jpw:

This is Datashed Retrocomputing's guide for the aspiring retrocomputing collector. The goal is to give a few basic hints to keep frustration to a minimum, and help the aspiring collector find a positive direction in this highly-rewarding hobby.

This guide is geared toward those interested in collecting physical hardware, and as such, emulation options will not be covered here.

== General Hints ==

=== Pick a Platform, and Focus ===
Choose a platform or theme for your collection, and stick to it for awhile. You can always branch out later, but the aspiring collector will benefit from learning one type of system well, getting to know its quirks and all the ways to work around them. This will avoid frustrating and costly mistakes. It's easier, for instance, to learn Sun SPARC hardware on its own, than to be learning Sun, Commodore, DEC, and Apple gear all at once. I've seen beginners amass large and varied collections early on, only to give up in frustration and sell everything, or worse, scrap everything.

Here are a few platforms with some pros and cons for beginning collectors. I will give a "BFS" or "Beginner Friendliness Score" from 1 to 5, with higher numbers being more friendly:

==== Older x86 PCs/IBM Compatibles ====

This one is pretty much a no-brainer, and probably the easiest to start with. These machines are the ancestors of the Windows and Mac computers that are still on the market today. Popularity of the platform helps here, as so many have been made over the years that the supply of usable and fun machines is quite plentiful. Even if this category is not your primary focus, it is a good idea to have at least one or two 80486 or early Pentium-class machines with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives around, as they make great "gateway machines" to get software and data you download on your modern desktop or laptop onto your vintage machines--most vintage microcomputers (but not all) will have some means of reading IBM-compatible floppy disks.

There are several eras to cover here:

===== 8088/PC and PC XT Era =====
This covers the first machine that introduced the x86 platform, the IBM PC, model 5150, and its immediate successor the IBM PC XT, model 5160. These machines generally include MDA video boards with no graphics capability, or CGA video boards with limited graphics capability (320x200/4 color, or 640x200 monochrome).

These machines inspired a number of clones, of various faithfulness to full IBM compatibility.

The IBM PC 5150 and PC XT 5160 are relatively challenging and expensive to find in good working order, will require some level of specialized components to upgrade to a usable state, and are quite slow. They also typically used 360KB double sided/double density 5.25-inch floppy drives. Without a network card (itself sometimes tough to find, for at least the 8-bit ISA expansion slots of the 5150) or a suitable "gateway machine" from the 386, 486, or early Pentium era equipped with a compatible floppy drive, these systems can be challenging to get programs and data onto. An XT-IDE adapter is a must, as the MFM/RLL hard drives of the day have mostly failed nowadays, and the ones that haven't are ticking time bombs. You should also expect to replace the tantalum capacitors on the system planar (IBM terminology for "motherboard"), as they have a tendency to violently explode. For the 5150, a power supply upgrade may be needed to support hard drives, as the original 62.5W power supply is a bit underpowered for such tasks.

These machines can support up to 640KB of RAM, although RAM above 256KB must generally reside on an expansion card. Given the limit of five slots on the 5150, this can be a problem.

I have limited experience with clones from this era, though the Tandy 1000 series is often considered an excellent alternative to IBM's entries into this category.

I would not recommend an IBM 8088 as a first retro system, but they can be a lot of fun for intermediate collectors, and a Tandy 1000 of any stripe would be a good beginner's machine with which to play games from the era. As an added benefit, some models of Tandy 1000 could be fitted with a 3.5" floppy drive, making data transfer from modern systems somewhat easier, although in the case of 720KB DSDD 3.5" floppies, modern USB floppy drives cannot generally write to them. You'll still need a "gateway machine" with a genuine, on-board floppy drive.

BFS: 2 for IBM, 3 for Tandy 1000

===== 80286/AT Era =====
This covers the IBM PC AT (model 5170) and clones. They generally have CGA or EGA graphics and a hard disk drive; usually MFM/RLL or ESDI.

These machines expanded the memory addressing capability of the x86 platform from 20 bits to 24 bits, expanding addressable memory from 1MB to 16MB, and added multitasking and memory protection.

These systems are expensive enough and rare enough that I would personally recommend saving them for after you've picked up a 386, 486, or early Pentium machine. They also suffer from common hard drive failures, and can be difficult to get software onto, due to the 5.25" hard drives that were still ubiquitous. A gateway machine is advised.

There is also difficulty in these systems due to the fact that BIOS setup requires a boot floppy to access.

BFS: 2 for IBM

===== IBM PS/2 Range =====

The IBM PS/2 succeeded the PC, PC XT, and PC AT systems. With some exceptions, these systems include Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) expansion slots, VGA graphics, 1.44MB high-density or 2.88MB extended-density 3.5" floppy drives. The most useful of these machines (and the bulk of the range overall) are in the 386, 486, and early Pentium class.

In this range, we're getting into components (like the VGA graphics standard, PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors) that make interoperability with modern peripherals easier. However, many of these machines used ESDI hard drives which are extremely rare, expensive, and unreliable. SCSI-based machines are friendlier, with the addition of a SCSI2SD adapter for reliable fixed storage, but the Micro Channel expansion slots mean that upgrades can be expensive and difficult to find, especially when it comes to sound cards. Also, the PS/2 floppy drives tend to fail, and are somewhat non-standard and difficult to source, though workarounds of varying degrees of elegance do exist. You will need a floppy diskette containing Adapter Definition Files for each Micro Channel expansion card installed in your machine, and diagnostics/setup diskettes as well.

If you can get over the obstacles inherent in these machines, they can be incredibly rewarding to collect and use, especially in concert with the IBM OS/2 operating system they were designed to run.

Again, I'd put this off--but not for too long, as the supply of PS/2 systems has dwindled sharply, while prices have steadily increased.

BFS: 3

===== 80386 Era =====

In this era, you're looking at machines that can run a wide variety of operating systems, and the platform itself was beginning to coalesce around a few standards, at least among clone vendors. MFM/RLL hard drives were still common, though SCSI and IDE both began to get a foothold in this era. A good 386 clone can be a decent starter and gateway machine, though they can be a bit hard to source for a decent price in modern times. Look for a machine with SCSI or IDE support, and a firmware-based BIOS setup utility. CompactFlash-IDE adapters and SCSI2SD solutions really begin to shine in this era of machine, although in the case of on-board IDE, support for CompactFlash-IDE media can be spotty, and BIOS may or may not detect your storage devices, especially at larger sizes. Look for 2GB or smaller media. SCSI will have higher chances of working with more and larger mass storage devices.

