I always love seeing a PET getting repaired. I've managed to amass 3 different models (2001, 2001-N and 8032) and am currently restoring my flood-damaged 8032
What these Commodores do to print out this value is to take the integer value of the bytes free, convert it into a float value stored in the floating point accumulator (some bytes in the zeropage) and then convert that value into a string to print it out. In this case, I would rule out the ram, because the routine basically works, it just gives wrong results. The same applies to the ROM. That leaves the CPU. It can have a minor fault where it doesn't update the carry- or the zeroflag correctly in some cases, which could lead to such results.
@@oldguy9051 Channels take years to grow a channel to that size - unless they're playing minecraft and a gazillion children subscribe or they're doing something controversial or extraordinary. Even though it may be due, there isn't enough people that used to mumble "38,911 basic bytes free" in their sleep when they were young.
I want to commend you on another excellent job explaining complicated technical things. I took some rudimentary electronics courses back in 2003-04. I love how you try to explain the problem in semi-layman terms. I get a lot of what you are talking about but am a little lost at other times, at no fault of your own. I also want to commend you on your "presentation skills." I see you seem to be more comfortable and fluid in front of the camera. Kudos!!
I 3D printed the same one but it's kinda lightweight and the center spindle on mine kept popping out, I ended up trashing it and buying a Hakko 611 holder which is rock solid.
It always reminds me of Computer Studies (1981-3) - the PET was sat right in the middle of the classroom, connected to an accoustic coupler. No one ever sat at it unless there really was no other computer available. BBC B, BBC A, Spectrum (latterly) , ZX81 then the Pet.
Yes, I'm kicking myself for not thinking of checking our local e-waste companies, there's no telling what retro goodies have passed by. I'd be so stoked if I could find a PET without having to resort to eBay. :(
This video sorts me out on the ROM situation for the universal motherboard so much! Can hardly wait for the next video. I am presently in the middle of empirical action on the RAM - new sockets and chips for all. I was fine and got started then one day. 98 bytes free…. Trying get to fiddling around with a Z80 & C/pm daughter board I had hanging out in the lid, an Easter egg when I found my 8032…
It's my dream to own a PET some day. It is daunting though knowing how many issues they typically have though. So I'm glad for videos about how to fix them. Great video as always!
I can't tell you the amount of joy I have watching your videos. The respect and care you have for this tech that literally helped shape many of our childhoods is greatly appreciated.
The first computer I ever saw was a Commodore PET. I cannot thank you enough for these videos which will come in handy when I get my own classic computers. There's nothing like the real thing. Glad this channel exists.
The PET was also my first computer to play with. I remember fondly turning it on and then typing in the question: "who bent the banana?" to which I got the iconic "SYNTAX ERROR" resposnse. What can I say. I had never been close to a computer before.
@@MatthiasWelwarsky I have a similar, but later, memory of the DOS prompt in Windows 98 - I typed versions of “die windows”, “kill windows” etc and thought the BAD COMMAND response was a promising sign that it was fighting back. I amused myself for a few days like that.
I occasionally see these go up for sale in the portland area on craigslist. Still hoping to snag one some day. Always fun to see a PET restoration. Great video!
Nice trick to jumper CS from the Kernal to one of the option ROM socket. I need to remember that one. The Romulator can replace the kernal but not everyone has one of those.
makes you wonder who thinks "Hmm, this old computer can't be worth anything so I'll just bin it!!" without checking the internet first, but, at least you have it now and is on its' way back to health... :D
My dad was the principal of a small town K-12 school. The school had Commodore PETs like this before I attended school but the summer before I started Kindergarten they all got replaced with Zenith IBM PC clones. They knew this was coming by June so they went grade by grade asking the students if they wanted a free PET. It took... I think going down to grade 10 but every PET found a home.
Hello Adrian. I am an automation engineer, i love to entertain watching Your movies. Your "deduction" path is similiar to mine. Your accent, pronousing is vsry very "understandable". Keep going good work!
If you approach one of our e-waste bins at the drop-off here, and don't have something to deposit, they yell at you. I saw some cool Commodore stuff in ours once but they told me to get away.
I'm still amazed by hardware working 40 years later. Anything made today seems to just fail in just a few years, or in barely a year if it's a peripheral. Maybe not a complete failure, but degrades in one way or another which affects usage of the product. God forbid you buy something that's a refurb/recert.. those go so quickly. Every time I turn on my computer I worry some part of it will suddenly be dead, especially a storage drive.
Funny, that budget electronics from this era last longer than professional stuff or even mil spec field equipment of the same era, because of the lack of exploding tantalum capacitors...
"[this video's] gettin kinda long" Only time I can recall hearing that on a video from this channel less than forty minutes lol. The disconnect between minutes of unedited footage versus an edited together video combined with how every person perceives the passage of time differently always makes statements like that throw me down a rabbit hole.
