Retrocomputing Beginner's Guide

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 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

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

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:

• Commodore Amiga
• Vintage PC Enthusiasts
• 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.