I got the PSU installed into my TRS-80 Model 1 expansion interface and it works! Only thing you have to do is remove the black tray inside that holds the original two power bricks. If you don't remove the tray, the PSU fits but you won't be able to connect one of the two DIN cables. imgur.com/a/QOLwZiX
@@squirlmy 3 countries in the entire world use 'fahrenheit' as their preferred unit of measurement for temperature and one of them is in the process of converting to standard untis of measurement, the other two are the US and Liberia. TH-cam is a global content platform that caters to all ~200 countries in the world that predominantely uses standard units of measurement.
That Magic Wand software is really fascinating. I just read that it was a CP/M word processor released in 1979. What makes it interesting is that in September 1980, a guy by the name of Bill Gates bought the rights to source code for it. It looks like this was what became Microsoft Word, which was released 2 years later.
That's very interesting. It'd be fascinating to see the Magic Wand up against the first release of Word to see how they compare. I'd be curious how much (if anything) in that initial version of Word was derived from Magic Wand. I have a feeling.... not much. According to the Wikipedia article, Word was written by two former Xerox PARC employees who worked on a word processor for Xerox, and hired in 1981. Based on timing, my guess is someone at Microsoft tried to adapt/port Magic Wand to DOS, and failed. They realized it wouldn't work, and hired these two guys from PARC to write a word processor. But that's pure speculation and instinct guesswork. Still it'd be interesting to see the two side-by-side to see if there's any passing familiarity at all.
The way I remember, Word for DOS was terrible and didn't sell well, either. It was Word for Windows that made a dent in the market, and also WordPerfect delaying porting their word processor to Windows that was important for Word and Office. I'd say the relationship between Magic Wand and Word for DOS is less historic because of that.
In case no one else has mentioned it... M80 and L80 are Microsoft's Macro-80 assembler and associated linker. I remember buying that package for CP/M in the early 80s. The distribution disk was an 8 inch and the mail order retailer provided the service of transfering to a 5 1/4 floppy for my Morrow MD2 as part of the sale (sending me both discs). I used the assembler quite a bit last year when hacking the bios while adding goteks to that old machine and making its addon ramdisk work once again.
That PLA on the C64 board is a play on words, the Klingon word for "Success" is "Qapla" (pronounced somehting like "kah-plah"), so they obviously have a trekkie in their midst there, and are hopeful that it is a successfu PLA replacement... :P
Oasis was an operating system for the z-80 released in the late 1970’s which was later renamed to Theos. “The Word” was a word processor for that system. Oasis borrowed a lot from mainframe and minicomputer OSes, and supported multiuser and memory beyond the 64k available at the time (via paging). It ran well on a TRS-80 Model II.
Magic Wand was a text editor all computer magazines of the time were flooded with ads for Magic Wand and Electric Pencil editors. I never used them because I used Magic Window in Apple II and I never had to use a text editor on TRS80, I only used those machines to write programs, so I don't know the platform they ran.
As soon as Commodore managed to ship SFD-1001 drives, I got one, and an IEEE-488 interface for my C64.. 1 MB per floppy on such a computer was like a fairly large harddisk.
One of the instruction pages mentioned having a disk with the Magic Wand software in one of the drives, while the disk holding the actual documents was in the other drive. That, combined with some of those notes and labels sounding like they were from a corporate environment, would suggest all those "Magic Wand" labeled disks are extra copies of the software, made for people to take, use, and return as needed.
ok, that's interesting, as i was thinking, what is the point of labelling all your documents disks with just the name of the program, you would normally label with dates or category of documents for example. Adrian is sitting on a small fortune at 400 dollars per disk.
Adrian - very much looking forward to your review of the Evo64 - please don’t worry about replicating other reviews. I think your insight on the hardware side is going to be unique compared to some of the other reviews that are out there. I’m VERY interested in potentially building an “ULTIMATE” 64 and the EVO 64 is something that I think could be the core of that. Also - can’t wait to meet you in VCF Midwest (hopefully!) Thanks as always!
The information you found on Magic Wand says it is a CP/M application. CP/M provides a great deal of hardware abstraction so a CP/M application written for one system can usually run on another. There were several different floppy disk formats so floppy disks written on one CP/M system may or may not be readable on a different system but typically the software itself is compatible. There are versions of CP/M for the TRS-80 model II and I believe it is quite possible to use double-sided drives. I know double sided drives were a common upgrade for other models so I would be surprised if some model II owners didn't also upgrade to double sided drives at some point. I believe it is quite possible the disks you have were used on a Model II. Also some of the notes you showed indicate that at least some of the disks are CP/M boot disks containing the Magic Wand software with free space for any documents that may be created in the future. It is likely that most of the disks are bootable and contain the Magic Wand software as that was a fairly common practice for users using CP/M regularly.