@Brandon Taylor Yeah the IIe is definitely better for productivity. my aunt and uncle were Apple IIe people then went to the mac. We had C64 here in my house and then we went to IBM PC's.
@@primus711 mostly because the Apple could display more columns on screen etc. I'm a commodore guy but apple and IBM were always better for productivity.
I remember when the Personal Electronic Transactor (PET) was first announced and would have loved to have one. At school I was using different computers (Research machine 380Z), which had some proper graphics capability, so when I finally got to use a PET, I was quite disappointed. But it's still an iconic machine.
I learned to program on one of those... and wrote a program for the local ski center to manage their ski rentals. Had to load it from C-cassette at startup😄
Well we've always been pretty good at recycling in Portland so I'm not shocked that so many school district PETs are still around. We'll always find a way to make old things be useful here!
Nice to know that some places do auction off old hardware..If I had the space to have an old pc or two I would have jumped at the chance to grab any and max them out and just simply enjoy them.
I love retro computer videos and I am so glad this one is less than thirty minutes in length. The simple reason for that is I don't have time for videos more than thirty minutes and in my experiences most people don't. Please keep these videos to this magic length.
Don't forget that you can save a little time by watching videos at 1.25x or 1.5x speed. But I also don't like watching videos more than thirty minutes long. He found a good stopping point for this one.
Good luck with the fixing of this machine. Nice that you recycled before it was too late. I love the pet chasis, never had or seen one irl. I'll like a similar desing but for a modern pc
So I just started this video and both of my daughters (1 year old and 2 years old) came running over when they heard your intro music, lol. I think they were expecting an 8-bit dance party.
I wonder if you could use Bondo's fiberglass resin on the case to go over the engraving and other scratches? Then possibly rattle can the entire case and print a new sticker for the front.
I've done this before on a TRS 80 that had really deep scratches and a piece of the case broken off. It looks fabulous if you know your way around prep and paint.
There is a very distinct texture to the case plastic, so I think it would be really hard to replicate although maybe not for someone with a lot of skill?
@@adriansdigitalbasement There is a simple little trick for plastics with texture. Get a hot glue gun and place a blob of hot glue on the textured surface and place a stick in the glue standing up. Once cooled, carefully peel up the glue with the stick still in it and viola, you have a texture stamp that can be used while the filler is soft.
@@notneb82 Yup. Hot glue or also polyester resin and anything that hardens but stays kinda flexible and can be torn/peeled away without bonding with the texture you're matching. Then you can press it on the filler or even the paint, if you go with painting with several thick coats
@@adriansdigitalbasement you'd have to take a mold of the texture in silicone, and then use that to re-add the texture to any epoxy resin you use to fix the damage. David Murray has a pretty good video from a few years ago about doing that to fix the lid on a Bell & Howell Apple II+.
This is my favorite computer of all time, as a 2nd grader I was the only kid who could program and load games on them, I also got cassette tapes from the regular library and played the games at school. We had 20 or so of them in our computer lab in the early 1980s, my mom was the media center lady so I had free reign on them and it was my thing to be the "computer genius" and geek. I remember some of them had like calculator keys, and some had commodore style thick keys. All had cassette tape drives for data and games of which we had a decent selection of. I also remember we had a few Apple 2Es which were great as we had tons of software, as well as being the first school in the country to get the Apple macintosh in a pilot program. They replaced all our PET computers with them, and I still remember all those computers sitting in a back hallway for a long time and asking repeatedly if I could take one home but was always told no. I actually contemplated just taking one, I can still remember 😆 Those games really were next level on the macintoshes because they had actual graphics, lots of games, even though they were just black/white/greyscale which I thought was stupid.
If you can solder, you can build your own - everything you need is listed clearly in the wiki attached to the project. It's all on GitHub, hoglet67 RGBtoHDMI
@@HutchCA The files are all there to order a PCB from one of the cheap internet suppliers - PCB Way, JLCPCB, Oshpark etc - depending on how long you're willing to wait for it to arrive, and what import duties/taxes your government levies, it can cost less than $10. If you don't feel confident ordering a PCB ( and honestly, it's a lot easier than you'd imagine, very user friendly these days) there are people on various forums ( try stardot the BBC micro forum) who make 'group buys' where one forum member will buy PCBs and components in bulk and then ship them individually to anyone who wants a kit, at or near cost price. There are sometimes people also selling kits on eBay, and Tindie, although you never know when they might have stock. Good luck :)
Back when they were new, I used to repair the older versions of PETs, apple 2 plus, S-100 computers, and the earliest IBM PCs. Chip level repairs, aligning floppy drives, all that stuff.