These machines do an acceptable job running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows 95 runs, but 8MB of RAM should be considered a minimum, and even then it will not be very performant. Early versions of Linux will run quite well, as will OS/2, provided drivers are available for all attached peripherals.

BFS: 3.5

===== 80486 Era =====

The 486 machines really hit a sweet spot for ease of troubleshooting and initial setup for beginners, as machines equipped with multi I/O boards containing standard IDE ports were quite common and plentiful. Most will also have a decent ROM BIOS, such as the American Megatrends WinBIOS or a Phoenix BIOS. These have good hard disk autodetection for IDE, and work well with IDE/ATAPI optical drives. Most will have a selection of 16-bit ISA and 32-bit VESA Local Bus expansion slots, and some later motherboards also included PCI slots, and could be upgraded to Pentium-class CPUs via a Pentium OverDrive add-on.

The 486 will also run the widest range of MS-DOS software of all early x86 systems, with most having a "turbo" button that will underclock the CPU--sometimes as low as 8MHz--and disable CPU caches to bring performance closer to that of a later 80286 CPU, for the benefit of early, timing-sensitive games.

BFS: 4

===== Early P5 Pentiums =====

It's all about the Pentiums! The 60MHz-90MHz Pentiums are absolutely terrific for running Windows 3.11, Windows 95, OS/2, and some versions of UNIX and Linux. IDE support in this era is rock solid, PCI expansion slots begin to edge out 16-bit ISA, and plug-and-play begins to become more robust.

In this era, my most recommended machine for a beginner would be the Gateway 2000 P5-75. Driver support is easy in all operating systems I've tried, and they are still relatively reasonable in price if you are patient.

Compatibility for MS-DOS gaming is quite good, if you limit yourself to games that were released in around 1989 or later. Generally speaking, games with VGA or SVGA graphics will run beautifully on these machines, up to and including WarCraft III, Doom, Quake, etc.

If you're like me and enjoy playing with 1990s productivity and software development titles, these machines are fantastic for it. Throw in an Ethernet card, get it on the network, and play!

For beginners, I would recommend staying away from the Packard-Bell machines. Compaq, Dell, and HP have some reasonable entries in this category, however, that are worth looking into.

BFS: 5

==== Commodore 8-bit ====

===== Commodore PET =====

===== Commodore VIC-20 =====

===== Commodore 64 =====

===== Commodore 128 =====

In this family, I would highly recommend a Commodore 128 with an SD2IEC adapter. It will run all Commodore 64 software perfectly, and as an added bonus, gives you access to Digital Research CP/M. Although slow, the Commodore 128's CP/M implementation provides the widest compatibility for reading and writing other CP/M systems' floppy diskette formats, making it an excellent gateway system for other CP/M systems you may end up collecting in the future. Its value proposition is quite impressive.

The SD2IEC adapter will make the use of oft-unreliable floppy disks less necessary, and will make the experience more seamless.

BFS: 4

==== Commodore Amiga ====

There are a few important concepts that an aspiring Amiga collector needs to be aware of:

* The Amiga range uses a variety of chipsets supporting various NTSC and multiscan graphics modes: OCS (Original Chip Set), ECS (Enhanced Chip Set), and AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture). Newer chipsets add more colors and resolutions, and generally attempt to remain backwards-compatible with prior chipsets. However, backwards compatibility in the Amiga range is far from perfect, especially in AGA-based machines. This can often be overcome for games by using WHDLoad. If you're looking to boot physical floppies, however, you will probably need to source an Amiga whose chipset matches the era when the game was released. Most games targeted OCS/ECS, as AGA only debuted two years prior to Commodore's bankruptcy.

* For a stock Amiga (and many accelerated Amigas), you will need some way of displaying video modes that use a 15kHz signal. There are passive Amiga video to VGA adapters, but where standard VGA modes use 31.5kHz signal timing, and work with flat-panel VGA monitors, most Amiga video modes require a monitor that can synchronize to a 15kHz scan rate, which is not commonly supported on flat-panel monitors. Exceptions do exist, and many "multiscan" CRT monitors will be able to handle NTSC 15kHz scan rates. It is possible to overcome this limitation with "display enhancer" or "scan-doubler" hardware, which takes 15kHz output, stores frames in a buffer, and outputs them at a doubled rate (i.e., 31.5kHz). This hardware will also remove flicker from "interlaced" modes, and the Amiga 3000 and 3000T include an integrated display enhancer and VGA port that will output scan-doubled graphics at 31.5kHz. Other options include Commodore RGB monitors such as the 1080, 1084, 1084S, M1438, and M1572 (although models prior to the M1438 will not display VGA-style "Productivity" mode and higher resolutions. Some Amiga systems include a composite video output for display on a standard television, though it will often be monochrome-only, as is the case with the Amiga 2000 family of systems.

* Another option for video is "RTG" or "ReTargetable Graphics" with a Zorro II, Zorro III, or accelerator-based graphics board. Examples include the Picasso II and Picasso IV from Village Tronic, the Cybervision 64 and Cybervision 3D from Phase5/DCE, and the onboard RTG graphics on the Apollo Vampire accelerators. Village Tronic and Phase5/DCE boards tend to be rare and highly expensive. Support for passing standard Amiga video modes through RTG boards varies. You will need either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX software in order to use RTG graphics boards. Both are readily available, though Picasso96 tends to be better-supported and more robust than CyberGraphX.

* Amiga floppy drives have the benefit of being able to read IBM-formatted floppy diskettes of the same density. However, IBM-compatible computers can neither read nor write Amiga-formatted floppy diskettes without the aid of special hardware, such as the Individual Computers Catweasel floppy controller.

* GoTek floppy emulators, flashed with an Amiga-compatible firmware such as FlashFloppy, make data transfer easy. This is facilitated by providing a standard 34-pin floppy connector on the back of the drive, and a readout, a type-A USB port for a USB memory key, and "up" and "down" buttons for selecting among the floppy disk images written to the USB key. These images normally come in "adf" format, and are readily available.

* Amiga computers (other than the A1000) have an upgradable ROM firmware known as the "Kickstart ROM". Generally speaking, a given AmigaOS version will need a ROM chip (or chips) installed in order to function, although in many cases, the ROM image can be soft-kicked from your Amiga hard drive at boot time, at the expense of delays in booting your machine.

