EGA RAM expansion from NZ, testing a Commodore Plus/4, a 1531 Datasette and some ESD protection ⚡

well hello everyone and welcome back to adrian's digital basement on today's episode yep it's a midweek mini mail call i didn't have one last week because i just was so busy unfortunately with projects and my day job and summertime stuff that i just couldn't get to it but if you feel like you're missing a mini mail call episode on wednesdays check out my second channel if you haven't already because i post videos up there at sort of random intervals and there might be something interesting that you'd like to watch there anyhow today's mail call is going to be a little bit different because i got a couple packages in and i'm trying my new format or i get it in and i open it on camera on the bench i don't do the whole two separate segments but there still is going to be one normal segment where i open something and then i show it on the bench and that's because i'm trying to get through the mail call backlog so without further ado let's get right to it [Music] all right so we have as you can see at least the box for commodore plus four now i didn't have to unbox this because this came from viewer nick who happened to be coming through town and he just dropped it off and gave it to me if we open the box here inside there is actually a commodore plus 4 and some other stuff so let's take a look see if this computer works we have the user's manual stop look no more for commodore plus four software we have it cardinal software in woodbridge virginia a great value at twenty dollars per disc or forty nine dollars for three or ninety nine dollars for a complete set looks like you got some learning software you got some logic games that's diskette number two poker solitaire twister puzzle games which also by the way could run on this 128 or the 64. i think those other discs were the same mad libs for the plus 4 or the c128 these things were probably all entirely written in basic and some other stuff here financial stuff there you go you can get all of those discs all seven of those for a hundred dollars and whenever this was i'm sure that was quite a lot of money probably a few hundred dollars in today's money here we have a manual for the 1541 and i don't think i've seen one that looks like this it's got the motif and the styling that matches the plus 4 computer with these lines very 80s and whatnot but i guess it's just probably a normal manual for the disk drive yep definitely is and it even says here for your commodore 64 vic-20 personal computer doesn't even mention that this works on the plus four maybe it does somewhere in here but that's pretty funny considering it's got the styling of the plus four under the computer here is another manual this is the integrated software manual uh there's a floppy disk in here unfortunately it's a bit bent oh and another one in here that's kind of in worse shape also has no label on it so don't know what's on those and yeah this is the manual that tells you how to use the kind of card to use and pretty mediocre software that is included in rom on the plus 4 here so i don't really know any backstory from nick i wasn't able to get that from him the machine is relatively dirty not very clean looking but actually in okay shape for the most part serial number starts with c does that mean that this thing was actually made in canada well let's give this thing a test uh there was no power supply in the box but i happen to have the commodore plus 4 power supply here i really don't have an idea if this thing is like a death trap for this machine let's see what's the deal here this seems to be just like the commodore 64 power supply in that outputs 5 volts dc and 9 volts ac so i am assuming that this brick has the same foibles as the 64 power supply where it goes bad and kills things now normally i would just use a 64 power supply but commodore in their infinite wisdom switched up the connector again and while it looks similar to the 128 connector it's not the same this is the commodore 128 power supply connector it has a center pin is there a difference otherwise nope same voltages that come out of both and let's just quickly check the connector or on the back of this machine and there it is it does not have that center pin so i cannot plug this in which is my adapter that would let me use a commodore 64 power supply like my good one i keep on the bench here that i built myself that's not gonna kill machines so unfortunately that means i have to use this dodgy adapter or maybe death adapter as some might call it alright the retro tank is hooked up let's plug this in see if this thing works so far nothing will it work i'm putting the chances at nothing whoa it worked i was basically going to say that i didn't think this thing would actually work and look at that well shift lock okay the i key doesn't work oh started working all right so some of the keys don't work i think this is a membrane keyboard which isn't great how do you get into the plus 4 software there it is f1 key look at that david w johnson and they could have had geos in rom and they decided to go with this stuff ugh but look at that this machine actually works i would just assume that the ted and or the cpu or bad in this thing and it actually works so all i really need to do is clean this thing up and um well hey a working plus four kind of a rarity these days so cool thanks a lot nick for dropping off this working commodore plus four