I'm noticing that all (or nearly all) of the double sided disks by Dysan that have manufacturer labels on them have a product code ending in /2d, if the disk has the product code on it, I'd imagine you can just look to see if the product code has that instead of hunting for the double sided writing. Edit: some of those Dysan boxes are gorgeous btw, they're pretty enough to go on display.
Awww yeah!!! Seeing the weeCee finally made our entire day! The extra bag there was just extra/alt parts left over from the build process - put some of the mailing postage stamps and the baggie you get the S2 in and used it for extra/misc parts bag. Thought it would be kinda neat to see the Belgium postage stamp and all. :3 Take all the time you need though, they truly are one-of-a-kind units, albeit somewhat odd and unique in charmingly weird ways. =)
Gotta admit, I'd LOVE to hear what you think about the sound quality of 8-bit Dance Party playing on that EVO-64 with the vaccuum tube amp. ;-) is it all snake oil, or is there a difference?
The whole tube thing is mostly snake oil. Vacuum tubes actually have *more* total harmonic distortion than transistor amplifiers, giving them the "warm" sound that people like. But I will always love my CD player connected to my receiver via TOSLINK and getting super-high quality digital sound. It sounds absolutely fantastic to me!
For phone cameras, you might check out the Motorola phones. Big Clive uses them and the color/wb is always pleasant. AFAIK, he only uses phones for camera work. Great video and channel, love the content. Cheers!
Adrian, I worked at Micom, which later became Micom-Philips, Philips-Micom, and eventually just Philips Information Systems in Montreal, Canada. The initial product was a dedicated word processor that used 8" floppy disks (I started there in 1981). The original 8080 desktop system was replaced by a desk side system (8080/64K. and Z80/128K) by the time I had started working there. It was basically a rectangular cube, had two 8" floppy drives (most common configuration) and had a cable to the actual terminal unit, which had a specific keyboard (Cherry keyswitches) with dedicated keys for things like "Format", "Copy", "File", "Print" and a number of other functions. From what I remember, the operating system was one and the same with the word processor, in other words, you could not get to the operating system in any way, aside from issuing commands in the word processor. We used the same 8", DS/DD, hard sectored disks that you have here. The printer was a Qume daisy wheel printer using a Centronics type connector, which I suspect was some sort of parallel connection. Later systems were desktops, had dual 5.25" floppies, or a 5.25" floppy and a hard drive, and used TEC serial daisy wheel printer. Same word processor and operating system, but the 5.25" system was eventually able to run CP/M.
41:02 In your review, could you please make some direct recordings from the regular and the NUTUBE64 output? Because I'd really like to see if one can spot any difference at all.
@@eDoc2020 David compared the output from a different C64 with the NUTUBE64 output, which of course sounds different. That's why I asked Adrian to do a comparison on the same machine 😉
I will never get the excitement over the 80's/early 90s gaming computers (outside of JP) but MAN, that C64 motherboard looks cool as sh*t. I admire the enthusiasm that youtubers like yourself and LRG have towards some of these older computers. Out of the entire 70s-90s era of PC, I only really want to get my hands on a Sharp X68000. Other then that, I was in love with Sony Vaio when they used to separate by use case (I used to have the model specifically for music creation).
Dysan 8"! It has been over 40 years since I have seen those. Those used to be my day to day job at the time; care and feeding of the disks in our CPM system.
Yeah! I have to think that brand was probably owned by some bigger company and maybe in Germany sold these disks under another name... but they just retained those warnings
It's a nice board, but I really question some of the engineering decisions. It just seems to me like if you took everyone's suggestions on what would be "the best C64" and threw them all together w/o question... mmmm, I dunno.
The vacuum tube looks like a VFD because it is one. The Korg/Futaba nutube is a very low power 'vacuum tube' that uses VFD assembly techniques. It's terribly clever.
From Wikipedia : "Magic Wand is the name of a piece of word processing software for CP/M based computers first released in 1979, written by Mike Griffin."
White balance problem on the iPhone is a software problem with the app. We film studio quality video with proper balancing frequently using Filmic Pro which operates the hardware properly.
I think you were right on the money with the mouse theory with OBS. At 32:20 you toss the manual from the box down and the video immediately cut as it landed. Sad for the lost footage, but it is still a great Super *Mega* Mail Call!
Watching it back, yeah that is right! I need to make sure I move the mouse off the start button or start recording from Stream Deck! It would be cool to have a visible red light that came on while recording, so I could notice if it stopped.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 I've never used a Stream Deck before; does it support the ability to change the button state when recording is active? If so, that would be a great idea, since you've already got it there on the bench. Also I believe there is a setting in OBS to require confirmation to stop recording (disabled by default), which may also help prevent it in the future.
@@bjn714 It does, it shows up as red when recording -- but it's not big and bright enough to notice unless you are looking right at it. And yes on the stop recording, I need to set that. I think I turned it off because I was annoyed at it -- but it's a good idea! LOL!