* The Amiga operating system has been variously known as "Workbench" and "AmigaOS"
** Workbench, as an umbrella term for the operating system, is older, but Workbench is technically just the graphical interface and desktop/file manager of the operating system, powered by the "Intuition" graphics libraries.
** Access to on-disk data, as well as the command-line shell, are supplied by a component called "AmigaDOS" (not to be confused with "AmigaOS").
** Buttons, text editing controls, drop-down lists, and other visual components of the UI are termed "gadgets", and are supplied by "gadget libraries", such as ReAction, MUI, and GadTools.
** Directories, rather than being referred to as "directories" or "folders", are called "drawers" in the Workbench UI.
** There are two current strains of the AmigaOS operating system family, and one abandoned strain of development:
*** AmigaOS 3.1.4, released in 2018, is the latest version capable of running on Motorola 68K-based Amiga systems
*** AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition, released in 2016, is the latest version capable of running on IBM PowerPC-based Amiga systems, such as the AmigaOne range of machines from EyeTech, A-Eon, and other vendors
*** AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 were based on AmigaOS 3.1 (the final Commodore release) and were developed by Haage & Partner under contract from Amiga Inc. and did not form the basis of AmigaOS 3.1.4, which was developed once again from Commodore's AmigaOS 3.1 by Hyperion Entertainment
** I will not be covering AROS and MorphOS here, as I do not consider them to be legitimate Amiga operating systems, as they share no code with the official OS releases from the various owners of the Amiga intellectual properties

===== Amiga 1000 =====

The original Amiga system has often been considered a novelty only for serious collectors, given its lack of internal expansion capacity, hard disk support, and requirement of inserting a kickstart floppy to boot the system. However, most of these limitations have been overcome with the introduction of the Classic 520 accelerator, which provides hard disk support and an autoboot feature, obviating the need for a kickstart floppy, and additional fast memory.

Even with the Classic 520, bear in mind that chip memory is still limited to 512K, you will be restricted to only OCS (Original Chip Set) graphics modes, and the status of the A1000 as a serious collector's machine tends to keep prices quite high.

BFS: 2 (due to price of acquisition)

===== Amiga 500 =====

===== Amiga 2000 =====

===== Amiga 3000 =====

===== Amiga 600 =====

===== Amiga 1200 =====

===== Amiga 4000 =====

===== CDTV =====

===== Amiga CD-32 =====

==== Apple 8-Bit ====

===== Apple II =====

===== Apple III =====

==== Apple IIgs Family ====

==== Apple Lisa ====

==== Apple Macintosh (68k) ====

==== Apple Macintosh (PowerPC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (68k) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (32-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Early 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Later 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== DEC VAX ====

==== DEC Alpha ====

==== Silicon Graphics (MIPS) ====

==== Acorn RISC Machines (ARM) ====

==== NeXT Workstations ====

==== Be Workstations ====

==== HP9000 ====

=== Find a Community ===

A collector is only as good as the communities in which they participate! Following are some suggestions. If you are an intolerant person--especially if you are chauvinistic, transphobic, homophobic, or have a problem with furry culture or anime--work on yourself before getting into this hobby. Such bigotry is not welcome in any of these communities.

==== CCTalk/CCTech/Usenet ====
Avoid posting to Usenet newsgroups and the CCTalk/CCTech mailing lists as a beginner. Do subscribe to CCTalk and CCTech early on, as they are bountiful treasure-troves of knowledge. However, some of these gurus tend to be as vintage and cranky as the computer systems we all love, and many of them have little patience for beginner-level questions. Being mocked and told to RTFM can be quite discouraging for newcomers to the hobby. Better to lurk here until you have built a certain level of knowledge and confidence, and can hang with the graybeards.

Every retrocomputing community has its share of cranky gurus and gatekeeping behavior, but these mailing lists and Usenet have a particularly high concentration. This is nothing against them--the beginner will eventually understand the reasons for it. One positive side effect of this gatekeeping is that the signal-to-noise ratio is quite excellent.

Read this right away, but save the posting for later.

==== Facebook ====
Facebook can be a good resource. Check out these groups to start out:

* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga Commodore Amiga]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintagePCEnthusiasts Vintage PC Enthusiasts]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintageUnixEnthusiasts Vintage UNIX Machine Enthusiasts]

The difficulty with Facebook groups is that they tend to have a rather high signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of silly flame wars (my platform is better than yours!) and low-knowledge trolls. But, with patience, and the right group moderators (such as those found in the aforementioned groups), they can be a goldmine.

==== Twitter ====
In my opinion, Twitter has the friendliest and most helpful group of retrocomputing enthusiasts on the Internet. Search for hashtags that are relevant to your particular retrocomputing interests, and be picky. Get your Twitter feed to only show you the good stuff.

==== Reddit ====
Typical retrocomputing subreddits (such as r/retrobattlestations) seem to have a signal-to-noise ratio that's somewhat better than Facebook, but somewhat worse than CCTalk/CCTech. As long as you comply with established rules in the subreddits you follow, and don't bother with those having capricious and overzealous moderators, a great deal of useful content can be found here.

==== Discord ====
Among modern chat platforms, Discord probably has the most retrocomputing resources, as well as the friendliest people. It tends to lean a bit gamer-centric, so if this is not your interest, it might be better to stick to IRC for chat, or just stick to less realtime-oriented platforms (forums, social media, etc.)

Finding a server can be challenging, but if you're on Reddit, many of its retrocomputing-centric subreddits have official Discord servers that dovetail well into their respective communities.

==== IRC ====
Freenode has a fair number of good channels for retrocomputing, but IRC overall suffers from a high level of gatekeeping and newcomer-unfriendly behavior. Freenode is somewhat better on this; EFnet is absolutely terrible in this regard. I have not dealt with UnderNet, DALnet, etc., so I cannot speak to their friendliness and/or usefulness to aspiring collectors.

Retrocomputing Beginner's Guide

2020-07-21T01:41:37Z

Jpw:

This is Datashed Retrocomputing's guide for the aspiring retrocomputing collector. The goal is to give a few basic hints to keep frustration to a minimum, and help the aspiring collector find a positive direction in this highly-rewarding hobby.

This guide is geared toward those interested in collecting physical hardware, and as such, emulation options will not be covered here.

== General Hints ==

=== Pick a Platform, and Focus ===
Choose a platform or theme for your collection, and stick to it for awhile. You can always branch out later, but the aspiring collector will benefit from learning one type of system well, getting to know its quirks and all the ways to work around them. This will avoid frustrating and costly mistakes. It's easier, for instance, to learn Sun SPARC hardware on its own, than to be learning Sun, Commodore, DEC, and Apple gear all at once. I've seen beginners amass large and varied collections early on, only to give up in frustration and sell everything, or worse, scrap everything.

