Glad to hear you have a BBC Micro now. They’re fine machines, and as you rightly point out, require 240V power plus some sort of monitor. Ignore the PAL outputs and go straight for the RGB which is on a DIN connector. I vaguely recollect making up a special cable when I got mine going and hooking it up to a Sony studio monitor. Watch out for the X2 cap in the power supply which is a known point of failure. It’s easy enough to replace if that hasn’t already been done, but annoying to have it fail...
240 ... What were they thinking!? What do we do for a disk drive? On Fri, Jun 1, 2018, 7:24 AM David Comley via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Glad to hear you have a BBC Micro now. They’re fine machines, and as you rightly point out, require 240V power plus some sort of monitor. Ignore the PAL outputs and go straight for the RGB which is on a DIN connector. I vaguely recollect making up a special cable when I got mine going and hooking it up to a Sony studio monitor.
Watch out for the X2 cap in the power supply which is a known point of failure. It’s easy enough to replace if that hasn’t already been done, but annoying to have it fail...
Dave
On Jun 1, 2018, at 1:36 AM, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Well that was interesting!
Several of us were there: me, Doug, Chris F., Dean, Chris L., Brian C., Bill Lange (not Bill L. the auction seller), and Jason Scott. All of us but Bill made it into a photo (https://tinyurl.com/ydbuy6pd) kindly taken by Chris L.'s girlfriend.
The auctioned started at 3pm. I was the last to leave at midnight -- but the auction was still going strong! They had another hour or two remaining.
Some people got amazing bargains (valuable nuggets discovered after buying boxes of inexpensive items) and other people paid full retail or higher for various things. We spotted a few people who were professional sellers, but most of the people (maybe 100?) were individual collectors, and most of those were gamers, not computer collectors like us. However we did see a few people who said they attended VCF East, and I couldn't help myself from recruiting a few new folks.
VCFed itself had a good night:
- Dean purchased a box of stuff which happened to contain a CGA/EGA/VGA adapter -- exactly what I posted about us needing a few days ago -- so I commandeered that item for us. :)
- VCFed has several S-100 computers, but there was one item I'd never seen: an industrial (rackmount) chassis with a keyboard built into the front edge of the case. It is from a company called MBR. No boards inside, but it looked unique. At my request, Dean entered an absentee bid for it (it would be one of the last items auctioned due to placement in the room). He'll donate it to us if he wins. We will find out tomorrow.
- VCFed has an Amstrad 640 and various Sinclair computers, but we didn't own a BBC Micro. There was a first-gen (1981) unit available in the auction. At my request, Bill (and his wife Lucy) successfully bid on it and donated it to us. It also has some nice software. We'll have to get a power adapter for it to use an American outlet.
It was fun hanging out with several group members all afternoon/evening. There were a few times where some of the group members bid against each other ... a little healthy competition!
Overall a very successful time for Bill Log. and all buyers.