• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Poly CPU and disk boards price

falter

falter

Veteran Member
Joined
Jan 22, 2011
Messages
6,576
Location
Vancouver, BC
I would like to get my 8813 up and running again but haven't seen a CPU board and disk controller come up in a long time. Today a couple came up but they're in the hands of vintagecomputermuseum for $245 and $200 respectively and I'm wondering if that's reasonable. This stuff comes up so rarely it's hard to judge.

I actually had a spare cpu and video board and regret every day selling them as I seem to be cursed with ebay and I think only got about $50 each. I'll assuming that's just the Canadian ebay curse and not what I'd have to pay as a buyer again.
 
IMO vintagecomputermuseum buys low, flips, and sells high, always higher than what I'd judge to be the "fair" market price. They seem to be happy to hold inventory for a good long time. They do use the Dutch Auction technique but only very slowly, preferring to hold out for the gotta-have-it customer. You'll have to decide if that describes you :->.

I have on a very few occasions bought from them when the price was "fair". They do pack well, ship promptly, and WYSIWYG.
 
Just to add my personal experience:
vintagecomputermuseum will buy systems and parts that are expressly labeled as "does not work" and later put them back up for sale at exorbitant prices BUT forgetting to include the warning that the item does not work. If you buy from this Seller, be ware.

smp
 
pbirkel@gmail.com said:
IMO vintagecomputermuseum buys low, flips, and sells high, always higher than what I'd judge to be the "fair" market price. They seem to be happy to hold inventory for a good long time. They do use the Dutch Auction technique but only very slowly, preferring to hold out for the gotta-have-it customer. You'll have to decide if that describes you :->.

I have on a very few occasions bought from them when the price was "fair". They do pack well, ship promptly, and WYSIWYG.
Click to expand...
Yeah I usually avoid him like the plague. But sometimes he has stuff other people don't. I'm surprised someone paid $200 for that disk controller.
 
Willing to bet that CPU card is the one you originally sold being resold without any change for that price. It's a real shame what some people think our hobby is worth - Positive and negative. Lots of people who want a million bucks and lots of people who would rather see it recycled into coke cans.
 
I looked it up.. it was someone called 'thorwor'. The card sold for $46.67 at auction.. think there were two bidders. And they tell me selling as a Canadian on ebay isn't the kiss of death.
 
What galls me is stuff there that sells all day long for X, and I buy it at X, but when I go to sell it myself I get X divided by 50. I really think American buyers penalize Canadian sellers, or Canadian sellers just don't pop up on American Ebay as much.
 
Anyone here can tell you that buying from a private individual is cheaper than ebay most of the time, but I'm here to say that with the things I collect, it's often cheaper to buy from industrial suppliers than it is to buy from eBay in a lot of cases.
 
If you end up needing help with the poly cpu board or video board I can probably help with that, similarly if you can provide help with the poly disk controller and getting one working with a gotek or other drive emulator I'd appreciate it
 
Getting the full operation of a gotek on a hard sectored disk is difficult and is not easy. There were some later soft sectored disk board from Polymorphic, for 8 inch and 5.25 inch. Still the primary drive was the hard sectored. I personally believe the hard sectored requires a track buffer that the chip on the gotek doesn't have. The N* is fussy about how many missed sectors it allows. Without a data buffer it is difficult to recreate the needed timing. Creating the sector pulses is also difficult but I believe could be done with some of the unused I/O pins and some wires. It is strange that the simplest disk boards using hard sectored are some of the hardest to emulate with the gotek.
As I noted before, the soft sectored used a Z80 that was more powerful than the main CPU board with the 8080. I don't think Polymorphic ever upgraded the main cpu card.
Dwight
 
On a separate subject, The Polymorphic video card has a serious timing error. I think it is funny that several others copied that error.
Most displays have issues with the start of the first line ( top left ). If you have that issue it isn't something that can be easily adjusted out. It is a design flaw.
Dwight
 
I've had success with flashfloppy on a newer model gotek cpu with the northstar advantage and I'm hoping that the implementation there will work here.
 
I now have the cpu board amd VTI my machine was missing. So now I just have to decide what to do about the disk drives. The fdc installed is polyps double density controller but I think that doesn't work with SA400s? Can't remember what deramp told me.. gotta look at my emails again.
 
I have an untested single density controller and a double density controller that I'm not sure was ever fully populated, let alone working
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top