Here are a few platforms with some pros and cons for beginning collectors. I will give a "BFS" or "Beginner Friendliness Score" from 1 to 5, with higher numbers being more friendly:

==== Older x86 PCs/IBM Compatibles ====

This one is pretty much a no-brainer, and probably the easiest to start with. These machines are the ancestors of the Windows and Mac computers that are still on the market today. Popularity of the platform helps here, as so many have been made over the years that the supply of usable and fun machines is quite plentiful. Even if this category is not your primary focus, it is a good idea to have at least one or two 80486 or early Pentium-class machines with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives around, as they make great "gateway machines" to get software and data you download on your modern desktop or laptop onto your vintage machines--most vintage microcomputers (but not all) will have some means of reading IBM-compatible floppy disks.

There are several eras to cover here:

===== 8088/PC and PC XT Era =====
This covers the first machine that introduced the x86 platform, the IBM PC, model 5150, and its immediate successor the IBM PC XT, model 5160. These machines generally include MDA video boards with no graphics capability, or CGA video boards with limited graphics capability (320x200/4 color, or 640x200 monochrome).

These machines inspired a number of clones, of various faithfulness to full IBM compatibility.

The IBM PC 5150 and PC XT 5160 are relatively challenging and expensive to find in good working order, will require some level of specialized components to upgrade to a usable state, and are quite slow. They also typically used 360KB double sided/double density 5.25-inch floppy drives. Without a network card (itself sometimes tough to find, for at least the 8-bit ISA expansion slots of the 5150) or a suitable "gateway machine" from the 386, 486, or early Pentium era equipped with a compatible floppy drive, these systems can be challenging to get programs and data onto. An XT-IDE adapter is a must, as the MFM/RLL hard drives of the day have mostly failed nowadays, and the ones that haven't are ticking time bombs. You should also expect to replace the tantalum capacitors on the system planar (IBM terminology for "motherboard"), as they have a tendency to violently explode. For the 5150, a power supply upgrade may be needed to support hard drives, as the original 62.5W power supply is a bit underpowered for such tasks.

These machines can support up to 640KB of RAM, although RAM above 256KB must generally reside on an expansion card. Given the limit of five slots on the 5150, this can be a problem.

I have limited experience with clones from this era, though the Tandy 1000 series is often considered an excellent alternative to IBM's entries into this category.

I would not recommend an IBM 8088 as a first retro system, but they can be a lot of fun for intermediate collectors, and a Tandy 1000 of any stripe would be a good beginner's machine with which to play games from the era. As an added benefit, some models of Tandy 1000 could be fitted with a 3.5" floppy drive, making data transfer from modern systems somewhat easier, although in the case of 720KB DSDD 3.5" floppies, modern USB floppy drives cannot generally write to them. You'll still need a "gateway machine" with a genuine, on-board floppy drive.

BFS: 2 for IBM, 3 for Tandy 1000

===== 80286/AT Era =====
This covers the IBM PC AT (model 5170) and clones. They generally have CGA or EGA graphics and a hard disk drive; usually MFM/RLL or ESDI.

These machines expanded the memory addressing capability of the x86 platform from 20 bits to 24 bits, expanding addressable memory from 1MB to 16MB, and added multitasking and memory protection.

These systems are expensive enough and rare enough that I would personally recommend saving them for after you've picked up a 386, 486, or early Pentium machine. They also suffer from common hard drive failures, and can be difficult to get software onto, due to the 5.25" hard drives that were still ubiquitous. A gateway machine is advised.

There is also difficulty in these systems due to the fact that BIOS setup requires a boot floppy to access.

BFS: 2 for IBM

===== IBM PS/2 Range =====

The IBM PS/2 succeeded the PC, PC XT, and PC AT systems. With some exceptions, these systems include Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) expansion slots, VGA graphics, 1.44MB high-density or 2.88MB extended-density 3.5" floppy drives. The most useful of these machines (and the bulk of the range overall) are in the 386, 486, and early Pentium class.

In this range, we're getting into components (like the VGA graphics standard, PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors) that make interoperability with modern peripherals easier. However, many of these machines used ESDI hard drives which are extremely rare, expensive, and unreliable. SCSI-based machines are friendlier, with the addition of a SCSI2SD adapter for reliable fixed storage, but the Micro Channel expansion slots mean that upgrades can be expensive and difficult to find, especially when it comes to sound cards. Also, the PS/2 floppy drives tend to fail, and are somewhat non-standard and difficult to source, though workarounds of varying degrees of elegance do exist. You will need a floppy diskette containing Adapter Definition Files for each Micro Channel expansion card installed in your machine, and diagnostics/setup diskettes as well.

If you can get over the obstacles inherent in these machines, they can be incredibly rewarding to collect and use, especially in concert with the IBM OS/2 operating system they were designed to run.

Again, I'd put this off--but not for too long, as the supply of PS/2 systems has dwindled sharply, while prices have steadily increased.

BFS: 3

===== 80386 Era =====

In this era, you're looking at machines that can run a wide variety of operating systems, and the platform itself was beginning to coalesce around a few standards, at least among clone vendors. MFM/RLL hard drives were still common, though SCSI and IDE both began to get a foothold in this era. A good 386 clone can be a decent starter and gateway machine, though they can be a bit hard to source for a decent price in modern times. Look for a machine with SCSI or IDE support, and a firmware-based BIOS setup utility. CompactFlash-IDE adapters and SCSI2SD solutions really begin to shine in this era of machine, although in the case of on-board IDE, support for CompactFlash-IDE media can be spotty, and BIOS may or may not detect your storage devices, especially at larger sizes. Look for 2GB or smaller media. SCSI will have higher chances of working with more and larger mass storage devices.

These machines do an acceptable job running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows 95 runs, but 8MB of RAM should be considered a minimum, and even then it will not be very performant. Early versions of Linux will run quite well, as will OS/2, provided drivers are available for all attached peripherals.

BFS: 3.5

===== 80486 Era =====

The 486 machines really hit a sweet spot for ease of troubleshooting and initial setup for beginners, as machines equipped with multi I/O boards containing standard IDE ports were quite common and plentiful. Most will also have a decent ROM BIOS, such as the American Megatrends WinBIOS or a Phoenix BIOS. These have good hard disk autodetection for IDE, and work well with IDE/ATAPI optical drives. Most will have a selection of 16-bit ISA and 32-bit VESA Local Bus expansion slots, and some later motherboards also included PCI slots, and could be upgraded to Pentium-class CPUs via a Pentium OverDrive add-on.

