I thank my friend Giacomo Vernoni for having given me this console that i was looking for a long times. This the link of the Giacomo blog where you can find a complete review of this console with some beautiful photos.

Gallery:

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Following Commodore’s acquistion of MOS technologies (famous for producing the later 6502 chip for the PET), the Pong-like TV Game consoles 2000K and 3000H made their appearance.

The 3000H console features two paddles (sliders), one internal and one connected by wire (with 2 additional optional sliders); 9VDC or battery power (6 AA batteries required, yes it can run on batteries!).  It generates its own sound with the built-in speaker and can play 4 games: Tennis, Target (with an optional light gun), Football and Squash.  There is also a gage for difficulty level (handicap), and another for the number of players and other settings.

The cool thing is that the core chip, the MOS 7601 (the last of MOS’s Pong-chip line) read game instructions from a special ROM which appears to be internal to the chip, making it stand out from the other Pong-clones that had the game hard-coded into the system’s logic

However, because graphics and sound are also generated directly by the 7601 and are hardwired into the chip’s logic, it meantthat special variants had to be created if a special display was required for an arbitrary application. Thus, the 7601 in the TV Game series, while being programmable in a crude sense, is hardwired to generate the graphics for the TV Game series’ internal games only and cannot be used into drawing other kinds of shapes.

Games available were the following four:

• Game mira (playable with an optional optical gun )
• Tennis
• Football
• Squash

source: computinghistory.org.uk

I thank my dear friend that gave me the Atari Touch Tablet.

Autopsy:

The Atari Touch Tablet was a well designed and brilliant idea. Giving the user the ability to use a virtual sheet of paper and pen, they could draw, drag and drop, paint and erase images with the included Atari Artist program.

Perhaps given more time, the Touch Tablet could have been used for many other innovative ideas and perhaps vertical market applications. The Atari CX-77 Touch Tablet was designed by Tom Palecki formerly of Atari’s Industrial Design group.

source: atarimuseum.com

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The VIC-20 (Germany: VC-20; Japan: VIC-1001) is an 8-bit home computer which was sold by Commodore Business Machines. The VIC-20 was announced in 1980, roughly three years after Commodore’s first personal computer, the PET. The VIC-20 was the first computer of any description to sell one million units.

The VIC-20 was intended to be more economical than the PET computer. It was equipped with only 5 kB of RAM (of this, only 3.5 KB were available to the BASIC programmer) and used the same MOS 6502 CPU as the PET. The VIC-20′s video chip, the MOS Technology VIC, was a general-purpose color video chip designed by Al Charpentier in 1977 and intended for use in inexpensive display terminals and game consoles, but Commodore could not find a market for the chip. As the Apple II gained momentum with the advent of VisiCalc in 1979, Jack Tramiel wanted a product that would compete in the same segment, to be presented at the January 1980 CES. For this reason Chuck Peddle and Bill Seiler started to design a computer named TOI (The Other Intellect).

The TOI computer failed to materialize, mostly due to the fact that it required an 80-column character display which in turn required the MOS Technology 6564 chip. However, the chip could not be used in the TOI since it required very expensive static RAM to operate fast enough. In the meantime, freshman engineer Robert Yannes at MOS Technology (then a part of Commodore) had designed a computer in his home dubbed the MicroPET and finished a prototype with some help from Al Charpentier and Charles Winterble. With the TOI unfinished, when Jack Tramiel was confronted with the MicroPET prototype, he immediately said he wanted it to be finished and ordered it to be mass-produced following a limited demonstration at the CES.

source: wikipedia

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The HS2 is a joystick adapter to improve the playability (like a Arcade/Coin-op). The adapter is compatible with the consoles ColecoVision & Atari 2600.

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The JD-560 and JD -562 are a series of Floppy disk drives that can be connected externally of the computer.

They are completely applicable to IBM PC/XT/AT/386/486 compatible computers and need no any special interface cards.