next up we have a package from amazon now unfortunately this didn't say mail call on it had my p.o box so i thought it was something that i actually ordered so i opened it up but it actually wasn't something i ordered it was this little box here amazon did not include any kind of gift receipt and this is non-descript oh there is something written on the end actually which i did not see the first time around it's a 24 by 27.5 inch beige anti-static mat so someone has gone ahead and ordered me an anti-static mat oops i'm dropping the box for the bench here to whoever you are thank you very much look at this look at this now one thing i worry about is it looks a little bit bright like it's very clean it's going to get dirty and dingy pretty quick but maybe that's just sort of par for the course right does have this wire here which i'm supposed to connect up to a ground point there it is and i don't have anything exactly quite handy yet now there is a american style quad outlet right here which is fully grounded so i can connect to that but i'm going to have to hook something up so it's not super sketchy plugging into one of those outlets so for grounding i'm going to take this clip here which has a banana jack which i guess is nice you can just if you have a little ground point you can plug this in i'm going to clip this onto that outlet cover here so this box is actually metal let me move this thermometer out of the way here so the box behind here is actually metal and it's grounded and the cover is also grounded and it has a bit of a lip to it here so it'll be perfect for clipping this thing right onto it so let me just move some loose parts out of the way and i'll clip this like so now there's actually a ground point connected to this mat how cool i'll stick my little thermometer thing back here i just cover up the wires just like that there you go it hides the wire and everything so i guess one of the problems is it is a little bit curly right now i do have this on the edge so i think i'll just have to let this sit and i guess over time is it should actually flatten out to some extent right hopefully this thing won't take too long to be flat on the bench where i don't need to hold the corners down but it's kind of cool it is very bright in color now that might interfere with filming to some extent so checking out the product label again it's from star tech and it's part number m3013 it's a qr code doesn't really give any specs for the anti-static mat i know there's various types of anti-static mats with how conductive they are and whatnot and if they're static dissipative or anti-static and things like that this feels a little bit more like a mouse pad the bottom is just rubber and the top has sort of a vinyl texture to it so i don't know how resistant that will be to getting burned by the soldering iron somehow it says that it's tested to comply with fcc standards i don't see how that's really a thing because that would be like saying this mouse pad here on my bench is also tested to comply with fcc standards like really give me a break all right so i have google lens up here let's see about this qr code it doesn't really say much at all it just says top technical specs meet ibm and us military static control standards [Music] so it says here top layer is anti-static pvc bottom layer is pvc foam there are some reviews here which don't really say too much about anything so there we go cool i mean if anything covers up the bench which is a little worse for wear under here people have asked what that big mark was on the bench i left an 18 amp hour jail cell 12 volt battery charging on the bench once i was just trickle charging it and it decided to leak and it leaked all over the bench that's why there's a perfect shape for an 18 amp hour battery and they kind of ate away at some of this laminate you know this is just an mdf type desk from ikea i've had this desk easily for let me think of how long i've had this desk it is easily 20 years old probably older i think i got this around 1999 or so but anyhow yeah so it's a little eaten away but to be honest very sturdy desk it's got a nice metal frame underneath it i do like it so cool thanks very much to the mystery viewer who gave this in we'll see how long it takes before i get some battle scars and also i'm sure this will make a lot of people happy who complain about how i mishandle my circuit boards and things like the commodore 64. i just stick them right on the bench on this sort of plastic laminate or whatever this is so now they'll get a little bit of anti-static love i guess but i won't get into the whole esd thing because that's a can of worms that everyone's going to have a thought and opinion on so anyhow thanks very much mystery viewer okay here's a package this one comes from jd in new zealand aka monotec monotec makes an amazing array of pcbs and products for old retro computers this is going to be something that is for my old ibm 5170 jd reached out to me after he saw a video on my second channel about the ibm ega card and how i tried to upgrade the ram on that card unsuccessfully on my ad by swapping out the 16k ram chips with 64k ram chips and he offered to send me some stuff including i am pretty sure one of the ram expansion units that jd sells on his website basically to allow me to expand my factory ega card all the way up to 256k so let me just unpack all the stuff here so we can take a quick gander at the goodies oh he sent me some sweets as well all