About the VIC20, I see "Assembled in Hong Kong", a bit history things, back in the 80's we have lot of girls (lady) in the factory assembly line making these computers, when running out of parts, their supervisors have to make sure the order can be completed within deadline, therefore the long fuse and other shoddy modifications may be the direct order from the management, "quick, look good and working" is very common Hong Kong style until now.
I don't know how horrible is to live in high humidity environment. I have the exact opposite problem. I have had 20-30% humidity in my house this winter season. That is unpleasant. Bought a humidifier, got it up to 50%, was lovely. But our water is full of lime so instead of low humidity my house is now covered in white dust..:P
Yeah, after living for a couple decades in cold and low humidity, I love visiting the south. First thing I do when I get there is sit in the car with the AC off and let the humid heat bake into my bones.
Hey small world. I went to St Mary Parish schools at the time these were around. The only computer classes were in High School. The labs usually had 30 Apple IIs of some sort. Just taught simple Apple Basic. In 1988 the IIs were replaced with IBM 286s. The High School Library had one Commodore for student use. If I remember only the cheerleaders and teachers used it. They had an OKI Data printer that printed black AND red ink on tractor feed paper. The cheerleaders would make banners for school games. Teachers would make hallway flare. It could well be a central office computer also.
Standard Sparkle bug on the Silver Label. A bug in the original Character rom. A Silver Label will also fail the Control port test even with a working SID. They had different resisters on the motherboard. Nice to see a Vic on the table.
wow a pristine first gen. C64! Actually my school had a computer room with ten or twelwe bread bin 64's each with a 1541 disk drive and 1702 monitors, as well as two needle printers in the back of the room. Then we would share a computer among two pupils in computer class. They still had them when I graduated from 9th grade in 1993 :o)
Adrian, there is a simple solution to the bad DeoxIT spray can. That design with the large yellow straw is called the "perfect straw" by the manufacturer, but that's one of those 'improved' designs that is actually made worse. People complained so much that DeoxIT sells a 'classic' version of the can, part number *D5S-6-LMH* . This one even has a variable flow design, where you can rotate the nozzle to achieve low, medium, or high flow rate, which is what the -LMH suffix alludes to. This design is your standard "Red straw" type nozzle that is found on most other products. Due to the adjustability, you can set it on the Low flow rate and you do not have to worry about a bunch of extra liquid accumulating anywhere, and there is no bulky plastic shrouding for it to accumulate in even if it did leak. Highly recommended to seek out this part number. I bought mine from Parts Express and it was about the same price as the yellow straw version.
OH thank you! I'll definitely be ordering the D5S-6-LMH version next time -- this one is just atrocious and horrible!!! And yes I would really like having low flow -- as most of that time that's all I want.
Fun story: Back in 2005 I was between IT jobs so I went to work with a friend cleaning and maintenance in a factory that made hose clips. I was told to clear out a load of junk from one corner of the warehouse which seemed to be mostly computer cables, old binders and other office junk. At the bottom of the heap was an old VIC-20. I asked if I could keep it and the answer came back next day saying I was welcome to it. I learned that it had been used in the goods in area connected to the company computer and used to have a cartridge in it that contained the (proprietary) software, a (presumably serial) computer interface and a barcode scanner. It was used for booking in goods coming into the warehouse. It was completely fillthy; when I took it apart it was full of soot from the exhaust of the lorries that reversed up to the loading bays of the warehouse! As I tried cleaning it up I quickly realised that something corrosive in the soot had attacked the components and they started dropping off the board. The soot also had eaten away at the PCB so the poor machine was a write-off. Someone I knew needed a keyboard but the rest got binned sadly. I suppose if I had known what I do now I might have extracted the VIC chip from the board since it might have been protected by the sheilding can, but to be honest in 2005 they weren't particularly rare. I've since found out that commodore sold a lot of VIC-20s to companies that turned them into industrial controllers (I think the 8-bit guy did a video once about it) because they were cheap and the cartridge port allowed custom boards to be plugged in easily, a sort of pre-arduino!
That Radar Rat Race game is basically just a clone of the Rally-X arcade game but with cars and flags changed to mice and cheese to avoid a lawsuit... :-) In the arcade game it would be smoke you fired out of the rear of the car to blind the cars chasing you so how this translated into sparkles coming out of the mouse's behind took a major stretch of someone's imagination...
Also it looks like they didn't copy the movement of the enemy cars in Rally-X very well- from what I recall (and it's been a while since I've played Rally-X), they didn't mirror the player's movements the way these rats do and would instead take paths around to cut the player off.
TIP: I spray a little DeoxIT 5 before I remove a crusty old chip from a historical motherboard. It does minimize the crunchy removal sounds. Spray a little D-5 on the chips, wait 5 minutes and your chip should come out much easier.
The yellowing of plastics is due to heat and not ultraviolet light as everyone thinks. I have used a Sous vide machine to submerge my peroxide covered and bagged items to "retro bright", no lights needed. Hence, the reason why you find such weird yellowing on some items in areas where the sun couldn't possibly get to. Keep up the great content. Love watching your videos.