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from Wikipedia homepage:

The Intellivision is a video game console released by Mattel in 1979. Development of the console began in 1978, less than a year after the introduction of its main competitor, the Atari 2600. The word intellivision is a portmanteau of “intelligent television”. Over 3 million Intellivision units were sold and a total of 125 games were released for the console.

In 2009, video game website IGN named the Intellivision the No. 14 greatest video game console of all time. It became Mattel’s first video game console, though it was their only console until the release of the HyperScan in 2006.

The Intellivision was developed by Mattel Electronics, a subsidiary of Mattel formed expressly for the development of electronic games. The console was test marketed in Fresno, California, in 1979 with a total of four games available, and was released nationwide in 1980 with a price tag of US$299 and a pack-in game: Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack. Though not the first system to challenge Atari, it was the first to pose a serious threat to Atari’s dominance. A series of advertisements featuring George Plimpton were produced, that demonstrated the superiority of the Intellivision’s graphics and sound to those of the Atari 2600, using side-by-side game comparisons.

Mattel Intellivision SECAM Motherboard:

source: wikipedia

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How you can see from the gallery i had to remove the scotch tape that has been glued on the keys, the scotch tape with the long time has dried and detached, now the keyboard is perfect.

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The Peters WS128 Home Computer is a Russian Clone of a Sinclair Spectrum 128 but with the addition of some features.

• Built-in printer port (centronics).
• The power switch.
• A internal power supply.
• Built-in ROM: Tetris Game, Assembler Monitor, Video Tester, Text Editor.

The Company Peters, then Peters Plus Ltd. is a company of microelectronic and computer founded in the year 1990 in St. Petersburg, known especially for the clone Sprinter.

Download: Spectrumpedia (1284)

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You can use any power supply with 6v / 1.5 amp with the polarity described below:

Polarity is positive + on the outside or barrel and negative - on the inside or tip

from Wikipedia and The National Valve Museum homepage:

The Sinclair TV80, also known as the Flat Screen Pocket TV or FTV1, was a pocket television launched by Sinclair Research in 1984. Unlike Sinclair’s earlier attempts at a portable television, the TV80 used a flat CRT with a side-mounted electron gun instead of a conventional CRT; the picture was made to appear larger than it was by the use of a Fresnel lens.

The set has a 2 in. screen, measures 5= x 3= x 1< in. and weighs 9= oz. A special Polaroid flat battery that provides 15 hours’ operation has been produced to power it — there’s also a mains adaptor. The set itself goes on sale at #79.95, with the 6V Polaroid lithium batteries in packs of three at #9.95 per pack and the adaptor at #7.95, all prices inclusive of VAT, postage and packing. Normal retail and export sales are expected to start during the first half of 1984. Sir Clive Sinclair predicts sales rising to a million or more a year worldwide, and speaks of the set ‘achieving for television what the transistor radio did for wireless, creating a new one-per-person product’.

The set has some interesting technical features. It is for example a multi-standard receiver with automatic switching between most UHF standards worldwide except for France. Most of the circuitry is contained within a single ic that uses innovative digital techniques to monitor the vision and sound signals and adjust the circuitry automatically to suit the transmission standard. The ic was jointly developed by Ferranti and Sinclair Research and is being produced by Ferranti. Manufacture of the flat-screen tube (the gun is mounted to one side and the phosphor is deposited on the rear section of the viewing part) has been subcontracted to Timex in Dundee, using Sinclair designed and owned automatic plant. Assembly of the sets has been subcontracted to Thorn.

Apart from the tube and the ic, the main electronic items consist of the video output transistor, line and field output stages, the tube power supply generator and the tuner. The latter measures just 31 x 23 x 11 mm and uses hybrid microminiature components with advanced surface mounting. It’s output is at 230 MHz, which has been chosen to avoid image frequency problems in the UHF band.

