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bbcmicro

Veteran Member
Joined
Apr 2, 2006
Messages
707
Location
Scotland
Nothing rare.

I have just arrived from a week at my Grandparent's in Worcester. It was a bit boring, but I found a Commodore C64 in a plastic bag in a charity shop. I'd never used one before so I bought it. It has the tape deck & manual, some tapes, a few sort of ROM cartridges and 5 (???) Joysticks, various. Oh, and a manual.

I tried a cart and it works fine. Brought up a clone of Space Invaders called Avengers.

I also bought an oldish looking laptop for a tenner at a car-boot. I had a power supply at home so at my Grans I looked inside to see what it was made of. Stamped 1997 and a pentium. However on return and booting up an error comes up and BIOS says it has de-activated saving to the hard drive. Windows 98 tries to boot up but nothing happens for a while, except for Error reading drive C, A/R/F? cant FDISK it or do a clean install. hmm... Oh, and the screen is terrrible so i'm using and old monitor. If I cant use it it shall become spares (Mwuhahahahahaaa!)

anyway, a productive week
 
Yesterday, I joined another (all-Swedish) vintage computing forum. We're nine people from Västerås in the same forum, and through history, everyone have moaned about how impossible it is to score a deal in a flea market, charity shop etc. Only once, one of the guys posted that he had made a good deal at the flea market, which by then all the other seven had stopped looking at. Tough business. :)
 
I only know of 2 charity shops that sell lectronics. They are both in a small town called Pershore 130 miles away from me. Only one actually ever has any computers. So far I've only ever seen commodores/amigas in some shape or form. Car boots are better over there to, but computers are still scarce.
 
Actually, the stuff the other guy living in the same city found on a flea market was unboxed C64 stuff. I've once seen a Schneider PC (which had a form factor not unlike an Amiga 1200) but that's about it, if we don't count various ISA cards and 486/early Pentium systems as scoring vintage deals.
 
However on return and booting up an error comes up and BIOS says it has de-activated saving to the hard drive.
Click to expand...

i think you need to look that model up and download a disk from the web. I fixed one for a friend that said that and it was missing a program on its hd the bios wanted.I found a disk image to download, installed it on the laptops hd, and it fixed it.

I seemed to have pretty good luck awhile back at flea markets( i geuss its these car boots you talk about) and goodwill/salvation army shops. I scored a Commodore Pet( now sold to a friend), a Kaypro(traded for XT parts i needed), a Mint Condition Copy of Magickinght Rayearth( second rarest Sega Saturn game behind Panzer Dragoon Saga) various Apples and even the game console collectors analogue to the Lisa, the GCE Vectrex, as well as others i can't seem to remember at the moment.

at the Flea Maket nearby theres a Mac external HD that doesn't plug into the scsi port, it plugs into the external Floppy port, which i'm geussing is pretty uncommon since its the first i've seen like that. It works great and we booted a Plus and a 512k off of it( i'm surprised how quick the older of the two Macs ran system 6 with just half a meg, the plus i knew is a fast system with 6, as i have a Rodime 20 loaded with 6 for my Plus)

and yes, my Rodime 20 is still working and hasn't given me any trouble, which from i heard might make IT more rare than the non-scsi Mac HD :lol:
 
I suppose a lot depends on whay you know.

e.g. i wouldn't have spotted that sega game.

At the carboot there were quite a lot of 486's and pentiums. I missed out on a Printer Switchbox which would have been ideal for my next planned project (linking oll my windows/dos machines with lplnk)

The laptop problem has been tracked down to a bad hdd. The FAT is bad, and according to various programs they state thinks like "Track 0 missing or corrupted" and "File allocation table bad". Heck, I don't even know if this is repairable!

A commodore PET eh? I would like one of those just for the funky shape. Has anyone in the UK seen that one on the Egg Card advert with the hamsters (Either that or its the windolene again)
 
After abandoning the laptop for a while, I found a utility from PhoenixBios, fixed the missing BIOS partition (only needed for when the laptop 'sleeps') and found this wasn't what was causing the problem. All along it was just a bad disk. I ought to take it out an see what model number it is and see if they are still made. Probably won't buy a new one though.
 
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