• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Major E-Waste score yesterday (Commodore PET etc)

Q

QuantumII

Veteran Member
Joined
Aug 12, 2008
Messages
503
Location
Oslo,Norway
Hi,

Long time no see, everybody! (I have been quite busy the last year), but now there's a reason to be back!

Yesterday I went on my usual lurking trip down to the e-waste behind electronics store nearby, and what do I see?

Some moron had thrown away his whole Commodore collection, it seems.

What I found was:

- 1x Commodore PET 2001
- 2x Breadbox style C64's. One dark in color, and one light.
- 1x Commodore C128
- 1x Tape drive (clone of some sort)
- 1x 1514 Floppy drive
- California games in original box, complete with manual and "California speak" guide.
- 1x Original box for an Amiga 500 style C64. Nothing inside, unfortunately.
- 1x Original commodore joystick
- 1x World Games tape

The bad:

The person who threw this away probably have an issue with people using stuff after him, as he had CUT THE CABLES on the power supplies, and the cables were nowhere to be found. Both the C128 PSU and the C64 PSU. I still picked them up, as I can always make cables, but MAN; why the -beep- would one do something like this?

Argh!


The status of the stuff as of now:

The C128 and the C64's are untested , because of the above reason. The only C64 PSU I have already is for the newer style Amiga look-and-feel one. I don't know if they are compatible, and I did not have time to check yesterday evening.

The floppy drive had a blown fuse, but it's probably OK.

The tape drive has a broken REC key and PAUSE key, but otherwise it seems OK. The reason for the broken plastic tabs is that there were a f-ing waffle iron smashed on top of it.

The games look fine, and probably works.

The PET:

It currently gives a horizontal bright line, so the CRT needs some work in the deflection area.
At least the HV works, the horizontal deflection works, and the CRT is not blown, so this may be a case of a bad connection or something in the vertical deflection circuit. It has nearly 4 decades of dust inside, so I need to disassemble everything and go over it.

I don't know if the mainboard boots or not, but I would guess that it currently does not. I am planning to clean the whole board and reseat every chip after I have fixed the CRT.

Man, the PET a space-age looking device :) And that funny casette player, which obviously is a re-used external one, adapted to fit inside the casing.

Misc:
I have also picked up some IBM AT's over the year, as well as some older Power PC based MAC's. The space at home is limited, so I am storing most of the IBM stuff at work, as well as the PPC MAC's.

EDIT, The PET looks exactly like this one:

pet2001front.jpg
 
Last edited:
Yes, I was really amazed when I started to dig trough the stuff. One Commodore after another. I missed out on a Dell XPS laptop that someone else picked up, but it was probably nuked by the nVidia chip anway :)
 
QuantumII said:
The only C64 PSU I have already is for the newer style Amiga look-and-feel one. I don't know if they are compatible
Click to expand...
Yes, the C64 breadbox and C64C flat model power supplies are 100% compatible. Actually the C64C power supplies probably are better built, are able to output slightly more power and won't break as easily as the old ones do. They work fine with VIC-20CR (DIN style) as well, probably also the few Commodore 16 and Plus/4 that came with a DIN power connector rather than the four pin square one.
 
carlsson said:
Yes, the C64 breadbox and C64C flat model power supplies are 100% compatible. Actually the C64C power supplies probably are better built, are able to output slightly more power and won't break as easily as the old ones do. They work fine with VIC-20CR (DIN style) as well, probably also the few Commodore 16 and Plus/4 that came with a DIN power connector rather than the four pin square one.
Click to expand...

Nice! Then I'll set up a little TV tonight and try the two C64's and the floppy drives to see if they work.

As for the PET, I will get my first on-hand experience with fixing CRT's. I have read a lot of repair logs of old TV's and monitors, so I do believe that I have a pretty good understanding of how a CRT works now. The one in the PET seems really simple, and should not be too complicated to repair, I hope
 
Congratulations on your haul. I wish my ewaste has some Commodore stuff. The best I've got from there is a complete C64.
 
Last edited:
DOS lives on!! said:
Congratulations on our haul. I wish my ewaste has some Commodore stuff. The best I've got from there is a complete C64.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't say that a complete C64 is bad. When I was a kid, I picked up a boxed one, complete with the monitor. In my ignorance (then) I sold it a couple of years later for around $200. That was a lot of money back then, but a big mistake as I still regret it to this day. It had "The Final Cartridge II" too.
 
Status update:

Both C64s have issues.

There are two types, One is the original C64, the other one is a late C64G.

The original one boots up to either a black screen or a blue screen. From the quick reading I just did, this is probably the PLA, which also gets very hot to the touch.
The C64G boots up to a framed blue box, but instead of basic it shows garbage (white boxes arranged in lines) or if power cycles, colurful squares scattered around.

The C128 is untested, as I have no PSU. I have an Amiga 500. Does the psu match?

I have the cable-less C128 PSU, so I can make a cable, but that connector is a bit hard to just find in my junk boxes :)
 
The cords were probably cut because it was someone who, let's phrase it in the most PC way I can, "needed the money", acquired the lot somehow and cut the cables to sell the metal to a recycler that pays.