The 486 will also run the widest range of MS-DOS software of all early x86 systems, with most having a "turbo" button that will underclock the CPU--sometimes as low as 8MHz--and disable CPU caches to bring performance closer to that of a later 80286 CPU, for the benefit of early, timing-sensitive games.

BFS: 4

===== Early P5 Pentiums =====

It's all about the Pentiums! The 60MHz-90MHz Pentiums are absolutely terrific for running Windows 3.11, Windows 95, OS/2, and some versions of UNIX and Linux. IDE support in this era is rock solid, PCI expansion slots begin to edge out 16-bit ISA, and plug-and-play begins to become more robust.

In this era, my most recommended machine for a beginner would be the Gateway 2000 P5-75. Driver support is easy in all operating systems I've tried, and they are still relatively reasonable in price if you are patient.

Compatibility for MS-DOS gaming is quite good, if you limit yourself to games that were released in around 1989 or later. Generally speaking, games with VGA or SVGA graphics will run beautifully on these machines, up to and including WarCraft III, Doom, Quake, etc.

If you're like me and enjoy playing with 1990s productivity and software development titles, these machines are fantastic for it. Throw in an Ethernet card, get it on the network, and play!

For beginners, I would recommend staying away from the Packard-Bell machines. Compaq, Dell, and HP have some reasonable entries in this category, however, that are worth looking into.

BFS: 5

==== Commodore 8-bit ====

===== Commodore PET =====

===== Commodore VIC-20 =====

===== Commodore 64 =====

===== Commodore 128 =====

In this family, I would highly recommend a Commodore 128 with an SD2IEC adapter. It will run all Commodore 64 software perfectly, and as an added bonus, gives you access to Digital Research CP/M. Although slow, the Commodore 128's CP/M implementation provides the widest compatibility for reading and writing other CP/M systems' floppy diskette formats, making it an excellent gateway system for other CP/M systems you may end up collecting in the future. Its value proposition is quite impressive.

The SD2IEC adapter will make the use of oft-unreliable floppy disks less necessary, and will make the experience more seamless.

BFS: 4

==== Commodore Amiga ====

There are a few important concepts that an aspiring Amiga collector needs to be aware of:

* The Amiga range uses a variety of chipsets supporting various NTSC and multiscan graphics modes: OCS (Original Chip Set), ECS (Enhanced Chip Set), and AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture). Newer chipsets add more colors and resolutions, and generally attempt to remain backwards-compatible with prior chipsets. However, backwards compatibility in the Amiga range is far from perfect, especially in AGA-based machines. This can often be overcome for games by using WHDLoad. If you're looking to boot physical floppies, however, you will probably need to source an Amiga whose chipset matches the era when the game was released. Most games targeted OCS/ECS, as AGA only debuted two years prior to Commodore's bankruptcy.

* For a stock Amiga (and many accelerated Amigas), you will need some way of displaying video modes that use a 15kHz signal. There are passive Amiga video to VGA adapters, but where standard VGA modes use 31.5kHz signal timing, and work with flat-panel VGA monitors, most Amiga video modes require a monitor that can synchronize to a 15kHz scan rate, which is not commonly supported on flat-panel monitors. Exceptions do exist, and many "multiscan" CRT monitors will be able to handle NTSC 15kHz scan rates. It is possible to overcome this limitation with "display enhancer" or "scan-doubler" hardware, which takes 15kHz output, stores frames in a buffer, and outputs them at a doubled rate (i.e., 31.5kHz). This hardware will also remove flicker from "interlaced" modes, and the Amiga 3000 and 3000T include an integrated display enhancer and VGA port that will output scan-doubled graphics at 31.5kHz. Other options include Commodore RGB monitors such as the 1080, 1084, 1084S, M1438, and M1572 (although models prior to the M1438 will not display VGA-style "Productivity" mode and higher resolutions. Some Amiga systems include a composite video output for display on a standard television, though it will often be monochrome-only, as is the case with the Amiga 2000 family of systems.

* Another option for video is "RTG" or "ReTargetable Graphics" with a Zorro II, Zorro III, or accelerator-based graphics board. Examples include the Picasso II and Picasso IV from Village Tronic, the Cybervision 64 and Cybervision 3D from Phase5/DCE, and the onboard RTG graphics on the Apollo Vampire accelerators. Village Tronic and Phase5/DCE boards tend to be rare and highly expensive. Support for passing standard Amiga video modes through RTG boards varies. You will need either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX software in order to use RTG graphics boards. Both are readily available, though Picasso96 tends to be better-supported and more robust than CyberGraphX.

* Amiga floppy drives have the benefit of being able to read IBM-formatted floppy diskettes of the same density. However, IBM-compatible computers can neither read nor write Amiga-formatted floppy diskettes without the aid of special hardware, such as the Individual Computers Catweasel floppy controller.

* GoTek floppy emulators, flashed with an Amiga-compatible firmware such as FlashFloppy, make data transfer easy. This is facilitated by providing a standard 34-pin floppy connector on the back of the drive, and a readout, a type-A USB port for a USB memory key, and "up" and "down" buttons for selecting among the floppy disk images written to the USB key. These images normally come in "adf" format, and are readily available.

* Amiga computers (other than the A1000) have an upgradable ROM firmware known as the "Kickstart ROM". Generally speaking, a given AmigaOS version will need a ROM chip (or chips) installed in order to function, although in many cases, the ROM image can be soft-kicked from your Amiga hard drive at boot time, at the expense of delays in booting your machine.

===== Amiga 1000 =====

The original Amiga system has often been considered a novelty only for serious collectors, given its lack of internal expansion capacity, hard disk support, and requirement of inserting a kickstart floppy to boot the system. However, most of these limitations have been overcome with the introduction of the Classic 520 accelerator, which provides hard disk support and an autoboot feature, obviating the need for a kickstart floppy, and additional fast memory.

Even with the Classic 520, bear in mind that chip memory is still limited to 512K, you will be restricted to only OCS (Original Chip Set) graphics modes, and the status of the A1000 as a serious collector's machine tends to keep prices quite high.