A new discovery for me: desoldering needles... not solder syringe, but stainles tubes that help remove corroded or stubborn pins. Might be worth checking out for those rusty parts!
Rather than spray paint, it might be worth investigating vinyl dye for recolouring yellowed plastics. I believe that it chemically changes the colour of the plastic rather than sitting on top like paint. I saw some discussion of this on an Acorn computer forum, where someone successfully recoloured a yellowed BBC Master.
Regarding the deoxit cans, the problem is the nozzle itself. When you flip up the precision tube, it tends to not be a tight connection and backpressure causes the liquid to back up into the cap.
18:40 i have no idea why you don't apply deoxid first before removing the DILs. breaking oxidized pins in that case is more intentional than accidental.
Adrian, This is going to be a bit wordy so sorry ahead of time. First off I thoroughly enjoy these videos, especially when it comes to the Commodores. I have had various of computers growing up starting with the Tandy TRS80. I was big into electronics and programming my own stuff. I did a lot of different projects on my C64 from basic home automation to robotics to voice synthesizers etc. One of the last projects I was working on but it was only in design phase was reviewing schematics and various other electronic projects, working on researching the clustering of the C64s together. I had quite the "museum" of vintage game consoles to vintage computers parts and accessories not to mention my vast electronics workshop with equipment parts and tools. I was deep within my research of clustering the C64s but in the early 90's we had a freak flash microburst where we got nearly 2" of rain within an hour and my basement was completely submerged. I lost everything!!! The stuff I lost, if you only knew, you would have probably cried. Long story short I lost interests in electronics and programming etc. until coming upon your videos which resparked the interest. So I am writing to you today to offer a suggestion for your channel, if you are anything like I was you probably have a stockpile of electronic components wire etc and breadboards. Perhaps you can do a video series on trying to cluster C64s together to make a more powerful robust singular compute power. Unfortunately my vast research notes are long since gone and a faded memory until watching your repair-a-thon series which jogged the old memory. Maybe one day I will start my research over or perhaps not, I have been out of electronics since the 90s and I have forgotten more than most know about electronics. Any rate if you do take this on it will be one interesting video series.
I spray the guts of those cans in a little jar and use a brush, pipet or serince to apply the stuff. Works much better. I had an industrial board last week and I was testing chips with a scope like you , all seemed right but it was not working. I used the HP current tracer and found out one of the groundpins did not carry current. ( I had a working board for comparing) On of the first things I learned from my " mentor" is to look for current ( using a probe or , in analog electronics, measuring the voltage over resistors. ( I now sometimes use a 7,5 digit meter to measure the voltage drop over a trace :-). Current can tell you so much. I always watch the current of the supply with a separate meter in the rare cases I can not use a lab supply.
My home town is in St. Mary Parish and went to school in the parish in the 80's-90's. The location is home to "cities" such as Franklin, Berwick, Morgan City, Patterson etc..... Good video. New to the channel. Definitely giving the channel a look over for more informative videos.
"Yes, I've Had my Tetanus Booster!" might be another good T-Shirt slogan! 😁 If there are any artists that want to have a go a T-shirt designs please let me know.
@@adriansdigitalbasement you should make a shirt!! i forget if you have merch yet but redbubble lets you toss a design up within 30 seconds in some cases, someone made a comment on facebook and i turned it into a tshirt design within 29 minutes of them posting "this would make a good tshirt design" about a very 80s science diagram
@@frogz I guess redbubble doesn't have very good policies, lgr had a bunch of stickers on his store that he designed himself and apparently someone falsely reported them all and they just took everything down without telling him.
I'm pretty sure I've commented this before, but the for the paddle inputs, the diagnostic is looking for a narrow range of values and sometimes replacing the two 1800pf capacitors can bring this back in range.
I had a Vic 20 as a teenager. I had the 8kram expansion, a cassette, 300 baud modem and radar rat race that games music is just 3 blind mice played in a loop.
I think the corrosion issue would be electrolysis. Any dissimilar metals that are touching (like the IC pins and the IC socket) will suffer galvanic corrosion in the presence of an electrolyte. They might be very close on the galvanic table, but unless they the exact same metal/alloy you will eventually get corrosion.
My recently restored Vic looked like that as well, it retrobrited really well though It wasn’t deep stained. If it were me I’d paint it some other color than cream. If you’re gonna paint it have fun.
Seen C64s with that same deep and internal yellowing (browning). On the 64s I see like that, the ones that have turned pretty much orange, I've restored the original color, as close as I can by retrobriting (regular water and peroxide, covering the object) with UV lighting. You've got to pay a lot of attention though, as with these extra colored ones in particular you can overdo it and they'll get white blotches. I check every 30 minutes and have had a lot of good results and a few misses, also a few that just won't brighten fully.
Oh my! I remember playing Radar Rat Race on a VIC-20 way back when! It along with the Fairchild Channel F were the first video games I ever played at home!
So I just watched this and it reminded me how extremely overdue you are for having a Retrobrite Episode! Please please please do a retrobriting episode, I think it will be excellent. You always put so much effort into restoring these older machines to perfect original function but the yellowed plastics are like the machine is crying when instead it could shine and smile.