I got a lot of old stuff that the seller's former roommate had gone through every machine and pulled every cable, cutting every cable, pulling everything that might potentially have precious metals in. Luckily for me, the most 'historically interesting' items had been missed. But lots of old PCs/Macs with every chip pulled, every cable pulled and when necessary cut. The seller knew that his roommate had been a meth addict; and discovered the hard way that she still was when this happened.
 
Oh, yes that might be the case, but the weird thing is that _most_ of the cables are still there, sans the connector part on the C64 PSU (The AC cord is still there). For the C128 PSU, about 20 CM of cable is left on both sides.
 
The mains cable cutting is just a P.I.T.A. "C.Y.A." to make sure the person picking the stuff up doesn't plug it in, get a shock and the remaining relatives sue the original dumper. Mad I know.
Hope there's not too many T.L.A.s!
 
I scored one last week from the electronics recycling bin at the local dump. We're not supposed to take stuff from there, but the girls that work there know me and know I'm pulling for myself or to give away to people, not to sell for scrap, so they look the other way.

My PET 2001-8 doesn't have the membrane keyboard or cassette, though it does have the blue-trimmed monitor and case. It has a mechanical keyboard (missing about a dozen keycaps, sigh) which sets on the case, raised about an inch or so. I suspect that it's after-market. I'll be putting a thread up about it soon - I'd like to get it restored and working 100%, which will at the VERY least require that I get some keycaps for it, and possibly a new keyboard cable as well (mine is fraying for about 3" where it comes out of the back of the keyboard). It's got the random character display going on, and the monitor has a vertical jitter on the display (moves the entire displayed screen up and down vertically about 1/4") - hopefully that won't be major. It had some kind of expansion on the side port as well. I haven't even had a chance to begin researching that.

Going to be fun :)
 
The PET is an original blue-trimmed 2001. It says 1977 on the motherboard too. I plan to take some pics of it and create a new thread about it, as it is no doubt the main attraction of the haul. It has the chicklet keyboard too. It is dirty, but not worn. There are some scuffs and scratches on the casing, but it still looks very good.

Mine has, as earlier mentioned, just a single horizontal line, so I need to disassemble the monitor and fix the vertical deflection first. Then, when the screen is running, I can get to see if the actual mainboard boots or not. It may require some work as well, but that is half (all) the fun, no?

The most annoying thing about the PET is that someone has scratched a pattern onto the cassette window. I had planned to look more at it tonight, but a friend of my wife came over, and she had her 4 year old daughter with her as well, and then I spent the evening entertaining her instead. Oh well, maybe tomorrow :p

It looks cool standing in the living room, though. Like something from a sci-fi movie!
 
Last edited:
Darn. I wish I could take the ewaste from the local dump because I've seen everything from a Portable III to an AST 386 there but yet nope, you can't take it for whatever reason they can come up with.

I only know one person with a C64 still and she has a Beige one, a color monitor for it, the 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" drives and also has the original manuals and a bunch of cartridges for it. She hasn't turned it on in 15 years so there is no telling if it works, but it has been sitting in the same spot for all those years.
 
Compgeke said:
Darn. I wish I could take the ewaste from the local dump because I've seen everything from a Portable III to an AST 386 there but yet nope, you can't take it for whatever reason they can come up with.
Click to expand...
That burns me up too. People taking quality old computers to the dump. I can't watch them being thrown away.

Thankfully, we've had our E-waste event going on for a few years now, so people learned to bring their stuff then.
 
Compgeke said:
Darn. I wish I could take the ewaste from the local dump because I've seen everything from a Portable III to an AST 386 there but yet nope, you can't take it for whatever reason they can come up with.

I only know one person with a C64 still and she has a Beige one, a color monitor for it, the 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" drives and also has the original manuals and a bunch of cartridges for it. She hasn't turned it on in 15 years so there is no telling if it works, but it has been sitting in the same spot for all those years.
Click to expand...

Technically, I am not allowed either, but I snagged the stuff when no-one was watching. Had I asked for permission, I would have gotten a no. Bring some old electronics so you have a valid reason to go there.
 
QuantumII said:
Technically, I am not allowed either, but I snagged the stuff when no-one was watching. Had I asked for permission, I would have gotten a no. Bring some old electronics so you have a valid reason to go there.
Click to expand...

It's the same deal here at our local rural dump, everybody seems to be worried these days that every computer must contain hoards of personal and banking information. As such there's a policy against picking up any equipment that's been dropped off, but nobody really watches the e-waste shed so as long as you have an old junker tv or vcr you've got a good excuse to go over there and make a 'trade'.
 
chalackd said:
It's the same deal here at our local rural dump, everybody seems to be worried these days that every computer must contain hoards of personal and banking information. As such there's a policy against picking up any equipment that's been dropped off, but nobody really watches the e-waste shed so as long as you have an old junker tv or vcr you've got a good excuse to go over there and make a 'trade'.
Click to expand...

Hehe, it is good that more people does this to sneak stuff from the ewaste sheds. I tried my luck today too, but there was nothing of interest there. Just some old fridges and a mess of cables and broken stereo equipment mostly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top