I'm sure its not the first time you've mentioned you're in the Portland area, but TIL I learned you're local! I'm down in the Salem area, and learning a bit about what is going or on, or has happened in the area is interesting. I always see LGR, RMC and GamersNexus talk about cool stuff near them but they're not local. xD
Just going off of the looks of the machine, I think I can see why a lot of these might've been saved. It has that retro-futuristic look to it that people like. In the 80s when these became obsolete, they could still do useful work, especially with a modem. BBSes probably worked just fine on these. But as their usefulness dropped off, their beauty picked up.
Interesting to hear a (former) Canadian talking about CRTC a lot in a video that has nothing to do with the CRTC 🤣Obviously they have the same initials to the controller chip, but a totally different beast... (For context, the CRTC - Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission - is our equivalent to the USA's FCC or Federal Communications Commission) P.S. Also don't mean to imply that Adrian isn't Canadian any more, just that he has resided in the US for quite a while now.
Commodore Pet 2001 and 4032 are what Space invaders was orignally hacked with ... by 6 guys in high school in Canada ... Ottawa to be exact ... . was great fun using the daisy chain network to drive the teacher nuts too when trying to get a program to work for her next class lol . mind all 6 of us had to have our class work done first and each prgram handed in .. of course we had to do the same assignemtn 6 different ways so we wouldnt be called on cheating ...
The first thing I thought of was bad RAM. All it takes is a flipped bit to mess up a number like that, and those 6502 BASICs all use single-precision floating point everywhere except when they need to be converted to or from a 16-bit integer. Other things were weird enough that I also expected it might be a whole column bad or something like that. The error that came up implies that there is aliasing between the zero page and the stack page, which would be quite troublesome on the 6502. It's quite right to stop the test right there, because having the stack crash into and twiddle with the zero page can cause some really subtle problems. At least try re-seating all the DRAM chips first, and check for tarnish on the pins. Sockets are nice for repairability, until oxidation makes a pin or two stop working after a decade or two. As for the display, I'm guessing that the CRTC was initialized incorrectly. Probably it is "scrolled" to the third line of the screen, and the first two lines are simply hidden. I wouldn't be surprised if that's being caused somehow by zero-page vs stack interference during the initialization. Fix the RAM and you'll probably fix the screen.
My MCL65+ could also be dropped-in to replace the 6502 which can emulate all of the PET's RAM and ROM. Perhaps not as user-friendly as the ROMulator, but does allow the user to enjoy some acceleration modes such removing 6502 cycle-accuracy and mirroring the RAM/ROM at very high speeds. Could make you machine the World's Fastest PET. :)
Heh heh, in one of my math classes, we had one PET and two Apple II computers. There wasn't a whole lot of time to use computers but what little time we had, no one ever used the PET.
This was the first computer I had access to, I remember how disappointed I was when I opened it and nothing was happening. I don't know what I was expecting but the system was so magical it was a major letdown to see that it was just a thing.
holy moly, you have an open Haribo-Happy Cola rail exposed on your desktop. that's extremely dangerous! :'D nitpicking just to be a nit picker: 23:40 it's 65536 addresses that can be addressed, 0 - 65535 :P
Interesting topic. Doesn‘t the /NOROM signal go to the option ROM sockets, too? That stack thing is weird. Somehow, a stack must be living somewhere else. Because, when you boot up, several subroutines and also the interrupt service routine is called. And that would not work without a proper return address from the stack. Exciting video, looking forward to the next part.
VisiCorp sold their products to include an option ROM for the PET. VisiCalc and others (VisiWord and VisiBase) would not run on the PET without the added ROM. There was other option ROMs out there.
youtube allows up to 24 hours in length and 12 gig in file size a couple years ago memes like 24 hours of music and windows starup stretched to 24 hours was a thing. so that is a green light for you to upload longer videos
Those were the days when computers used keys to wind them up 🤫😆. I remember assembling a sinclair zx80. Lol...it didn't work cause I dropped a component and couldn't find it...for a while when I did it finally came to life and how disappointed I was . They said." Flicker free graphics "...lol there wasn't any.😆😆😆😆😆😆
@@ginkumpow3726 I think it's on the analog side actually. I have two - one with mechanical damage - and the plan was get one working but C= used different revs. I haven't dug into it all the way yet. This video did inspire me to power up the 4032 though and it was satisfying to see that still works.
The PET was the first computer I ever saw!! The one with the original keyboard and the built in cassette 'drive' Yes this was in the mid 1970's! Nearly 50 years ago!
Fancy! Not sure how many of these you do, but seems like that diagnostic stuff seems like a useful candidate for a PCB that plugs into the socket instead, so you don't have to bend chip legs. But, then you'd have to find chip leg shaped pins to solder into the PCB instead, maybe that's harder than replacing an EPROM after wearing out the bent-out pins.
It is not the ROM/KERNEL that does the initialisation. It is the CPU that does the initialisation using the code it retrieves from the ROM/KERNEL. In all computers it's the CPU that does the work.
First saw a PET used in anger on a visit to BT's research labs in late '70s. They used them for self-tracking telescopes, claiming they were cheaper than building from scratch....