It was a commercial failure, and did not recoup the £4m it cost to develop; only 15,000 units were sold. New Scientist warned that the technology used by the device would be short-lived, in view of the liquid crystal display technology being developed by Casio.

Download: Service Manual Sinclair FTV1 & FTV2 (2181)

Video:

source: wikipedia r-type.org

Finally i have found a small CRT Color TV with Composite input and an External RF Antenna input. This is a very useful in my lab where the free space is always a problem.

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from Wikipedia:

The Texas Instruments TI-99/4A was an early home computer, released in June 1981, originally at a price of US$525. It was an enhanced version of the less successful TI-99/4 model, which was released in late 1979 at a price of $1,150. The TI-99/4A added an additional graphics mode, “lowercase” characters consisting of small capitals, and a full travel keyboard. Its predecessor, the TI-99/4, featured a calculator-style chiclet keyboard and a character set that lacked lowercase text.

The TI-99/4A’s CPU, motherboard, and ROM cartridge (“Solid State Software”) slot were built into a single console, along with the keyboard. The power regulator board is housed below and in front of the cartridge slot under the sloped area to the right of the keyboard. This area gets very hot so users commonly refer to it as the “coffee cup warmer”. The external power supply, which was different according to the country of sale, was merely a step-down transformer.

Available peripherals included a 5¼” floppy disk drive and controller, an RS-232 card comprising two serial ports and one parallel port, a P-code card for Pascal support, a thermal printer, an acoustic coupler, a tape drive using standard audio cassettes as media, and a 32 KB memory expansion card. The TI-99/4 was sold with both the computer and a monitor (a modified 13″ Zenith Color TV) as Texas Instruments could not get their RF Modulator FCC approved in time. The TI-99/4A did ship with an RF Modulator.

In the early 1980s, TI was known as a pioneer in speech synthesis, and a highly popular plug-in speech synthesizer module was available for the TI-99/4 and 4A. Speech synthesizers were offered free with the purchase of a number of cartridges and were used by many TI-written video games (notable titles offered with speech during this promotion were Alpiner and Parsec). The synthesizer used a variant of linear predictive coding and had a small in-built vocabulary. The original intent was to release small cartridges that plugged directly into the synthesizer unit, which would increase the device’s built in vocabulary. However, the success of software text-to-speech in the Terminal Emulator II cartridge cancelled that plan. Most speech synthesizers were still shipped with the door that opened on the top, although very few had the connector inside. There are no known speech modules in existence for those few units with the connector. In many games (mostly those produced by TI), the speech synthesizer had relatively realistic voices. For example, Alpiner’s speech included male and female voices and could be quite sarcastic when the player made a bad move.

Playing Alpiner Cartridge:

source: wikipedia

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Donated By: Andrea Pierdomenico

from The Personal Computer Museum:

The PowerPad is Chalkboard’s graphics tablet. With its combination of features, reasonable price, friendly support, and wide range of software, it would be an excellent addition to your hardware.

The first thing you notice about the PowerPad is that it’s big: it measures 17 inches by 14 inches, with a drawing surface 12 inches square. It is easier to draw on than the smaller surfaces of other tablets.

The PowerPad uses 14,400 tiny digital switches to read where pressure is applied to the pad. There are 10 x 10 per inch. Unlike the surfaces of other pads, the PowerPad has no problem resolving simultaneous multiple inputs. This ability allows the PowerPad to be used as much more than just a graphics tablet: it becomes a flexible input device.

If you’ve done a little arithmetic, you may be wondering about the PowerPad’s resolution. Ten switches per inch by 12 inches equals 120 points, or pixels – not even as high resolutions as Graphics 7! However, it’s possible to design a program using the Atari’s highest-resolution screen, by “software stretching” of the resolution.

The version of Micro Illustrator ($49.45) for the PowerPad has a special feature called “Scale” that uses ,Software stretching” to let you draw pixel by pixel, even though the tablet’s resolution isn’t as high as Micro Illustrator’s.

