David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
In 1974, Marx introduced a diesel freight train set it called The Allegheny, catalog #25760, that ran on AC electric power and sold through catalog retailers. If you have a Marx 25760 train set today, it’s worth considerably more than its original retail price, even adjusted for inflation.
Marx’s Allegheny train set was part of the Great American Railroads series. It had catalog number 25760 and was manufactured only in 1974. Today it is one of the most valuable Marx train sets ever made.
The distinctive thing about the Commodore 64 was its custom chips. And while the VIC-II chip provided competitive graphics, the 64’s secret weapon was the sound interface device, also known as the SID. The Mastermind behind the SID was a young chip designer named Robert Yannes, who went on to found the synthesizer company Ensoniq. But the chips frequently fail today and the problem is getting worse. Here’s why 6581 SID chips can go bad just sitting on a shelf.
What was the first CD burner? It seems like a straightforward question, but I had a hard time finding a straight answer. The first CD burner in the modern sense was released in 1991. And I think it was either Yamaha or Sony.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.