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 haha whoops! Sometimes the little annoyances can serve to save us from bigger problems, so it's probably worth enabling that confirmation again, even if the odds of it happening again are statistically quite low. Still, not a massive loss this time, since at least it was just a SMMC on the second channel and not a repair video where you could have lost content you couldn't easily recreate. I definitely understand the frustration, though!
Actually, if you had the right drive and controller, 8 inch floppies could hold more than even a high-density 5.25 (or 3.5) inch disk could. If I remember correctly, the high-density (80-track) 5.25" disks could hold 1.2 MB (and as we all know the HD 3.5" disks could do 1.44 MB), but 8" double-sided double-density floppies (which were actually around for quite some time before the HD disks ever existed) could hold up to a whopping 1.6 MB. This is because even though they had slightly fewer tracks, the tracks were physically larger which meant you could put more sectors per track on them. (I think there were even some fancy controllers that could squeeze even more out of them by using varying numbers of sectors per track (more sectors per track on the outer (longer) tracks, but I never personally got to play with any of those.)
While at college I used the northstar with wood case and northstar Advantage complete machine with keyboard and screen all in one. I think we had a 20mb hd on it shared out via scsi
I've no idea what that particular "ECAS" is, but here in the UK, there is an ECAS who are a leading supplier of Citroen 2CV, Dyane, Ami & Mehari parts, just a random note there seeing ECAS amongst the Magic Wand disks... :P
Archive those word-processor disks, but don't upload them without checking the contents. They might hold software for e.g. Wang Technologies dedicated word processors, but some look like they might hold patient data _or_ applications, so their contents will need to be checked.
Back in the day I worked for a guy (Hi Jeff L.! J.) with a Televideo terminal attached to an Ithaca Intersystems S100 bus Z80 machine with dual 8" floppies. Magic Wand was the word processor he had; whether purchased or pirated I don't remember (it was 40+ years ago). I didn't use it much, so I remember little more than the name. And since it was running with a remote terminal, the interface was certainly clunky compared to what we have and expect today.
There's a lot of recent focus on expensive retro hardware like the Evo64 and the WeePC. They just seem over-priced for what they are. At the same time, there's some very cheap newly designed computers like the Agon Light 2. Which is literally 50 euro from Olimex fully assembled. I bought one, but haven't had time to do anything with it yet. Honestly, like anything else the price is all about the design. It's also fully open source, so nobody can play gatekeeper for it. That's often the problem with these projects. Someone makes something for a period, loses interest, and it becomes unavailable.
They should bring back the 8" drive. With modern technologies, the storage capacity could be almost practical, I bet. But just because 8" disks are cool.
I hear you man. I've got maybe 3 totes and 5 other smaller containers full of parts that never got sorted and put away for one reason or another. About a week ago I ordered some 3.3V LDV regulators only to trip over a bag of them in one of those totes that I had evidently bought a few years back. Don't let it get out hand like I did! 👎
32:20 Seattle is pretty much in the middle between north and south Washington. I didn't even know the area Between Portland and Castle Rock was part of Washington state. My entire life I believed anything below US-12 was part of Oregon. I've never driven farther south than Olympia as there's pretty much nothing there of interest until Portland.
If were way of adding video card acceleration the weepc would be great. Still is a impressive device that would be even important on the future since parts Will be broken. Maybe there's some system on a chip for old cpu replacements
How about-make analog (Audacity?) record of one and the same C-64 audio sample; one with the vacuum tube, one without it. Record at the same level, overlap and substract one from another to see how the difference (if any) sounds like.
Small Business Applications, Inc out of Houston dissolved in 1982. So that $400 price tag might even be a late 70s number making that software cost around $1600 in 2023 dollars.
800 mhz 486. Not bad at all! One question: DX? I mean math co? It's perfectly usable without it, but having it will massively expand it's usability. I'm looking at Quake.
Did quake explicitly require the FPU? I wonder because at that speed, the loss of performance due to software emulation of the FPU would likely be fully negated.
Low voltage (say anything under 30 volts, maybe a little higher) is perfectly safe. Safety of voltage/amperage is far more complicated than will fit in a comment, But StyroPyro did an _excellent_ video on the subject not long ago. th-cam.com/video/BGD-oSwJv3E/w-d-xo.html
I figured since 1982/1983 kept showing up on disk labels so I went by that and adjust for inflation that is ~$1276. That is not completely out of the realm of realistic when you consider there was a time where a full featured version of MS Office (adjusted for inflation as well) could cost you $900 or more. Also .. I can not help but to wonder if the naming of that quad PLA is an inside joke since "QAPLA' " is also a word in Klingon that translates as "Success!" Especially when you notice they took the time to include the apostrophe on the word.
The color from the iPhone looks better than your main camera. The main camera is very blueish and the highlights are blown out. Your displays are likely not calibrated.