BFS: 2 (due to price of acquisition)

===== Amiga 500 =====

===== Amiga 2000 =====

===== Amiga 3000 =====

===== Amiga 600 =====

===== Amiga 1200 =====

===== Amiga 4000 =====

===== CDTV =====

===== Amiga CD-32 =====

==== Apple 8-Bit ====

===== Apple II =====

===== Apple III =====

==== Apple IIgs Family ====

==== Apple Lisa ====

==== Apple Macintosh (68k) ====

==== Apple Macintosh (PowerPC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (68k) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (32-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Early 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Later 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== DEC VAX ====

==== DEC Alpha ====

==== Silicon Graphics (MIPS) ====

==== Acorn RISC Machines (ARM) ====

==== NeXT Workstations ====

==== Be Workstations ====

==== HP9000 ====

=== Find a Community ===

A collector is only as good as the communities in which they participate! Following are some suggestions. If you are an intolerant person--especially if you are chauvinistic, transphobic, homophobic, or have a problem with furry culture or anime--work on yourself before getting into this hobby. Such bigotry is not welcome in any of these communities.

==== CCTalk/CCTech/Usenet ====
Avoid posting to Usenet newsgroups and the CCTalk/CCTech mailing lists as a beginner. Do subscribe to CCTalk and CCTech early on, as they are bountiful treasure-troves of knowledge. However, some of these gurus tend to be as vintage and cranky as the computer systems we all love, and many of them have little patience for beginner-level questions. Being mocked and told to RTFM can be quite discouraging for newcomers to the hobby. Better to lurk here until you have built a certain level of knowledge and confidence, and can hang with the graybeards.

Every retrocomputing community has its share of cranky gurus and gatekeeping behavior, but these mailing lists and Usenet have a particularly high concentration. This is nothing against them--the beginner will eventually understand the reasons for it. One positive side effect of this gatekeeping is that the signal-to-noise ratio is quite excellent.

Read this right away, but save the posting for later.

==== Facebook ====
Facebook can be a good resource. Check out these groups to start out:

* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga Commodore Amiga]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintagePCEnthusiasts Vintage PC Enthusiasts]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintageUnixEnthusiasts Vintage UNIX Machine Enthusiasts]

The difficulty with Facebook groups is that they tend to have a rather high signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of silly flame wars (my platform is better than yours!) and low-knowledge trolls. But, with patience, and the right group moderators (such as those found in the aforementioned groups), they can be a goldmine.

==== Twitter ====
In my opinion, Twitter has the friendliest and most helpful group of retrocomputing enthusiasts on the Internet. Search for hashtags that are relevant to your particular retrocomputing interests, and be picky. Get your Twitter feed to only show you the good stuff.

==== Reddit ====
Typical retrocomputing subreddits (such as r/retrobattlestations) seem to have a signal-to-noise ratio that's somewhat better than Facebook, but somewhat worse than CCTalk/CCTech. As long as you comply with established rules in the subreddits you follow, and don't bother with those having capricious and overzealous moderators, a great deal of useful content can be found here.

==== Discord ====
Among modern chat platforms, Discord probably has the most retrocomputing resources, as well as the friendliest people. It tends to lean a bit gamer-centric, so if this is not your interest, it might be better to stick to IRC for chat, or just stick to less realtime-oriented platforms (forums, social media, etc.)

Finding a server can be challenging, but if you're on Reddit, many of its retrocomputing-centric subreddits have official Discord servers that dovetail well into their respective communities.

==== IRC ====
Freenode has a fair number of good channels for retrocomputing, but IRC overall suffers from a high level of gatekeeping and newcomer-unfriendly behavior. Freenode is somewhat better on this; EFnet is absolutely terrible in this regard. I have not dealt with UnderNet, DALnet, etc., so I cannot speak to their friendliness and/or usefulness to aspiring collectors.

Retrocomputing Beginner's Guide

2020-07-20T23:46:57Z

Jpw:

This is Datashed Retrocomputing's guide for the aspiring retrocomputing collector. The goal is to give a few basic hints to keep frustration to a minimum, and help the aspiring collector find a positive direction in this highly-rewarding hobby.

This guide is geared toward those interested in collecting physical hardware, and as such, emulation options will not be covered here.

== General Hints ==

=== Pick a Platform, and Focus ===
Choose a platform or theme for your collection, and stick to it for awhile. You can always branch out later, but the aspiring collector will benefit from learning one type of system well, getting to know its quirks and all the ways to work around them. This will avoid frustrating and costly mistakes. It's easier, for instance, to learn Sun SPARC hardware on its own, than to be learning Sun, Commodore, DEC, and Apple gear all at once. I've seen beginners amass large and varied collections early on, only to give up in frustration and sell everything, or worse, scrap everything.

Here are a few platforms with some pros and cons for beginning collectors. I will give a "BFS" or "Beginner Friendliness Score" from 1 to 5, with higher numbers being more friendly:

==== Older x86 PCs/IBM Compatibles ====

This one is pretty much a no-brainer, and probably the easiest to start with. These machines are the ancestors of the Windows and Mac computers that are still on the market today. Popularity of the platform helps here, as so many have been made over the years that the supply of usable and fun machines is quite plentiful. Even if this category is not your primary focus, it is a good idea to have at least one or two 80486 or early Pentium-class machines with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives around, as they make great "gateway machines" to get software and data you download on your modern desktop or laptop onto your vintage machines--most vintage microcomputers (but not all) will have some means of reading IBM-compatible floppy disks.

There are several eras to cover here:

===== 8088/PC and PC XT Era =====
This covers the first machine that introduced the x86 platform, the IBM PC, model 5150, and its immediate successor the IBM PC XT, model 5160. These machines generally include MDA video boards with no graphics capability, or CGA video boards with limited graphics capability (320x200/4 color, or 640x200 monochrome).

These machines inspired a number of clones, of various faithfulness to full IBM compatibility.

The IBM PC 5150 and PC XT 5160 are relatively challenging and expensive to find in good working order, will require some level of specialized components to upgrade to a usable state, and are quite slow. They also typically used 360KB double sided/double density 5.25-inch floppy drives. Without a network card (itself sometimes tough to find, for at least the 8-bit ISA expansion slots of the 5150) or a suitable "gateway machine" from the 386, 486, or early Pentium era equipped with a compatible floppy drive, these systems can be challenging to get programs and data onto. An XT-IDE adapter is a must, as the MFM/RLL hard drives of the day have mostly failed nowadays, and the ones that haven't are ticking time bombs. You should also expect to replace the tantalum capacitors on the system planar (IBM terminology for "motherboard"), as they have a tendency to violently explode. For the 5150, a power supply upgrade may be needed to support hard drives, as the original 62.5W power supply is a bit underpowered for such tasks.

These machines can support up to 640KB of RAM, although RAM above 256KB must generally reside on an expansion card. Given the limit of five slots on the 5150, this can be a problem.

I have limited experience with clones from this era, though the Tandy 1000 series is often considered an excellent alternative to IBM's entries into this category.

