Thanks for the comments everybody. Various commenters have identified the enclosure as an Archer brand "Deluxe Metal Enclosure" sold by Radio Shack, catalog number 270-228 or 270-269 for example.
Sometimes these types of videos become popular and bring forth the original creator in the comments. Hopefully he or she is still with us and sees their creation featured on the Internet!
@@fwingebritson I cannot imagine building something like this from a magazine unless you already had EE training or experience in a factory or lab. Honestly youtube is the most important modern technology for DIY electronics. Though JLCPCB and KiCAD or EasyEDA certainly make a huge difference.
@@HypherNet Magazines from the 80's like Byte, were very good as containing everything from basic (and sometimes assembler) code, as well as plans and schematics for neat and interesting stuff to add on to your computer. In fact, most computers came with complete schematics that would help diagnose issues and add stuff to the computer. It was like having a car that came complete with a repair manual. Of course now there are smaller and better things, but most sources offer a taste and require a lot more perspiration and imagination. I guess I am trying to say it was easier back then, whereas now the MFR;s and sources seem to assume people are simply born with the knowledge. Unless there are very well rounded courses that schools offer these days in which people are assumed to know.
Hi Robin. I think this device is great! I grew up and learned on the VIC-20 (born in 1969). The VIC-20 holds a special place in my heart, the same as you for C64. I made a very similar RAM expander for my VIC-20 years ago, but instead of the cartridge expansion slots, I added a ROMulator socket. The ROMulator socket allowed me to use the VIC-20 to emulate the ROM of a different computer or microcontroller device. The different device would read from the RAM connected to the socket just as if it were ROM. From the VIC-20, I could then use my HESMON machine language monitor to program the memory connected to that socket. When ever VIC-20 would write to that RAM address range, it would hold the reset to the connected device. After writing was complete, the reset would be lifted and then the device would restart with the new code update. I used octal bi-directional buffers to isolate each side. I still have my original VIC-20 and that same RAM expander/ROMulator board that I made. If I could attach pictures here, I would share with you, but that is not possible. By the way, you didn't really mention in the video where or how you got your device. I am curious where it came from and who made it.
The carts fit in the case just fine... that why we have rubber mallets... every vintage computer enthusiast should have one... and an air can. Oh wow ... that every well done for the time. Makes me want to get a ViC 20 and put full memory in it with simi modern static ram.
Funniest ending ever, shades of the old 'the Time Machine' movie where the Inventor sends his model into time. Great stuff and such an interesting little home made build, beautifully constructed!
@@HutchCA When I was in grade school, a friend and I used to wire them up to piezo buzzers and 9v batteries, tape them all up with electrical tape and... well, umm, probably annoy people. :)
Yep, I agree with this 100%. It looks like a typical project case you used to be able to buy at Radio Shack. They also sold a hand nibbler tool to cut out rectangular-ish openings like on this case.
I definitely recognize the case / chassis is from Radio Shack, it even had the ventilation slots. Also the conical trim washers used for the four case screws were typical for this type of case. Likewise for the knobs, switches and most if not all of the other parts, Radio Shack. Try looking here: www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html www.radioshackcatalogs.com/part_numbers-all_products.html
This is a great find Robin. I’m a fellow Canadian that was a member of TPUG back in the day. (Toronto Pet Users Group) I made a bit of stuff for the Vic20 but the one that I used the most was a small expander with only one slot. It had two switches and one push button. The push button was reset, one switch disabled writing to the added expansion slot, and one switch reversed block 5 and 3. This allowed you to plug in your game cartridge, switch it to block 3, and save your game on the 1541 drive. To play a game you would plug in 8k or 16k of ram (yes we made our own ram boards), load the game to 6000 (blk 3) from the disk, switch the block from 3 to 5, disable the write line and press reset. It was a great way to archive your cartridge games:). I still have all of the stuff I made for my Vic and my original Vic. Your videos are inspiring me to dust it off and bring it back to life. Thanks for all of the great stuff you put together on your channel.
Hi Larry, thanks for watching and for the comment! Neat about the VIC-20 expander, I believe Chuck Hutchins @cahutch1000 demonstrated something like that on his channel.