right all right so jd has gone ahead and sent me another one of these almond dark almond chocolate bars uh made by whittaker's here this is new zealand chocolate i actually recently had a candy mail call video where i think i showed this off and i have already eaten all of the dark chocolate with the almond and there's another whittaker's here oh pear and honey now okay that sounds interesting let's let's crack this open i i'm very intrigued now i want to try this out ooh might get chocolate on my brand new anti-static mat here so the whitaker's chocolate's interesting has this foil wrapping it's actually sealed you have to tear it open all right so just uh normal chocolate here well i gotta say on my second channel video where i talked about the candy i said i didn't really like sweet candy i gotta say this is quite good i love pear i absolutely love pear and that's quite the interesting combo i gotta say i am a fan part of their artisan collection really really great i already said i like this in that video so if you haven't seen that candy review it was not popular not a lot of people watched it um i did like the the almond chocolate quite a bit all right looks like we have a can of soda here so that's a soft drink carbonated beverage something like that it's in an anti-static bag here so it's lp lemon and perroa peroa i don't know what that is good lemony stuff 330 milliliters now what's funny is in australia cans of soda or carbonated drinks or beverages or whatever i think are 360 or 380 milliliters more than the typical us cam which is 335 ml and i think i saw a lot of 330 in europe but it's funny this has the feeling of the cans they sell in the us here this feels exactly the same as those so it's almost like they use the same equipment to make these cans as uh they do here it says lp is the classic drink that's been refreshing new zealanders since oh ages ago when some bright spark in peoria pay aria i'm sorry i'm not saying that right peoria it's not peoria like in the south africa it's like pear orea peroria first created bottled and whacked a label on it lp drink it when you're thirsty like maybe right now all right i'm gonna give this a try here we go yeah nice fizz don't know if that's gonna come come across now this isn't totally cold because it wasn't in the fridge that is delicious it's nice and carbonated it's got a little hint of lemon it's sweet and a little taste of i guess pear or something like that i like now as a diabetic i don't normally drink sugary sodas like this but i'm gonna need to drink this whole thing i'm gonna go grab some ice upstairs and i will give myself some extra insulin for my insulin pump here some ice and it's actually a good thing that i have this soda because there's my blood sugar it's actually dropping anything below about 80. i need to get something sweet in me to bring it up quite the treat jd thank you very much for sending that so let's take a look at what you've sent along looks like this here is the ram expansion it's a kit there's a ram expansion for the video card that is the oh look you sent all the ram as well oh jd thank you very much very nice so we have a bunch of passives we have the pcb itself this clips on to the ibm ega card to expand it not really a whole lot to it oops we have one ttl chip here 74 hct04n we have all the sockets for the ram and we have the ram itself now this is one a ram each chip here is four bits wide and 16 kilobits this is compared to say uh 4116 chip which is one bit wide times 16 kilobits these are four and that's um what the ibm card needs stock ibm card has 64k and this adds an additional 192k to bring it up to 256. as i said before you can buy this monotech card on jd's website i'll put a link in the description of course to that there's the parts list and some assembly instructions this is going to be pretty easy to assemble not a whole not a whole lot to it now i have a follow-up video to that ibm ega card video because a few people had some suggestions on potential ways to upgrade that using the onboard memory while upgrading the onboard memory without needing this card so i'm going to assemble this card test that this works that it expands the card and then i'm going to try out some of the methods that viewers suggested in the comment section about getting that card maybe upgraded without needing this card so be a good test for people who don't necessarily want to buy this card but this ram expansion card the original ibm one of course is rare so it's pretty cool that jd sells this because anyone can just buy this and upgrade their card to the full 256k i put the ram kit back in the bag just so i don't mix up the parts because jd has gone ahead and sent me something else i think i know what this is oh top man so jd has gone ahead and sent me one of these replacement power switches for commodore 1084 monitors i have one uh it's the magnavox version that they sell in the us but it's like the phillips monitor and it's basically got a bad power switch on the back when you push it it doesn't stay in it's very frustrating so he sells these switches here which of course i'll link to as well to his store to replace the dodgy one on the motherboard that loses the little latch magnet mechanism the switch still works and i can get it to stay most of the time but it's definitely a pain in the butt and i have to fiddle with it to make it work so it'll be nice to take that monitor apart and replace that switch so we also went ahead and