Oh my.. back in '93 a friend and I found a whole dumpster filled with 8" floppy disks and computer parts.. one big pile of goodies for a community like this . Back then it was just garbage and we used the discs as frisbees but they weren't very good at that.
I designed/build one with a pci slot for video and got pretty good performance out of it. The limiting factor is that it's missing MMX and a few other Intel specific instruction sets, that causes directx incompatibilities.
The EVO team is not charging or collecting any money for the distribution of ROM images. They program the EPROMS to test them and make sure that they're working with the EVO.
I've never seen one of those election pamphlets before. Nor are they handed out on voting day in my state. Nor can I get any wi-fi or cellular signal when in the polling venue... Only those signs that sedan drivers love to hate at intersections with Vote YES or NO on question X. What is question X? Why does it matter? Are there really 8,888 steps in the Tower of Art? What is the sex of the turtle? One would really help.
2:30: Not every state sends these voter information/election publicity books out. They're not a thing in Oklahoma at all. You ask for one at the elections office and they'll grind for a second and say "Oh, the Tulsa World's down the street five blocks, they usually have all of this week's issues for sale in their lobby". Then when you explain what it is you're talking about, the answer you'll probably get is "You're kidding me, right? Noplace does that." This surprised me about Oklahoma when I moved here from Oregon. That, and in-person voting. I thought that went away pretty much everywhere by the time I was 25, in favor of the more reliable vote-by-mail system Oregon's had in special elections since I was a little kid, and in all elections my entire adult life.
I'm pretty sure you've got the floppy collection of the proprietor of the Magic Wand word processor. Or you've found the earliest warez operation in recorded history....
The EVO guys developed the product for over a year, making over 6 prototypes with their own money. By the time this board was made for Adrian, they were super-tight on funds and had to go with the standard sockets. The NuTube64 module is a differentiator with EVO, which is why they chose to send it with the prototype board.
Not like there was copy protection back in the day. Lol. They bought it once and copied it for all their machines. Maybe that's why it was so expensive, the publisher anticipated copying?
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
I got the PSU installed into my TRS-80 Model 1 expansion interface and it works! Only thing you have to do is remove the black tray inside that holds the original two power bricks. If you don't remove the tray, the PSU fits but you won't be able to connect one of the two DIN cables. imgur.com/a/QOLwZiX
I know this is a retro channel, but 'fahrenheit' in 2023? Come on now.
@@guderian557 Do you live in America? The "imperial" system is still very much alive here!
@@squirlmy 3 countries in the entire world use 'fahrenheit' as their preferred unit of measurement for temperature and one of them is in the process of converting to standard untis of measurement, the other two are the US and Liberia. TH-cam is a global content platform that caters to all ~200 countries in the world that predominantely uses standard units of measurement.
That Magic Wand software is really fascinating. I just read that it was a CP/M word processor released in 1979. What makes it interesting is that in September 1980, a guy by the name of Bill Gates bought the rights to source code for it. It looks like this was what became Microsoft Word, which was released 2 years later.
Thank you. You saved me from asking about Hitachi computers.
@@hardlyworgen71 😂😂😂
That's very interesting. It'd be fascinating to see the Magic Wand up against the first release of Word to see how they compare.
I'd be curious how much (if anything) in that initial version of Word was derived from Magic Wand. I have a feeling.... not much. According to the Wikipedia article, Word was written by two former Xerox PARC employees who worked on a word processor for Xerox, and hired in 1981.
Based on timing, my guess is someone at Microsoft tried to adapt/port Magic Wand to DOS, and failed. They realized it wouldn't work, and hired these two guys from PARC to write a word processor. But that's pure speculation and instinct guesswork.
Still it'd be interesting to see the two side-by-side to see if there's any passing familiarity at all.
That's a fascinating piece of information! You have to hand it to Bill Gates, the dude knew how to make money in software.
The way I remember, Word for DOS was terrible and didn't sell well, either. It was Word for Windows that made a dent in the market, and also WordPerfect delaying porting their word processor to Windows that was important for Word and Office. I'd say the relationship between Magic Wand and Word for DOS is less historic because of that.
Adrian, the TQFP IC on the Evo is labeled, “Qapla”, the Klingon word for “Success”. Just an FYI for non-Trekkies out there. 😊
Thanks for saving me the trouble of writing that.
May your coordinates be free of tribbles.
The 64 is a worthy opponent.
And it's pronounced "kah-plah".
In case no one else has mentioned it... M80 and L80 are Microsoft's Macro-80 assembler and associated linker. I remember buying that package for CP/M in the early 80s. The distribution disk was an 8 inch and the mail order retailer provided the service of transfering to a 5 1/4 floppy for my Morrow MD2 as part of the sale (sending me both discs). I used the assembler quite a bit last year when hacking the bios while adding goteks to that old machine and making its addon ramdisk work once again.
So the QAPLA' chip there is kind of a pun in Klingon. Qapla' = success. Nice little easter egg they did there. 😎
It's getting to the point where your basement is one of the most important collections of computing history in the world.