I think the wire wrapping give it away that it was not a ham. I think CS engineer with a degree from the early 70's. A ham would totally go off on you for using wirewrap and not putting the bypass caps directly across the chips... soooo much noise! xD
@@DasIllu i am not sure if this bypass caps concept was fully understood by all folx in the 1980ies. (and wirewrap had astonishing good HF characteristics for f
0:24 I had a homemade VIC-20 cartridge expander. But, it was too glitchy for any practical use. 1:35 Odd that you can't use more than one cartridge at a time. Though, I guess the only cartridges you might want to use with others is RAM expansion. 2:20 Mechanical-watch parts. 4:11 Why split the 16K and 24K expansions? They're compatible with each other and are equally incompatible with the unexpanded VIC. 9:47 I take that it even a simple 8K expander from the era also wouldn't be recognized. 13:50 Infinite power!!
Great find! A lot of respect to whomever put this together. I remember using wire wrap for projects around 40 yrs ago (still have the radio shack made wire wrap tool somewhere around here). The amount of wrapping to do on this project is incredible and the satisfaction the builder would have had upon completion would have been something to see.
I owned one made out of what looked like an old kitchen cupboard, it had 5 cartridge slots, was covered in white veneer and the motherboard was glued down on top of it. Quality bit of kit.
Heh. I have played Telengard on the PC, Commodore 64 (My first version) and on the Apple II. My childhood was spent trying to map the insanely large level map. (200x200x50) One tactic we used to do is to sneak down to level 50, hoping to snarf some loose treasure and make it back up (Using Grey Misty Cubes) without being spotted. A single pile of Gems was usually worth hundreds of thousands, so getting to high levels wasn't too hard, assuming no one spotted you.
Letraset, beautiful, the linings on the Thomas the Tank Engine locomotives in the 80s and 90s when real models were used to film was Letraset. I love the two rotary switches. Couldn't just go for six slots and use the one switch, huh. I love the old parallel/serial dumb switchboxes that run all 25 pins through a huge rotary switch, they look like a corn cob from the back.
Dude! I was watching your video at my hobby workbench and at the end when you prepared to send the "time machine back to 1983 I was smiling at what creative video editing you might come up with and as soon as you flipped the switch I nearly jumped out of my skin! There sitting on my workbench was IT! The Ram Expansion! I was elated! But I couldn't accept such a miraculous gift. So I had to give it a COVID free kiss goodbye and send it back! Keep that thing safe and away from the Men in Black!
I built a contraption to allow a RAM cart to be added and simultaneously a couple of EPROM copy ROMs (Vickit? and VICMON). I had to add buffer chips because the EPROM couldn't drive the bus and cabling. I still have it and it still works, must dig it out.
I always dreamed about something like this as a 13 year old kid... The best I had was the Super Expander though... Nice to see Telengard on the VIC 20 - I just found it myself last month!
That Atlantis actually looks amazing. I've never seen graphics on the Vic-20 run at 60fps before. And I think it actually looks better than the Atari 2600 version.
Likely i did not suckered in on the word time machine until i clicked on the video, i was amezed once i saw that word, i was just curious about that huge obscure ram expander.
I'm always curious about what he's going to show. I'm from the era of these retro 8-bit systems so all of his videos are kinda special to me. It brings me back every time.
When I was a kid growing up I would steal time on whatever computers I could at school because I didn’t have one at home, and in my last year of high school someone had a floppy with a game called something like ‘Telengard ][‘ - and I figured out it was written in BASIC, printed the source code out, took it home, and over the weekend wrote, with pencil and paper, a save game editor and entered&debugged that when I was back at school the next week. Not the same platform, but man, did seeing ‘Telengard’ while watching this bring back memories. (I think it was the same game and ][ was thrown on the Apple port, but I could be wrong)
I created my own expansion board that supported 8 cards. Each expansion slot had 2 switches. The 1st switch enabled/disabled the slot. The 2nd switch set the NMI or the IRQ (can’t remember) to reset the computer. When I plugged in a game cartridge and turned on the computer and pressed reset button, the computer would go to the run prompt, then I could save the cartridge to the disk.
Hello Robin nice find the box came from Radio Shack, I'm looking at one right now that I bought years ago for a project that I built. Also I built an expander board for my Vic 20 back in the day. Lawrence
Like the expansion interface for the Tandy/Radio Shack TRS 80 model 1 and the Multi Pak interface for the CoCo. I had the CoCo 3 version which I made switchable to bypass the lockout which prevented some older CoCo accessories working on it.