sent me this and what this is is the deluxe floppy controller high density floppy controller for the ibm pc xt so it's an 8-bit card it's got some smd parts which he has already installed so it has a socket here for this chip the plcc chip it's got a nine pin connector because i'm pretty sure this is also yes it is so besides being a high density floppy controller with a bios chip there it is monotec deluxe floppy it also has a serial port on here so it's like for a mouse controller so we went ahead and sent me the flash chip socket we have the dip switches there and then right here is the actual floppy controller itself so it's a national semiconductor part ns431ad or is it the pc 8477bv-1 either way this is a standard pc floppy controller card and oh looking at this what's really cool is you can put this pin header on here so you can actually plug in a regular cable but you can also plug in the slotted type of cable like the ibm original ibm pc xt came with a cable that was slotted on both ends that is awesome we have a crystal oscillator here that obviously goes on here and really there's just not a whole lot of assembly required everything is all included i'm assuming the serial port is actually handled by these ics over here and the floppy controller i think is uh this larger ic and the socket plus these smaller these are probably bus transceivers or whatnot and then we have the dip switches so yeah that is awesome i asked jd to send that along because uh you've probably seen this in a lot of my videos here this is also a floppy controller card in a very similar way in fact it's got the same chip on here or slightly similar but different the thing about this thing that was cool about it before i screwed it up it had a bios it worked on the xt it allowed up to four floppy drives you use these dip switches to configure the drives the problem is is i stuck the bios chip in backwards i took it out and i was about to copy the contents onto my computer but before i did that i put it in backwards and that instantly killed the eeprom now the problem is is the e-prompts that are floating around on the internet for similar cards did not work on this card the dip switches here which you use to set up the floppy drives goes through this pal chip here and i don't know how it talks to the main controller i see but whatever was going on it just did not work with those epromps so without an eprom at all this acts just like a normal floppy drive controller and put into a 286 or higher works with high density disk drives and in an xt you can use it for low density stuff but i was really kicking myself because with the original chip in here you could have up to four high density floppy drives even on an xt and it just worked it's really just extra handy for me because when i'm testing on xt machines i like to use these types of discs here that have you know the utilities i'm often using on them and i don't have to create separate discs with that are 720k that i can't hold all the tools because like check it barely fits as a bootable os on a 720k without deleting some of the files so it's nice to just be able to use the same test disk i use on everything on an xt so i'm going to build this up right away so i can start using it and here's the deluxe floppy controller fully assembled gotta say i love it nice high quality contacts on here it's like gold plated i guess it's not the the cheaper silver stuff very easy to assemble the only thing you have to be careful of when you install this socket just make sure you have the notched corner uh aligned with the notch on the silk screen otherwise it's freaking awesome i love this unfortunately i can't test it right now because my test bench machine is busy right now running some long-term hard drive diagnostics so can't do it right now but i'll be using this new deluxe floppy controller instead of this one in upcoming videos and if anyone does recognize this card has seen one similar to this there it is smb-c018 universal fdc card if anyone has a rom image that can work on this please let me know but i did spend a lot of time and i made a whole bunch of eproms for this thing with what i could find on the internet and not one of them would work properly it would always mis-detect the floppy drives as like 360k i think that's what i did every single time anyhow thank you jd for sending in this wonderful stuff i'll be showing off this card in future videos and i'll be showing this off also in a future video and these sweets will be eaten don't forget to check out jd's store and there'll be links in the description below and now there we go thanks jd for sending this stuff all the way from new zealand here's something from thorben in germany hi to all my german viewers i think everyone is probably tired of me saying that germany i think is the number three country on my viewership so i definitely have a good number of german viewers and hello to all of you and we have something here and add some candy and some more candy and more candy let me dig right into what this is without checking out the notes i can already see what it is looks like a commodore 1531 dataset this is the cassette drive that goes with the commodore ted series of machines like the c16 plus four things like that and there it is it's in really nice shape i am sure i mentioned recently when i opened up a bunch of machines that i didn't actually have one of those so i had no way to test tapes for those machines and he's gone