Another museum in the making, hopefully
That PLA on the C64 board is a play on words, the Klingon word for "Success" is "Qapla" (pronounced somehting like "kah-plah"), so they obviously have a trekkie in their midst there, and are hopeful that it is a successfu PLA replacement... :P
Oasis was an operating system for the z-80 released in the late 1970’s which was later renamed to Theos. “The Word” was a word processor for that system. Oasis borrowed a lot from mainframe and minicomputer OSes, and supported multiuser and memory beyond the 64k available at the time (via paging). It ran well on a TRS-80 Model II.
Magic Wand was a text editor all computer magazines of the time were flooded with ads for Magic Wand and Electric Pencil editors. I never used them because I used Magic Window in Apple II and I never had to use a text editor on TRS80, I only used those machines to write programs, so I don't know the platform they ran.
As soon as Commodore managed to ship SFD-1001 drives, I got one, and an IEEE-488 interface for my C64.. 1 MB per floppy on such a computer was like a fairly large harddisk.
One of the instruction pages mentioned having a disk with the Magic Wand software in one of the drives, while the disk holding the actual documents was in the other drive. That, combined with some of those notes and labels sounding like they were from a corporate environment, would suggest all those "Magic Wand" labeled disks are extra copies of the software, made for people to take, use, and return as needed.
ok, that's interesting, as i was thinking, what is the point of labelling all your documents disks with just the name of the program, you would normally label with dates or category of documents for example. Adrian is sitting on a small fortune at 400 dollars per disk.
Adrian - very much looking forward to your review of the Evo64 - please don’t worry about replicating other reviews. I think your insight on the hardware side is going to be unique compared to some of the other reviews that are out there. I’m VERY interested in potentially building an “ULTIMATE” 64 and the EVO 64 is something that I think could be the core of that. Also - can’t wait to meet you in VCF Midwest (hopefully!) Thanks as always!
Fun fact: Qapla! is a Klingon greeting. It means, "success".
The information you found on Magic Wand says it is a CP/M application. CP/M provides a great deal of hardware abstraction so a CP/M application written for one system can usually run on another. There were several different floppy disk formats so floppy disks written on one CP/M system may or may not be readable on a different system but typically the software itself is compatible.
There are versions of CP/M for the TRS-80 model II and I believe it is quite possible to use double-sided drives. I know double sided drives were a common upgrade for other models so I would be surprised if some model II owners didn't also upgrade to double sided drives at some point.
I believe it is quite possible the disks you have were used on a Model II. Also some of the notes you showed indicate that at least some of the disks are CP/M boot disks containing the Magic Wand software with free space for any documents that may be created in the future. It is likely that most of the disks are bootable and contain the Magic Wand software as that was a fairly common practice for users using CP/M regularly.
I'm noticing that all (or nearly all) of the double sided disks by Dysan that have manufacturer labels on them have a product code ending in /2d, if the disk has the product code on it, I'd imagine you can just look to see if the product code has that instead of hunting for the double sided writing.
Edit: some of those Dysan boxes are gorgeous btw, they're pretty enough to go on display.
Awww yeah!!! Seeing the weeCee finally made our entire day! The extra bag there was just extra/alt parts left over from the build process - put some of the mailing postage stamps and the baggie you get the S2 in and used it for extra/misc parts bag. Thought it would be kinda neat to see the Belgium postage stamp and all. :3
Take all the time you need though, they truly are one-of-a-kind units, albeit somewhat odd and unique in charmingly weird ways. =)
Gotta admit, I'd LOVE to hear what you think about the sound quality of 8-bit Dance Party playing on that EVO-64 with the vaccuum tube amp. ;-) is it all snake oil, or is there a difference?
This is exactly what I've been waiting for
The whole tube thing is mostly snake oil. Vacuum tubes actually have *more* total harmonic distortion than transistor amplifiers, giving them the "warm" sound that people like. But I will always love my CD player connected to my receiver via TOSLINK and getting super-high quality digital sound. It sounds absolutely fantastic to me!
For phone cameras, you might check out the Motorola phones. Big Clive uses them and the color/wb is always pleasant. AFAIK, he only uses phones for camera work. Great video and channel, love the content. Cheers!
QaPla is a Klingon reference, a greeting as well as meaning success. Pronounced Kah Plah.
wow the condition of those floppies is nuts.