Hardware isn’t of much use without software, but the PowerPad doesn’t come with any. However, Chalkboard offers several programs in cartridges requiring 32K of RAM for the Commodore VIC-20.

source: pcmuseum.ca

I thank my dear friend for the donation of the Cartridges for Commodore VIC-20.

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from Wikipedia:

The Commodore 16 was a home computer made by Commodore with a 6502-compatible 8501 CPU, released in 1984. It was intended to be an entry-level computer to replace the VIC-20 and it often sold for 99 USD. A cost-reduced version, the Commodore 116, was sold only in Europe.

The C16 was intended to compete with other sub-$100 computers from Timex Corporation, Mattel, and Texas Instruments (TI). Timex’s and Mattel’s computers were less expensive than the VIC-20, and although the VIC-20 offered better expandability, a full-travel keyboard, and in some cases more memory, the C16 offered a chance to improve upon those advantages. The TI-99/4A was priced in-between Commodore’s VIC-20 and Commodore 64, and was somewhat between them in capability, but TI was lowering its prices. On paper, the C16 was a closer match for the TI-99/4A than the aging VIC-20.

Commodore president Jack Tramiel feared that one or more Japanese companies would introduce a consumer-oriented computer and undercut everyone’s prices. Although the Japanese would soon dominate the U.S. video game console market, their feared dominance of the home computer field never materialized. Additionally, Timex, Mattel, and TI departed the computer market before the C16 was released.

Outwardly the C16 resembled the VIC-20 and the C64, but with a dark gray case and light gray keys. The keyboard layout differed slightly from the earlier models, adding an escape key and four cursor keys replacing the shifted-key arrangement inherited from the C-64 and VIC. Performance-wise located between the VIC-20 and 64, it had 16 kilobytes of RAM with 12 KB available to its built-in BASIC interpreter, and a new sound and video chipset offering a palette of 128 colors (in reality 121, since the system offered 16 base colors with 8 shades per color, but black always remained black, with all 8 shades), the TED (better than the VIC used in the VIC-20, but lacking the sprite capability of the VIC-II and advanced sound capabilities of the SID, both used in the C64). The ROM resident BASIC 3.5, however, was more powerful than the VIC-20′s and C64′s BASIC 2.0, in that it had commands for sound and bitmapped graphics (320×200 pixels), as well as simple program tracing/debugging.

source: wikipedia

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This is a old article that i forgot to publish.

from Wikipedia:

The Commodore Plus/4 is a home computer released by Commodore International in 1984. The “Plus/4″ name refers to the four-application ROM resident office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, database, and graphing); it was billed as “the productivity computer with software built-in”. It had some success in Europe, though it was a total flop in the United States, where it was derided as the “Minus/60″—a pun on the numerical difference between the Plus/4 and the dominant Commodore 64.

In the early 1980s, Commodore found itself engaged in a price war in the home computer market. Companies like Texas Instruments and Timex Corporation were releasing computers that undercut the price of Commodore’s PET line. Commodore’s MOS Technology division had designed a video chip but could not find any third-party buyers. The VIC-20 resulted from the confluence of these events and it was introduced in 1980 at a list price of $299.95.

Later, spurred by the competition, Commodore was able to reduce the VIC’s street price to $99, and it became the first computer to sell over 1 million units. The Commodore 64, the first 64-kB computer to sell for under 600 US$, was another salvo in the price war but it was far more expensive to make than the VIC-20 because it used discrete chips for video, sound, and I/O. Still, the C-64 went on to become a best-seller and was selling for $199 at the time of the Plus/4′s introduction.

Even while C64 sales were rising, Commodore president Jack Tramiel wanted a new computer line that would use fewer chips and at the same time address some of the user complaints about the VIC and C64.

source: wikipedia

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from Wikipedia:

The Music Maker was a plastic overlay for the Commodore 64 “breadbox” keyboard, which included plastic piano keys corresponding to keys on the keyboard.

source: wikipedia