Author: Dave Farquhar

Marx 52844 train set

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Marx 52844 train set

Marx train set 52844 was an electric train set from Marx from 1955. It featured arguably Marx’s second-best steam locomotive pulling deluxe 8-wheel plastic freight cars, lettered for the Santa Fe.

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CD-ROM drives in 286 and 386 PCs

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
CD-ROM drives in 286 and 386 PCs

I’ve seen a few YouTube videos where people mentioned installing CD-ROM drives in 386 or even 286 computers and getting comments about it. In this blog post, I’ll talk about whether CD ROM drives are an anachronism in a system that old.

And if you’re wondering whether a CD-ROM drive will work in a 286 or 386 PC, I can verify they absolutely do. Just load the same DOS drivers you would on a 486.

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Commodore PLA: The breadbin killer

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Commodore PLA: The breadbin killer

The Commodore PLA is one of the most problematic ICs in the Commodore 64. Even in the early 1990s, Commodore parts dealer The Grapevine Group estimated 50% of dead C-64s were due to a bad PLA. In this blog post, we will explore what the PLA was, and we’ll investigate the gremlin that lurks inside some PLAs but not others.

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Marx diesel type electric train set 45225

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Marx diesel type electric train set 45225

Marx train set 45225 was an electric train set from Marx from 1951-1953, and possibly into 1954. Arguably the last hurrah for Marx’s tinplate trains, it featured Marx’s #21 tinplate diesels in the Santa Fe Warbonnet livery pulling tin freight cars on high trucks.

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Piracy on the Commodore 64: A memoir

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Piracy on the Commodore 64: A memoir

One of the indelible memories of owning and using a Commodore 64, at least for me, was the disk drive knocking and rattling loudly as your game loaded. This was the results of deliberately putting errors on the disk to make it difficult to copy. In this blog post, I’ll give you the straight talk on how big of a problem software piracy was on the Commodore C-64, at least in the United States, and what it led to, including the bad, the ugly, and the good. Not that the end justifies the means, but over time it did lead to some good things too.

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Marx Stream Line Steam Type Electrical Train 52925

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Marx Stream Line Steam Type Electrical Train 52925

Marx train set 52925 was a plastic postwar train set for the Canadian market, commemorating the Canadian Pacific railroad. It was a five-unit train featuring a 2-4-2 steam locomotive with a tender pulling two freight cars and a caboose.

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Fast Hack’em: The best C-64 disk copier?

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing
Fast Hack’em: The best C-64 disk copier?

Disk copiers were long a taboo subject that mainstream computer publications didn’t like to talk about. But not here. In this blog post, we’ll talk about one of the most innovative and popular copiers of all time for the Commodore 64, a program called Fast Hack’em, by Basement Boys Software. We’ll also talk about the company’s connection to Nintendo, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves just yet.

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What a DASD is besides curious IBM terminology

Dave Farquhar Hardware
What a DASD is besides curious IBM terminology

When reading IBM documentation or looking at a piece of IBM hardware, you may see a reference to an unfamiliar term: DASD. In this blog post, I’ll explain what DASD means and what other terms you may know it by.

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Nintendo in a small town, 1987

Dave Farquhar Retro Gaming
Nintendo in a small town, 1987

I was in middle school in 1986 when my friends started getting new video game consoles. It’s possible that one or two of them got them right away in the fall. Since it’s been nearly 40 years, the timelines are a little fuzzy. But I do remember visiting a friend over winter break and he had his new Nintendo NES set up. He was always the first to get everything new, but he was especially excited about this.

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Marx steam freight train set 9610

Dave Farquhar Toy trains
Marx steam freight train set 9610

The Marx/Allstate steam freight train set number 9610 was an steam freight train set featuring a plastic steam engine pulling plastic freight cars with 4 wheels and fake trucks to make them look like 8 wheels. It replaced earlier sets Marx made for Sears like the 9644, replacing metal cars with plastic. It was similar to the 9611 set, replacing the diesels with steam.

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