Adrian, I worked at Micom, which later became Micom-Philips, Philips-Micom, and eventually just Philips Information Systems in Montreal, Canada. The initial product was a dedicated word processor that used 8" floppy disks (I started there in 1981). The original 8080 desktop system was replaced by a desk side system (8080/64K. and Z80/128K) by the time I had started working there. It was basically a rectangular cube, had two 8" floppy drives (most common configuration) and had a cable to the actual terminal unit, which had a specific keyboard (Cherry keyswitches) with dedicated keys for things like "Format", "Copy", "File", "Print" and a number of other functions. From what I remember, the operating system was one and the same with the word processor, in other words, you could not get to the operating system in any way, aside from issuing commands in the word processor. We used the same 8", DS/DD, hard sectored disks that you have here. The printer was a Qume daisy wheel printer using a Centronics type connector, which I suspect was some sort of parallel connection. Later systems were desktops, had dual 5.25" floppies, or a 5.25" floppy and a hard drive, and used TEC serial daisy wheel printer. Same word processor and operating system, but the 5.25" system was eventually able to run CP/M.
I find it funny that they named it QAPLA because Qapla' Is Klingon for Success
41:02 In your review, could you please make some direct recordings from the regular and the NUTUBE64 output?
Because I'd really like to see if one can spot any difference at all.
I can -- I'll use the USB DAC and upload the WAV files, perhaps without compression someone could hear something different?
I've watched David Murray's video and even I could tell the difference. I don't think it sounds better, just different.
@@eDoc2020 David compared the output from a different C64 with the NUTUBE64 output, which of course sounds different.
That's why I asked Adrian to do a comparison on the same machine 😉
I will never get the excitement over the 80's/early 90s gaming computers (outside of JP) but MAN, that C64 motherboard looks cool as sh*t. I admire the enthusiasm that youtubers like yourself and LRG have towards some of these older computers. Out of the entire 70s-90s era of PC, I only really want to get my hands on a Sharp X68000. Other then that, I was in love with Sony Vaio when they used to separate by use case (I used to have the model specifically for music creation).
Pity CP/M didn't dictate disk layouts etc. Interoperability was bad unless you used modems, but then not many people exchanged files
Dysan 8"! It has been over 40 years since I have seen those. Those used to be my day to day job at the time; care and feeding of the disks in our CPM system.
7:30 just imagine if this was somehow related to the Hitachi device of the same name.
Hey, when you go to build the Evo, can you get the audio captures uploaded somewhere so we can listen to them directly?
I think that the channel Usagi Electric needed the floppy with the OS for the Magic Wand
That was for the Wangwriter, iirc
7:12 I always find it interesting, when there's also German instructions on brands I've (as a german) never heard of or seen.
Yeah! I have to think that brand was probably owned by some bigger company and maybe in Germany sold these disks under another name... but they just retained those warnings
Imagine paying hundreds of dollars for a C64 PCB and then having to provide the main ICs yourselves.
It's a nice board, but I really question some of the engineering decisions. It just seems to me like if you took everyone's suggestions on what would be "the best C64" and threw them all together w/o question... mmmm, I dunno.
The vacuum tube looks like a VFD because it is one. The Korg/Futaba nutube is a very low power 'vacuum tube' that uses VFD assembly techniques. It's terribly clever.
Maybe the white balance on the iPhone uses Fahrenheit instead of Kelvin for the colour temperature?
From Wikipedia : "Magic Wand is the name of a piece of word processing software for CP/M based computers first released in 1979, written by Mike Griffin."
White balance problem on the iPhone is a software problem with the app. We film studio quality video with proper balancing frequently using Filmic Pro which operates the hardware properly.
The D. Tholen mentioned on the note stuck to the pack of disks has to be the astronomer David J Tholen: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Tholen
Looks like the paper with ERA, STAT and others are commands from CP/M.
I think you were right on the money with the mouse theory with OBS. At 32:20 you toss the manual from the box down and the video immediately cut as it landed. Sad for the lost footage, but it is still a great Super *Mega* Mail Call!
Watching it back, yeah that is right! I need to make sure I move the mouse off the start button or start recording from Stream Deck! It would be cool to have a visible red light that came on while recording, so I could notice if it stopped.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 I've never used a Stream Deck before; does it support the ability to change the button state when recording is active? If so, that would be a great idea, since you've already got it there on the bench.
Also I believe there is a setting in OBS to require confirmation to stop recording (disabled by default), which may also help prevent it in the future.
@@bjn714 It does, it shows up as red when recording -- but it's not big and bright enough to notice unless you are looking right at it. And yes on the stop recording, I need to set that. I think I turned it off because I was annoyed at it -- but it's a good idea! LOL!
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 haha whoops! Sometimes the little annoyances can serve to save us from bigger problems, so it's probably worth enabling that confirmation again, even if the odds of it happening again are statistically quite low. Still, not a massive loss this time, since at least it was just a SMMC on the second channel and not a repair video where you could have lost content you couldn't easily recreate. I definitely understand the frustration, though!
Actually, if you had the right drive and controller, 8 inch floppies could hold more than even a high-density 5.25 (or 3.5) inch disk could. If I remember correctly, the high-density (80-track) 5.25" disks could hold 1.2 MB (and as we all know the HD 3.5" disks could do 1.44 MB), but 8" double-sided double-density floppies (which were actually around for quite some time before the HD disks ever existed) could hold up to a whopping 1.6 MB. This is because even though they had slightly fewer tracks, the tracks were physically larger which meant you could put more sectors per track on them.