Those knobs and the rotary switches look very much like Radio Shack parts from the era. Radio Shack also made a project case that looked very much like that box, including the sheet metal screws with the tin dish washers to hold it together, but I remember them being black rather than silver. The toggle switches don't look like RS parts, I believe RS was selling ALPS (or ALPS clone) switches in that era. The 44 pin connectors were available from RS, but a number of the perf boards and those Japanese logic chips don't look like RS parts. Mouser had just come into existence about that time, then based in San Diego. They had a good catalog, cheap prices, and quick mail order delivery as compared to Allied and the more established mail order houses of the time. I suspect whoever made that used a bunch of RS parts and a bunch either from a local surplus house or from Mouser. Certainly all of the parts would have been easily available to the more dedicated hobbyist of the era.
07:05 Ohhh... OMEGA RACE! The love of my life. 😍 I got OMEGA RACE and JUPITER LANDER as a bundle when I bought my first VIC-20. Had no tape recorder, so I had to type in any other game I wanted to play... again, and again and again... 😂
Another great video. I didn't know what to expect from that one but I'm glad you tested it out and took it apart. That's exactly what I would've done. Great video as always.
What a neat gadget. During my VIC year, the only memory expansion I had was in the Super Expander, and I never used it since I realized no one would be able to use anything I wrote unless they also had it. Now I wish I had gotten a RAM expander back then.
Had to laugh about the decoupling caps just having been put into one cluster - instead of putting each one of them directly at the ICs. Someone missed the point there. This, the wirewrapping and the long ribbon cable would explain the noisy behavior.
Also if I remember right those boxes where made by Bud Industries. They where also sold by Olson electronics, Lafayette Electronics and others. Lawrence
It’s a thing of beauty that. Someone not only knew what they were doing, but did it well. Wonder if it was a developer. Out of interest, how easy would it have been to get those components and would they have been expensive?
Icon on the chips at 12:04 is the Hitachi logo. When I bought a Commodore 64 a little over a year ago or so, I bought it with some homemade numeric keypad attached to it. It seemed like having a piece of DIY hobbyist computer history would be interesting. Sadly a bunch of keycaps did not survive shipping (they weren't in the box). It had an obviously custom ceramic case and a mess of wires on a PCB underneath that didn't identify it very well (it had some part numbers, but nothing identifiable). I eventually figured out that it was hacked out of a Rapid Data 2000R adding machine, which I've also bought one of for myself because why not =P Some people who tried to help me identify the device did mention articles written at the time explaining how to do it, and I later found another numpad on eBay that appears to have been built and offered by a specialty shop, so there were options, I guess. (There was also the Atari CX85 numpad and a few commercial clones as well; the Deskthority page "Atari interface" has more info.) Sadly the numpad ribbon cable was soldered into the individual wires of the keyboard connector so we decided to just cut the cable out, but I am keeping what I have left of the numpad =P (The C64 worked perfectly, but I did blow a fuse and ruined a VIC-II chip's legs diagnosing that fuse problem. It also had a cassette port dongle, though I don't know which game it was for.)
The Vic20 was my first computer when I was about 11 ish. Played games for a couple of days, then got bored and started programming it using the book it came with on basic. I remember writing a little app to find guitar chords and display their variations in a chord box just like it's done now. I suppose that was the first guitar chord software ever written ! Do I get a prize ?
Woah! Those SRAMs must draw a load of current! No wonder you're seeing brightness changes rolling on the screen, the power supply must be under a lot of stress.
I don't think the case is repurposed. I think they drilled four holes in the top of an iron project box, cut out the square between them, and halved+bent that spare square of material to make the brackets creating the recessed slot(s). Very nice DIY design/build by someone.
So many chips. At the risk of inviting you to turn this into "8-Bit Power Supply Replacements and Recapping", I am a smidge surprised there's no discussion of just how many expansion port chips and carts the original Vic power supplies could be trusted to drive...
I heard Omega Race running and it sucked my back 35 years in time... I have fond memories of drilling holes in my C-64 and 1581 drives in order to hack them. Also put a reset button on my Epyx FastLoad cart. I think my best hack was putting some bubble LED strips on the expander port and scrolling text on it. Fun times. Cheers,
All those capacitors in a DIP socket look suspiciously like bypass capacitors. Usually, you install those across the +/- rail as close as possible to the IC's power/ground pins. This way, you minimize any noise generated by the wiring/traces between the capacitor and the chip. With all that meticulous hand-wiring, it looks like the purpose of the bypass capacitor was defeated :(
I did have more RAM. I had the Super Expander. Got me my 8K of RAM total. It was good enough to make piddly little games in Basic and some four-channel tunes lasting up to a few minutes long, also in Basic. It was kind of funny. I'd always run into the absolute limit of available RAM, and there was always a quirk about the last character, like it wouldn't keep, or or it saved weirdly or something.