I would not recommend an IBM 8088 as a first retro system, but they can be a lot of fun for intermediate collectors, and a Tandy 1000 of any stripe would be a good beginner's machine with which to play games from the era. As an added benefit, some models of Tandy 1000 could be fitted with a 3.5" floppy drive, making data transfer from modern systems somewhat easier, although in the case of 720KB DSDD 3.5" floppies, modern USB floppy drives cannot generally write to them. You'll still need a "gateway machine" with a genuine, on-board floppy drive.

BFS: 2 for IBM, 3 for Tandy 1000

===== 80286/AT Era =====
This covers the IBM PC AT (model 5170) and clones. They generally have CGA or EGA graphics and a hard disk drive; usually MFM/RLL or ESDI.

These machines expanded the memory addressing capability of the x86 platform from 20 bits to 24 bits, expanding addressable memory from 1MB to 16MB, and added multitasking and memory protection.

These systems are expensive enough and rare enough that I would personally recommend saving them for after you've picked up a 386, 486, or early Pentium machine. They also suffer from common hard drive failures, and can be difficult to get software onto, due to the 5.25" hard drives that were still ubiquitous. A gateway machine is advised.

There is also difficulty in these systems due to the fact that BIOS setup requires a boot floppy to access.

BFS: 2 for IBM

===== IBM PS/2 Range =====

The IBM PS/2 succeeded the PC, PC XT, and PC AT systems. With some exceptions, these systems include Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) expansion slots, VGA graphics, 1.44MB high-density or 2.88MB extended-density 3.5" floppy drives. The most useful of these machines (and the bulk of the range overall) are in the 386, 486, and early Pentium class.

In this range, we're getting into components (like the VGA graphics standard, PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors) that make interoperability with modern peripherals easier. However, many of these machines used ESDI hard drives which are extremely rare, expensive, and unreliable. SCSI-based machines are friendlier, with the addition of a SCSI2SD adapter for reliable fixed storage, but the Micro Channel expansion slots mean that upgrades can be expensive and difficult to find, especially when it comes to sound cards. Also, the PS/2 floppy drives tend to fail, and are somewhat non-standard and difficult to source, though workarounds of varying degrees of elegance do exist. You will need a floppy diskette containing Adapter Definition Files for each Micro Channel expansion card installed in your machine, and diagnostics/setup diskettes as well.

If you can get over the obstacles inherent in these machines, they can be incredibly rewarding to collect and use, especially in concert with the IBM OS/2 operating system they were designed to run.

Again, I'd put this off--but not for too long, as the supply of PS/2 systems has dwindled sharply, while prices have steadily increased.

BFS: 3

===== 80386 Era =====

In this era, you're looking at machines that can run a wide variety of operating systems, and the platform itself was beginning to coalesce around a few standards, at least among clone vendors. MFM/RLL hard drives were still common, though SCSI and IDE both began to get a foothold in this era. A good 386 clone can be a decent starter and gateway machine, though they can be a bit hard to source for a decent price in modern times. Look for a machine with SCSI or IDE support, and a firmware-based BIOS setup utility. CompactFlash-IDE adapters and SCSI2SD solutions really begin to shine in this era of machine, although in the case of on-board IDE, support for CompactFlash-IDE media can be spotty, and BIOS may or may not detect your storage devices, especially at larger sizes. Look for 2GB or smaller media. SCSI will have higher chances of working with more and larger mass storage devices.

These machines do an acceptable job running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Windows 95 runs, but 8MB of RAM should be considered a minimum, and even then it will not be very performant. Early versions of Linux will run quite well, as will OS/2, provided drivers are available for all attached peripherals.

BFS: 3.5

===== 80486 Era =====

The 486 machines really hit a sweet spot for ease of troubleshooting and initial setup for beginners, as machines equipped with multi I/O boards containing standard IDE ports were quite common and plentiful. Most will also have a decent ROM BIOS, such as the American Megatrends WinBIOS or a Phoenix BIOS. These have good hard disk autodetection for IDE, and work well with IDE/ATAPI optical drives. Most will have a selection of 16-bit ISA and 32-bit VESA Local Bus expansion slots, and some later motherboards also included PCI slots, and could be upgraded to Pentium-class CPUs via a Pentium OverDrive add-on.

The 486 will also run the widest range of MS-DOS software of all early x86 systems, with most having a "turbo" button that will underclock the CPU--sometimes as low as 8MHz--and disable CPU caches to bring performance closer to that of a later 80286 CPU, for the benefit of early, timing-sensitive games.

BFS: 4

===== Early P5 Pentiums =====

It's all about the Pentiums! The 60MHz-90MHz Pentiums are absolutely terrific for running Windows 3.11, Windows 95, OS/2, and some versions of UNIX and Linux. IDE support in this era is rock solid, PCI expansion slots begin to edge out 16-bit ISA, and plug-and-play begins to become more robust.

In this era, my most recommended machine for a beginner would be the Gateway 2000 P5-75. Driver support is easy in all operating systems I've tried, and they are still relatively reasonable in price if you are patient.

Compatibility for MS-DOS gaming is quite good, if you limit yourself to games that were released in around 1989 or later. Generally speaking, games with VGA or SVGA graphics will run beautifully on these machines, up to and including WarCraft III, Doom, Quake, etc.

If you're like me and enjoy playing with 1990s productivity and software development titles, these machines are fantastic for it. Throw in an Ethernet card, get it on the network, and play!

For beginners, I would recommend staying away from the Packard-Bell machines. Compaq, Dell, and HP have some reasonable entries in this category, however, that are worth looking into.

BFS: 5

==== Commodore 8-bit ====

===== Commodore PET =====

===== Commodore VIC-20 =====

===== Commodore 64 =====

===== Commodore 128 =====

In this family, I would highly recommend a Commodore 128 with an SD2IEC adapter. It will run all Commodore 64 software perfectly, and as an added bonus, gives you access to Digital Research CP/M. Although slow, the Commodore 128's CP/M implementation provides the widest compatibility for reading and writing other CP/M systems' floppy diskette formats, making it an excellent gateway system for other CP/M systems you may end up collecting in the future. Its value proposition is quite impressive.

The SD2IEC adapter will make the use of oft-unreliable floppy disks less necessary, and will make the experience more seamless.