(I think there were even some fancy controllers that could squeeze even more out of them by using varying numbers of sectors per track (more sectors per track on the outer (longer) tracks, but I never personally got to play with any of those.)
While at college I used the northstar with wood case and northstar Advantage complete machine with keyboard and screen all in one.
I think we had a 20mb hd on it shared out via scsi
I saw a year of 1979 for Magic Wand in a search. $400.00 would be over $1600.00 these days as found in another search.
47:38 4A at 5V is 20W, not the 30 requested so you might need to check that again :)
I've no idea what that particular "ECAS" is, but here in the UK, there is an ECAS who are a leading supplier of Citroen 2CV, Dyane, Ami & Mehari parts, just a random note there seeing ECAS amongst the Magic Wand disks... :P
Archive those word-processor disks, but don't upload them without checking the contents. They might hold software for e.g. Wang Technologies dedicated word processors, but some look like they might hold patient data _or_ applications, so their contents will need to be checked.
Back in the day I worked for a guy (Hi Jeff L.! J.) with a Televideo terminal attached to an Ithaca Intersystems S100 bus Z80 machine with dual 8" floppies. Magic Wand was the word processor he had; whether purchased or pirated I don't remember (it was 40+ years ago). I didn't use it much, so I remember little more than the name. And since it was running with a remote terminal, the interface was certainly clunky compared to what we have and expect today.
WeeCee has a Crystal Sound Chip. I watched the video about it on TH-cam. as well as it's companion the Wee86
There's a lot of recent focus on expensive retro hardware like the Evo64 and the WeePC. They just seem over-priced for what they are.
At the same time, there's some very cheap newly designed computers like the Agon Light 2. Which is literally 50 euro from Olimex fully assembled. I bought one, but haven't had time to do anything with it yet. Honestly, like anything else the price is all about the design.
It's also fully open source, so nobody can play gatekeeper for it. That's often the problem with these projects. Someone makes something for a period, loses interest, and it becomes unavailable.
The WeeCee Gerber files and Altium files are available out there, you can 100% make your own without permission.
I would guess from the company name font that this Magic Wand was from the mid-late 70s.
Seeing these disks reminds me of the movie War Games.
U. Saddle River, NJ is Upper Saddle River, NJ! I grew up there!
They should bring back the 8" drive. With modern technologies, the storage capacity could be almost practical, I bet.
But just because 8" disks are cool.
I hear you man. I've got maybe 3 totes and 5 other smaller containers full of parts that never got sorted and put away for one reason or another. About a week ago I ordered some 3.3V LDV regulators only to trip over a bag of them in one of those totes that I had evidently bought a few years back. Don't let it get out hand like I did! 👎
So many 8" diskettes! 🤩🔥👍👍👍 Love floppy disks!
I have seen the dysan brand before, later they made 3.5 in floppy disks
Magic Wand is a CP/M word processor.
32:20 Seattle is pretty much in the middle between north and south Washington. I didn't even know the area Between Portland and Castle Rock was part of Washington state. My entire life I believed anything below US-12 was part of Oregon. I've never driven farther south than Olympia as there's pretty much nothing there of interest until Portland.
M80 and L80 ring a bell. I think its the assembler and linker.
If were way of adding video card acceleration the weepc would be great. Still is a impressive device that would be even important on the future since parts Will be broken.
Maybe there's some system on a chip for old cpu replacements
How about-make analog (Audacity?) record of one and the same C-64 audio sample; one with the vacuum tube, one without it. Record at the same level, overlap and substract one from another to see how the difference (if any) sounds like.
1981 magic wand adjusted for inflation is $1340 today !! Crazy
I got excited and thought there was a modern 64 motherboard that also had a 486 embedded on the same board
Altos produced a number of machines (eg. ACS-8000) that used 8" disks and ran CP/M and an OS called Oasis. Disks could be from one of those systems?
That C64 board is sexy! I can't wait to see it in action.
Small Business Applications, Inc out of Houston dissolved in 1982. So that $400 price tag might even be a late 70s number making that software cost around $1600 in 2023 dollars.
I wonder what they would do back then if you told them you were running CP/M on one of those Apple ][ cards that had the Z80 on it. Mind blown! 🤯
800 mhz 486. Not bad at all! One question: DX? I mean math co? It's perfectly usable without it, but having it will massively expand it's usability. I'm looking at Quake.
Did quake explicitly require the FPU? I wonder because at that speed, the loss of performance due to software emulation of the FPU would likely be fully negated.
@@jameschamplin1742
I'm not sure, I think the extra speed might compensate, but it might won't start without it. I don't remember.
Its a Vortex86dx
47:40 - Careful! 5V at 4A is only 20W...
