--- CLeyson_at_aol.com wrote:
> Re: Commodore SX64 - Thanks for the info Ethan.
Sure thing.
> Havn't seen any recently
> in the UK but I think they were popular in Germany. I'm not actively
> looking out for one, it just sprang to mind. I never liked the C64
> anyway, the custom chips were prone to early failure.
I never had that problem personally, but I can see how it could be a
concern. I always liked the PET/C-64 partially because the custom
chips afforded a feature set at a price lower than other machines (like
the Apple ][) They were far from perfect (I couldn't *afford* a disk
drive for my PET and the C-64 drive was the slowest on the planet), but
I liked them once you finally did get whatever you were working/playing
on into memory.
As for failure modes, the single most common thing to break in a C-64
is the PLA (82S100 chip) - a totally dead machine (that's been verified
to have good power) probably has a dead PLA. Next to that, I think RAM
was the most common thing to go, but that wasn't 1/10th as common.
> Used to own an Atari 800 together with all
> of the software development manuals - wish I'd kept now.
I was never into Atari, but I was recently gifted with an Atari 800,
two disk drives, tape drive, comm interface, parallel dot matrix
printer, acoustic coupler, all tech ref manuals, digitizer tablet,
box of software *and* the receipts - my friend paid about 80% of
retail (according to the Atari glossies in the box) and it was still
in the region of $3000!
It's a gem of a set - all the goodies you could imagine, all the docs
and paperwork. About the opposite from the typical thrift store
experience... my friend is a retired engineer - he aquired and kept
*everything*!
-ethan
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Received on Wed Dec 19 2001 - 15:31:02 GMT