It would be a perfect opportunity for someone other than Retro Recipes to try doing it without peroxide. Although he does live in Oregon, so he'll only have a few sunny days out of the year to work with. 😉
Vic 20 story: As part of a student exchange program, I was in the Soviet Union before its collapse. In one medium sized town, in what could only be described as a department store, they had a Vic 20, with monitor, disk drive, and printer, marked for sale, at 20,000r!!! The official exchange rate was 1:1 $1 US to 1 Ruble. The unofficial black market exchange rate was $1 to 10r. The year was 1990. I can only guess, this was for show, not for foreigners. The town was far from touristy areas. This was for the people - You can get a computer, if you want one. It was impossible to save for. For perspective, this was 200,000 loafs of bread, worth. Meanwhile, government run, after school programs, for party children, had clone Apple II computers, made in Bulgaria and with Cyrillic font, to learn basic programming. The USSR was kinda of weird that way. They wanted Western technology, even Pepsi, but didn't want to pay anything for it, officially. Then turn around and make it impossible for regular people to access. Also, the only way to get a bottle of Pepsi, was on the river speed boat, which was a form of mass transit.
Great to see you doing some repairs on a VIC20! Like you, I had one as my first computer, and I remember it with affection even though it really wasn’t that great compared with a C64.
12:45 - judging by the title of the video it makes me anxious just looking at your waving finger around the rusty shield, bracing for impact :D Since only the socketed chips are rusted, maybe it's not the chips' fault but it's a low quality socket that somehow reacts with the legs of the chips.
il C64 e in condizioni buone,ma non ho mai visto un VIC20 in quelle condizioni,lo shield sotto la mainboard pieno di ruggine,tre chip marci e il case talmente giallo che sembra verniciato in giallo.il padrone del VIC20 lo ha tenuto nel peggior modo possibile.sono contento che li hai sistemati,sei un ottimo tecnico.ciao
My best guess to explain the degree of that vic20's yellowing; it may have spent much of it's life on a glass counter in direct sunlight that reflected off something below the counter into the vents on the bottom of the machine, reflected back onto the inside of the bottom by the RF shield while protecting the inner top, immersing the bottom half with UV rays from all sides
Doesn't explain why the when the plastic was broken it was also yellow inside though. The break on that standoff looked like it was fairly recent, and it was uniformly the same color as the rest of the plastic. So even if it was reflected uv, and the standoff had broken off ages ago, you'd expect some variation in the color.
@@bruwin photodegredation doesn't simply stop at the surface layer, it's a chemical reaction that slowly permeates the material, in this case from both sides and apparently quite intense. The process would have also released more free oxygen trapped in the bottom of the case accelerating the degredation, and likely also causing the excessive rust
I'd solder some legs on those chips (plenty of flux, some light sandpaper action before). Maybe solder them directly to those sockets that come in strips you cut to length.
Love that these poor mistreated machines still work with basic fixes. I'd love to see you do a full cosmetic cosmetic restoration of some of them. It would be sad for that Vic-20 to sit unused on a shelf for another 40 years just because it's a bit battered. 🙂
I had two VIC-20 machines go through my hands many years ago and I had traded them for other computers that I found more interesting at the time. Every time I see one in a video, I wish I still had one. Now they cost actual real money but back then they were worth peanuts.
Nooooooooo....We need more C64 Repairathons!!! How about a Vic-20 Repairathon next.....!??!!!!! Keep up the great work Adrian!! :o) Tony K., Melbourne, Florida...
Adrian should have put X marks on those MOS 64245 chips. Or else he might be using them in something again! Or in other words: those rusted off legs made the ICs SMD parts.
I would never clean or overpaint yellowing that cool (the VIC20). That is history right there! Its sad how often "restoration" of retro computers is nothing like restoration, when people throw out parts, shields etc. the computer is no longer orginal, its a mod which is not worth anything historically.
It's a shame that many of the MOS chips were so unreliable. I love that MOS logo. If I owned a C64 or Vic, I'd want all my chips to have that MOS logo. :)
Yes, I'm always replacing them with mixed feeling, because those chips tell a story: That Commodore made their own chips and were capable make stuff themselves if they had supply problems. Replacing them with standard parts removed that history from the machine. In 100 years from now, if there are people around interrested in computer history, they will for sure like those chips in there. But... a machine should always be repaired, so there is no alternative for replacing them with standard chips.
Would love to see a video on how to mod the old /new c64 mainboard to work with both 6581 and 8580 sid chip. Have an old 6581 and a shortboard c64 without the 8580 chip.
Ideally I should change those sockets yeah -- especially as it was acting flaky in the first place. My notes (that I write on the motherboard) help me recall in in the future if it does become a problem.
@@gregjarvis1232 Yes, that's actually the RF shield. The VIC-20 used an actual metal shield. Commodore didn't start using the aluminized cardboard shields until the C64, as one of Jack Tramiel's cost-cutting measures. The cardboard shields are a notorious heat trap, which is one of the reasons Adrian always throws them away. This one, however, is one of the rare instances where he _can't_ throw it away, because the motherboard is too short to be screwed down to the original screw holes without it.