Low voltage (say anything under 30 volts, maybe a little higher) is perfectly safe. Safety of voltage/amperage is far more complicated than will fit in a comment, But StyroPyro did an _excellent_ video on the subject not long ago. th-cam.com/video/BGD-oSwJv3E/w-d-xo.html
I have never recieved a voting flier like that before.
My inner Klingon just started crying….
I figured since 1982/1983 kept showing up on disk labels so I went by that and adjust for inflation that is ~$1276. That is not completely out of the realm of realistic when you consider there was a time where a full featured version of MS Office (adjusted for inflation as well) could cost you $900 or more.
Also .. I can not help but to wonder if the naming of that quad PLA is an inside joke since "QAPLA' " is also a word in Klingon that translates as "Success!" Especially when you notice they took the time to include the apostrophe on the word.
At 13:17 spell checker instructions starting with misspelled "INTSTRUCTIONS"
The color from the iPhone looks better than your main camera. The main camera is very blueish and the highlights are blown out. Your displays are likely not calibrated.
Maybe all the disks labelled Magic Wand are copies of the program and they came from a company that distributed it ?
Have you not heard, Adrian? The bird IS the word!
Oh my.. back in '93 a friend and I found a whole dumpster filled with 8" floppy disks and computer parts.. one big pile of goodies for a community like this . Back then it was just garbage and we used the discs as frisbees but they weren't very good at that.
At 14:46 they should have said “The mostest” LOL!
Hmm - new drinking game.. Take a shot every time Adrian says '8 inch'.. Love you man.......
it would be good if you did reviews of new stuff in one casual video like this format --- P
LGR did a review a while ago on the wee PC box quite good but if it had a 3d accell that would make it complete
I designed/build one with a pci slot for video and got pretty good performance out of it. The limiting factor is that it's missing MMX and a few other Intel specific instruction sets, that causes directx incompatibilities.
Magic Wand is a word Processor software.
Magic Wand on the Nabu??? :)
I hope that all the old MOS made Custom chips are replaced with FPGAs so we don't have to worry about MOS chips Rotting away.
Hi Adrian, are you missing your Walmart Stores? What is it like when retailers are becoming fewer and fewer?
I wonder if the EVO team has the rights to copy and distribute the ROMs?
The EVO team is not charging or collecting any money for the distribution of ROM images. They program the EPROMS to test them and make sure that they're working with the EVO.
42 years in Illinois.... I've never once even seen nor heard of an election booklet like that. I will need to investigate.
I've never seen one of those election pamphlets before. Nor are they handed out on voting day in my state. Nor can I get any wi-fi or cellular signal when in the polling venue... Only those signs that sedan drivers love to hate at intersections with Vote YES or NO on question X. What is question X? Why does it matter? Are there really 8,888 steps in the Tower of Art? What is the sex of the turtle?
One would really help.
MK2 by Individual Computers is a very good board for a modern C64 motherboard with original or modern chips. (Not knocking the EVO 64)
Adrian didn't get the Star Trek reference! QAPLA!!! You have never experienced BASIC until you have programmed it on the original Coleco Adam!
Adrian please get the evo board working 👍
Please make a video about the miniature DOS PC. Please, please, please.
Crap better be magic for 4 Benjamins…
"Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word"
First thing that came to my mind also 😂
2:30: Not every state sends these voter information/election publicity books out. They're not a thing in Oklahoma at all. You ask for one at the elections office and they'll grind for a second and say "Oh, the Tulsa World's down the street five blocks, they usually have all of this week's issues for sale in their lobby". Then when you explain what it is you're talking about, the answer you'll probably get is "You're kidding me, right? Noplace does that." This surprised me about Oklahoma when I moved here from Oregon. That, and in-person voting. I thought that went away pretty much everywhere by the time I was 25, in favor of the more reliable vote-by-mail system Oregon's had in special elections since I was a little kid, and in all elections my entire adult life.
The word? What’s the word?… a word up. It’s the code word, no matter how you say it, you know that you’ll be heard.
I'm pretty sure you've got the floppy collection of the proprietor of the Magic Wand word processor. Or you've found the earliest warez operation in recorded history....
They must have cheaped out on the C64 board. Everyone else got them with zif sockets.
The EVO guys developed the product for over a year, making over 6 prototypes with their own money. By the time this board was made for Adrian, they were super-tight on funds and had to go with the standard sockets. The NuTube64 module is a differentiator with EVO, which is why they chose to send it with the prototype board.
47:40 Adrian needs to work on his math, 4amps at 5volts is only 20 watts, not 30. ;-)
I could use some stuff Andrew :O trying to make a IBM clone need some parts.
Those November election posters you see on sticks everywhere...
I call them "Pr__ks on sticks."
Not like there was copy protection back in the day. Lol. They bought it once and copied it for all their machines. Maybe that's why it was so expensive, the publisher anticipated copying?