BFS: 4

==== Commodore Amiga ====

There are a few important concepts that an aspiring Amiga collector needs to be aware of:

* The Amiga range uses a variety of chipsets supporting various NTSC and multiscan graphics modes: OCS (Original Chip Set), ECS (Enhanced Chip Set), and AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture). Newer chipsets add more colors and resolutions, and generally attempt to remain backwards-compatible with prior chipsets. However, backwards compatibility in the Amiga range is far from perfect, especially in AGA-based machines. This can often be overcome for games by using WHDLoad. If you're looking to boot physical floppies, however, you will probably need to source an Amiga whose chipset matches the era when the game was released. Most games targeted OCS/ECS, as AGA only debuted two years prior to Commodore's bankruptcy.

* For a stock Amiga (and many accelerated Amigas), you will need some way of displaying video modes that use a 15kHz signal. There are passive Amiga video to VGA adapters, but where standard VGA modes use 31.5kHz signal timing, and work with flat-panel VGA monitors, most Amiga video modes require a monitor that can synchronize to a 15kHz scan rate, which is not commonly supported on flat-panel monitors. Exceptions do exist, and many "multiscan" CRT monitors will be able to handle NTSC 15kHz scan rates. It is possible to overcome this limitation with "display enhancer" or "scan-doubler" hardware, which takes 15kHz output, stores frames in a buffer, and outputs them at a doubled rate (i.e., 31.5kHz). This hardware will also remove flicker from "interlaced" modes, and the Amiga 3000 and 3000T include an integrated display enhancer and VGA port that will output scan-doubled graphics at 31.5kHz. Other options include Commodore RGB monitors (1080, 1084S, M1438, M1572), and some Amiga systems include a composite video output for display on a standard television, though it will often be monochrome-only.

* Another option for video is "RTG" or "ReTargetable Graphics" with a Zorro II, Zorro III, or accelerator-based graphics board. Examples include the Picasso II and Picasso IV from Village Tronic, the Cybervision 64 and Cybervision 3D from Phase5/DCE, and the onboard RTG graphics on the Apollo Vampire accelerators. Village Tronic and Phase5/DCE boards tend to be rare and highly expensive. Support for passing standard Amiga video modes through RTG boards varies. You will need either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX software in order to use RTG graphics boards. Both are readily available, though Picasso96 tends to be better-supported and more robust than CyberGraphX.

===== Amiga 1000 =====

The original Amiga system has often been considered a novelty only for serious collectors, given its lack of internal expansion capacity, hard disk support, and requirement of inserting a kickstart floppy to boot the system. However, most of these limitations have been overcome with the introduction of the Classic 520 accelerator, which provides hard disk support and an autoboot feature, obviating the need for a kickstart floppy, and additional fast memory.

Even with the Classic 520, bear in mind that chip memory is still limited to 512K, you will be restricted to only OCS (Original Chip Set) graphics modes, and the status of the A1000 as a serious collector's machine tends to keep prices quite high.

BFS: 2 (due to price of acquisition)

===== Amiga 500 =====

===== Amiga 2000 =====

===== Amiga 3000 =====

===== Amiga 600 =====

===== Amiga 1200 =====

===== Amiga 4000 =====

===== CDTV =====

===== Amiga CD-32 =====

==== Apple 8-Bit ====

===== Apple II =====

===== Apple III =====

==== Apple IIgs Family ====

==== Apple Lisa ====

==== Apple Macintosh (68k) ====

==== Apple Macintosh (PowerPC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (68k) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (32-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Early 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== Sun Microsystems (Later 64-bit SPARC) ====

==== DEC VAX ====

==== DEC Alpha ====

==== Silicon Graphics (MIPS) ====

==== Acorn RISC Machines (ARM) ====

==== NeXT Workstations ====

==== Be Workstations ====

==== HP9000 ====

=== Find a Community ===

A collector is only as good as the communities in which they participate! Following are some suggestions. If you are an intolerant person--especially if you are chauvinistic, transphobic, homophobic, or have a problem with furry culture or anime--work on yourself before getting into this hobby. Such bigotry is not welcome in any of these communities.

==== CCTalk/CCTech/Usenet ====
Avoid posting to Usenet newsgroups and the CCTalk/CCTech mailing lists as a beginner. Do subscribe to CCTalk and CCTech early on, as they are bountiful treasure-troves of knowledge. However, some of these gurus tend to be as vintage and cranky as the computer systems we all love, and many of them have little patience for beginner-level questions. Being mocked and told to RTFM can be quite discouraging for newcomers to the hobby. Better to lurk here until you have built a certain level of knowledge and confidence, and can hang with the graybeards.

Every retrocomputing community has its share of cranky gurus and gatekeeping behavior, but these mailing lists and Usenet have a particularly high concentration. This is nothing against them--the beginner will eventually understand the reasons for it. One positive side effect of this gatekeeping is that the signal-to-noise ratio is quite excellent.

Read this right away, but save the posting for later.

==== Facebook ====
Facebook can be a good resource. Check out these groups to start out:

* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga Commodore Amiga]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintagePCEnthusiasts Vintage PC Enthusiasts]
* [https://www.facebook.com/groups/VintageUnixEnthusiasts Vintage UNIX Machine Enthusiasts]

The difficulty with Facebook groups is that they tend to have a rather high signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of silly flame wars (my platform is better than yours!) and low-knowledge trolls. But, with patience, and the right group moderators (such as those found in the aforementioned groups), they can be a goldmine.

==== Twitter ====
In my opinion, Twitter has the friendliest and most helpful group of retrocomputing enthusiasts on the Internet. Search for hashtags that are relevant to your particular retrocomputing interests, and be picky. Get your Twitter feed to only show you the good stuff.

==== Reddit ====
Typical retrocomputing subreddits (such as r/retrobattlestations) seem to have a signal-to-noise ratio that's somewhat better than Facebook, but somewhat worse than CCTalk/CCTech. As long as you comply with established rules in the subreddits you follow, and don't bother with those having capricious and overzealous moderators, a great deal of useful content can be found here.

==== Discord ====
Among modern chat platforms, Discord probably has the most retrocomputing resources, as well as the friendliest people. It tends to lean a bit gamer-centric, so if this is not your interest, it might be better to stick to IRC for chat, or just stick to less realtime-oriented platforms (forums, social media, etc.)

Finding a server can be challenging, but if you're on Reddit, many of its retrocomputing-centric subreddits have official Discord servers that dovetail well into their respective communities.

==== IRC ====
Freenode has a fair number of good channels for retrocomputing, but IRC overall suffers from a high level of gatekeeping and newcomer-unfriendly behavior. Freenode is somewhat better on this; EFnet is absolutely terrible in this regard. I have not dealt with UnderNet, DALnet, etc., so I cannot speak to their friendliness and/or usefulness to aspiring collectors.