ahead and sent that oh and he sent along an adapter that lets you use this drive on a vic-20 or a 64 or pet as well so that's pretty cool and there is the original manual in here which is probably in german a friendly introduction to your 1531 dataset i guess it's not in german it seems to be in english but on the back there's a warning paper and that is in german so that's funny commodore didn't even localize the manual how rude all right let's check out the note here it's rather lengthy so i'll probably summarize or paraphrase a good amount of it dear adrian i couldn't resist sending you this package after viewing your midweek mini mail call number 28. that just shows how long i've had this package and how long ago he sent this package i think i just put out mail call 48 so 20 episodes later so basically 20 weeks later yeah sorry about that just shows how behind i am at opening mail call packages he goes on to say here's the commodore 1531 dataset that he's had for a few years and it worked fine it hasn't been serviced but it worked fine since he doesn't own a plus 4 machine he had an adapter to connect it to 64 which i just showed it says growing up he was always a quote disc kid meaning he didn't use tapes he used floppy disks so he doesn't need more data sets which is why he sent this to me he's also gone ahead and included some candy which he thought was missing from my channel this is the haribo colorado like colorado and i think michael sent me some of this with the kung fu flash which i haven't tried yet i'm glad that candy has a really good shelf life because this has obviously been sitting around in my house in the basement here where the temperature is nice and cool all the time around 20 degrees celsius or 68 70 degrees so candy won't expire it's not like it's in the hot sun or anything but please don't send anything perishable because at the amount of time it takes me to open things yeah well you know it might spoil in that time so he sent some of this colorado he says that colorado brings back a lot of childhood memories for him especially from his grandparents they probably got it for him or gave it to him i wonder why no one's ever sent this to you before since it has the most variety of different stuff in one bag he's also sent some yogurt candies it says cat cat catches it's a picture of a cat yogurt candy that sounds absolutely delicious yogurt gums it says he says that these yogurt gums are one of his childhood candies as well and the brand is most famously known for their katzen okay i'm going to try to say this cats you know it sounds like a bad word cats and falcon cat paws probably pronounced that terribly which is a very soft licorice he says and then he also sent this chocolate bar here milka it's called cow spots wait it says kufleken or something cow spots greetings and kind regards from germany thorben with asylum h so that'd be torben so all right let's take a look at this tape drive on the bench let's take a look at side again close up it's in really nice shape so the 1531 data set it's basically exactly the same as the i don't know actually the mark the part number it's the one that goes on the commodore 64 and the vic-20 i had the kind of creamy beige color one for my commodore vic-20 when i was a kid it looked exactly like this but of course commodore changed up the connector to this little thing from the edge connector that was used on all of the commodore products except for the ted machines so the 64 if i'm going to use this tape drive on here we will need this adapter so we'll just connect that up i am sure that there is like a reverse adapter so you could use a commodore the older data sets on the plus 4 machines but i don't have a plus 4 machine handy well actually there is one just over there but it's a little bit taken apart so i'm going to connect this up to the 64 here this is the zip 64 but i'm pretty sure the cassette port should be working on here and i have a cassette to try out this was sent in from a lovely viewer i mean quite a few commodore tapes i don't remember who sent this one in let's see if this is the right tape that's in here kamikaze for the commodore 64 and 128 i struggled a little bit to get that in there but it did go down eventually so the 64 is connected to the little monitor here there it is this is a an ntsc machine and most likely this game is a pal market game let's see is there power here it's rewinding shift run stop hit play on tape let's see if this actually works case anyone's wondering about this monitor here i will have a review on the second channel for it i've got it recently it's sort of composite hdmi vga input i bought it from aliexpress it's not a very good monitor it does work though so that's nice um shouldn't we have seen something on here yet like a loading oh there we go found kamikaze what do you hit run stop nope boy that shows how much i know how to load tapes here let's try that again we rewind a little bit so shift run stop press play on tape here we go again try number two i hit the space bar this time oh there's a little splash screen there and i'm actually plugging the speaker in because maybe there's sound uh no sound yet i thought maybe like those ocean games there would be a tune playing while it's loading off tape which is so cool that the commodore 64 could do that at least this gave you a little i don't know snapshot of some of the other games a little cool graphic to look at while you wait the 10 minutes or whatever