LegacyMan – Lets the legacy live on!

How to write to a Commodore 1541 Disk Drive Part I

As many of you might know, the Commodore 64 is still a very popular platform to play games on, create music on or just dust off your very Basic (buhuh) skills. Even I recently got one from a dear colleague (thanks Jelle & Simon!), a Commodore 64C – the “revised” model – with a power supply, the 1530 Datasette, lots of tapes and cartridges, and a bunch of cables. And later on, I found a Commodore 1541-II disk drive and some floppy disks and a nice Commodore 1084S stereo monitor. More on that in a different post.

But software!

HP 6824A lab power supply

As I got hold of two Tono Theta 7000E communications terminals, I grew a need for a stable power supply: The Tono’s use an external power supply for 12V DC, a fuse is in place at 2A. Digging in the Old Stack I found a power supply I got donated from Els, a good friend (she kept the skeleton with the party hat for herself 🙁 ), it’s a brand old HP 6824A DC Power Supply Amplifier! Should do the trick ..

Lepper Primus bike saddle repairs: a HowToFix your front spring

Aaaah, a Lepper Primus saddle! One of the best saddles ever made. I got one on my Gazelle transport bike from 1940. It is loaded with 4 springs at the back with an additional two as main shock absorbers, a double coiled spring at the front and a perfectly formed leather surface. It looks like a space craft from the ’50’s, but sits like a fresh spring meadow with lush green grass.

Unless, of course, the front spring is broken off. Doesn’t happen a lot, but if it does the soft saddle turns into a mean monster that bites your soft butt cheecks. So, mine needed to be fixed!

NCR PC386sx/MC20, an introduction

In my quest for an old computer I came across this beauty: a NCR PC386SX/MC20. At first sight a fairly normal 386, with a nice big red power button that you can push, a 3.5″ 1.44MB diskette drive, a 100MB hard drive and a host of interfaces at the back. When I bought it, it came with a matching VGA monitor and a Tulip DIN keyboard. The price on Marktplaats was fairly low, so it seemed a good bargain for me. Only thing was that nobody else was interested in it. I wondered why! So I looked this particular type up, and then I knew ..