Hacker News Reader

Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

This was the computer I got as a kid, which I only ever used to play games on (maybe my parents should have just given me that nintendo I wanted). I still have it but it hasn’t been turned on for decades. I wonder how likely it would be to turn on? I suspect it would need to be opened up for inspection first but since I don’t know how to solder I doubt there’s anything I could do on the inside and I wouldn’t know how to find someone to help me with it.

Same deal with my se/30. It hasn’t been turned on for many years and I’m afraid to do so in case I damage it (further). IIRC it had a broken floppy drive anyway so it needs some repairs.

View on HN

The 128 will probably work just fine today. They don't have the notoriously dangerous power supply of the C64. You might want to add a cooling fan to it, or some heat sinks on the rarer chips. To be safer, you could even test the voltages on the power supply before plugging it into the machine, and open it up to look for leaking capacitors, but it's not really a machine that fails much (yet).

The SE/30 needs to have its PRAM battery removed, it is a bunch of lithium-acid waiting to leak all over the logic board. The electrolytic capacitors on it are also fairly notorious for leaking and destroying electrical traces, but there's not much you can do about that without learning to use solder.

What about a regular C128 all-in-one? Same bad external PS as the C64?

“The C128's power supply is improved over the C64's unreliable design, being much larger and equipped with cooling vents and a replaceable fuse,” according to Wikipedia

Ten years ago I went through my Apple collection to remove those RTC batteries when people started reporting that they were exploding. I have an Apple "set top box" prototype- didn't have one with a ROM that allowed to actually function as a standalone system, but it was still a really neat artifact. The battery had exploded and turned the inside of the case into a rusty mess. That was a painful moment of realization. I also lost a Mac Classic to a bursting battery but I managed to get the batteries out of my other systems in time. I also have a Bandai Pippin and since that's also basically a Mac it's also got the same RTC battery, and luckily it wasn't all that hard to disassemble non-destructively to remove it. Those batteries did tend to last a really long time, and I imagine in some systems the clock is probably still keeping time until the moment the battery melts.

If you've had old Apple systems on the shelf for a long time- or an Apple IIgs which also had a battery-backed RTC- get those original batteries out!

My IIgs still has its original "Manufactured In West Germany" battery, still at 3.0V and keeping the RTC running! I'll need to remember to remove it before it goes back in cold storage, or when it finally drops below an acceptable Vcc.

So basically you used it in C64 mode? My childhood friend also had a C128 (her dad did, anyway) and we used it in C64 mode.

Re: turning it on now, the consensus of the C64 fan community is that you should replace the original PSU with a new one, because the old ones were prone to failure and could ruin your computer. Maybe the same applies to the C128?

edit: ah, a sibling commenter mentions the C128 PSU isn't as dangerous as the C64's.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com