it's going to take to load this game hey look oh we got music let me turn the volume up it's very quiet the music okay cute if anyone played this game when you were a kid let me know this definitely comes from the uk here code masters it says it's a new release you know i don't have a joystick connected so i'm sure this um i'm supposed to take off obviously all right well anyhow that worked this um this data set works and it's a nice addition for the commodore 16 and the commodore plus four that i have if i ever set those things up this thing will just add to that classic look now if you're someone who grew up using tapes when you played games on your commodore machines i really don't recommend that you try to get a data set and i mean unless you have specific tapes you want to use that have maybe programs you wrote on them if you really want to experience the slow loading of a tape i recommend something like this a viewer sent this in and it's got a headphone in jack plugs into the cassette port on the computer and you can use your phone or computer or like a laptop to play the audio from tape files into the computer and it's a good way to load stuff in addition there are things called like a tap duino i think it plugs into the cassette port and it uses an sd card to load tape files but really all of that stuff is sort of silly in my opinion you're better off emulating a 1541 disk drive with a pi 1541 or getting an sd iec to plug that into the iec port it just even though disk drives are slow on the commodore they're so much faster than this and i really think by at this point all of the tape based games that existed like this game kamikaze could be had as a prg file something you can just download and load onto your st iec and load very quickly especially if you've got jiffy dots we're talking seconds versus the amount of time that this took here's my very hacked up sd iec here it's got an sd card with all the programs and stuff on there let's see if i have kamikaze on this thing i'm just doing a quick swap of the rom for whatever reason i have the stock rom chip in here and i usually have my jiffy dos in this machine and i don't know why i took it out i think i was testing that rom chip it was like something i pulled out of another machine turn this back on that should give us jiffy dos or actually jaffy doss thing i like about jaffydos is you can just do shift f7 and it will go right to your sdiec and allow you to allow you to browse it and we're browsing here and there's a file called comma cod and you can't read the rest of the name because it's a long file name and sdic truncates it let's hit enter on this see what we get says searching it's loading it's decompressing okay as it's cracked obviously that was a crack screen intro by excel what is this do you want unlimited lives okay so it's a trainer there it is kamikaze so that was a lot faster i sped up the loading off the tape drive but uh loading this off scienc with jiffy dos it took longer to get past the trainer and the crack screen let me turn the volume down then then the other parts so yeah like i said i really recommend that if you're just getting back into your commodore 64. so thank you very much corbin for sending in this very nice commodore disk drive with the adapter and also thank you very much for the candy that you sent in and speaking of candy i recently put out a candy review video on the second channel adrian's digital basement 2 and that was pretty much my worst performing video of all time i've never had a worse performing video since i started doing the channel in earnest so because of that i'm probably not going to do any more well maybe i'll do one more several viewers have sent in just candy like no retro computer parts and i want to at least let them know that i did get their candy so i'm probably going to do one more review of those big batches that people sent in but i'm not going to spend a whole ton of time on that and that's just because my time is probably better spent working on retro computer stuff that people do like to watch versus the candy stuff so with that that's going to be it for this mail call video once again thanks to everyone who has sent in stuff for mail call i still have quite a lot of stuff that i haven't shown yet unfortunately especially during the summer i've been extremely busy and it's been really hard to get to mail call items but i really do appreciate the stuff that you've sent in and it's not lost it's all organized in these boxes that are just off the side of the camera here so i'll definitely be getting to those and it's good because i'm not gonna be running out of things to make videos about because there was just so many incredible donations from people anyhow thanks very much to my patrons i just hugely appreciate all the support i've been getting their names are scrolling up the side of the screen if you'd like to become a patron there is a link in the description below you can check that out down there there's also a link to my second channel so check that out if you haven't seen that already and put your comments below hit the subscribe button you know all that youtube stuff that thumbs up thumbs down etc etc and that is gonna be it stay healthy stay safe and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 27,391

Rating: 4.9515152 out of 5

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Id: D5WnwPbUmK4

Length: 38min 14sec (2294 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021