If someone offers something, and you turn them down because it's not something that will work for the show, and they send it anyway, *they* are the jerk, not you.
He could sell what he don't need/want and raise money for some charity. I think,also, most of the people wants to donate is just trash witch is a legitimate reason to turn down things.
Yeah that's just being really rude. Go donate it to Goodwill or just toss it away. Why you'd go to such lengths to send your old shit to a guy on UA-cam, is beyond me.
Why's? Because pend good hard earned money to send him things whether valuable or not. Plus, as he mentioned, the floppy disc with a handwritten label, did he at least check it? Seems like he didn't. What if someone were trying to share a game or program with him for which they didn't want to part with the original? Now, he'll never know since he threw it out. That's why he will now get "hate".
ngiants22 well they should have labelled the disc properly or attached a note explaining what it was. They might as well have taken a shit on his doorstep.
He is the type of guy that even when he turns you down you would not feel angry at him at all and you would even enjoy it because of the way he tells you.
That ZX80 is an awesome donation, here in the UK they go for hundreds when they work. Easy to fix too. The real bonus is the casing is super brittle, and the one you got looks fully intact! Usually the corners are broken off. 😊
What if you made a series out of the items that you never wanted. Packaging fails. I would have probably enjoyed watching you face palm as you open that smashed pentium processor.
i can see people being upset hearing that you sell stuff on ebay (which you dont). but having heard that you trade with other youtubers helps keep this genre of retro electronics alive. the intel dev kit you traded to obsolete geek was probably a good trade considering he may have had more knowledge about the item and wanted to do a review, while for you, it may have just sat on a shelf. the trade essentially made content for another channel, and your own.
I didn't watch the whole thing yet, but I wanted to note that that is an Intellivision II console. Those are actually somewhat rare as they did not sell well compared to the original. They're essentially the same console, but feature a few changes that render some games unplayable (for the most part, games that don't use the standard system boot screen). They're also a bit smaller and feature detachable controllers, something the original did not have. I also personally think the original looked much better with it's wood paneling. bonus fact: you have one of (if not THE) first games to have a soundtrack, Snafu. EDIT: Finished the video, the way you handled the unwanted donations was MORE than tactful.
I suspect that people who send you unwanted items (even after you've refused them) are doing so because they can't BEAR to discard the items themselves. They're borderline hoarders and by "setting the item free" into the world (by sending it to you) they have abdicated any personal responsibility (or feelings of guilt) for having made a decision to trash the item. Perhaps they think of you as a "no-kill electronics shelter". (Try not to let it get you down. Don't be too discouraged or frustrated by it.) Thanks for your videos. I enjoy them very much and look forward to seeing what you'll be doing next.
Good for you for sticking to your gut feelings on how to respond to these people. Sounds like you are at a crossroad and need to decide whether or not to grow your channel into something bigger or keep it small and exactly what you want it to be. I think either path is fine in the end but you need to decide what you want to do. If you go the bigger path and expand you NEED help! Ask for volunteers even if its only for a few hours once a week helping to sort/arrange/clean up/move stuff to a new storage location like lazy game reviews has. Get another person on board to do reviews or videos on the stuff that you don't really care to cover but want to include on your channel. Otherwise scale back and keep your current ground and cover a very narrow amount of content. In the end your happiness matters too not just ours. If you aren't happy, then why do it?
You lucky man, you got a free TR-626! Those are individual outs for each of the sounds coming out of the drum machine. It's essentially an upgraded 505 with latin percussion sounds. The 505 and 626 are a bit the unsung brothers of the TR family, fetching much much lower prices than the 606, 7x7, 808 and 909.
I have a TR 626, I don't use it much, but anything Roland is normally worth keeping. If I remember right on mine one key doesn't work quite right. I'm interested what you will do with it, I'd like to see you use it or make a video about it. Thanks.
Don't worry about the haters. I found you channel and I truly enjoy watching you explain and demonstrate the old tech. I remember some of it and some others, I was like, wow, that was around in the 80's. Keep up the good work.
That ZX80 computer, (thanks for pronouncing it correctly by the way), somebody sent you will be worth a small fortune if it works. They're rare in the UK now as well.
Maybe the ZX80 could open up a lucrative seam of British 8bits on this channel. Sinclair's tend to be built to a to a price point, so laughably or ingeniously made. ZX80 up there with Turing as British computer royalty as far as I'm concerned. Started a huge home computer boom, with more computers per household in UK than any country at the time. Prefer 6502 Acorns myself. Lots of content on both those machines out there.
Nice idea. I'd love to see 8-bit Guy do some more stuff with the old UK computers. I know it's a pain getting them working in the States with power adaptors for voltage, and adaptors for the TV output. I'm one of the Sinclair generation from the 80s. Who made a successful career in programming thanks to Clive Sinclair.
Electrically, the zx80 was mostly equivalent to the ZX81... Main differences were: 1.A lot more chips in the ZX80(the ZX81 used a custom chip that Sinclair called the ULA that substituted for many of the chips in the ZX80). 2.no SLOW mode(the NMI circuitry needed for this was not in the ZX80) 3.the ZX80 BASIC was a 4k fixed point BASIC.....the ZX81 used a 8K floating point BASIC BTW, in each case, around 512 bytes was used for the character set, so the actual BASIC was smaller than 4K or 8K There was a conversion kit available for the ZX80 to convert it to the 8K BASIC...it came with a overlay for the keyboard. You ended up with a unit that worked exactly like a ZX81 except that the SLOW mode was not there(since the hardware for this was not available)
And it has surprisingly good case condition, without broken edges. But sadly, as my experience says, of stuff has good looking case, it was probably broken long time ago and sit on a shelf woke
Hey, I'm in one of those pics! It was great visiting you Dave, I hope I will be able to do it again soon. Also, I had a Vectrex when I was a kid. Even had the 3-D glasses. Really wish I still had it.
Some programs for the pc had overlays for the keyboard (wordstar and wordperfect to name just two). I had a stack of cards that fitted the zx spectrum 48 keys with space for you to write something.
I usually don't watch these videos in full, mainly because they are long. but today, I watched it. You are one of my favourite old-school tech UA-camrs. Keep up the good work!
Dave! You are such a nice person, like every time you talk about channel difficulties or your non-youtube stuff in general you seem so kind! The 'open-door' pictures were really nice to see, too.
Don't feel too bad. You have to look out for your channel and content. And about your content, it's awesome! I've relived a LOT of my electronic youth through your videos. Thanks for all your work and care in making 8-Bit Guy.
The Roland TR626 doesn't have trigger inputs; they're audio outputs for individual drum sounds. You may want to put different effects on different sounds, or a click track for a drummer to sync to.
Anamnesia Yep, I was wondering if anyone else noticed that. Individual outputs can be pretty useful too (external processing, like you mentioned). And I'm not familiar with the 626, but one may be able to use MIDI to trigger individual sounds anyway. Not that it's necessary, as it's got a built in sequencer
I'm glad you mentioned the whole donation of broken and worthless stuff. I used to work in goodwill, and I hated people that donated vinyl records and obsolete computer parts because people weren't buying them and running out of shelf space for stuff that's more popular. We told the donators to not give us those stuff, and told them to send them to recycling centers. Keep it up David.
Beat me to it! On Friday I was thinking of my Atari 5200... Star Raiders comes to mind. But the Intellivision was first. I had the Colecovision too but I don't recall any games that used keypad , or at least any game for which I saw the need to search the game box for such inclusion. But I've spent the past two days trying to compose the best unfunny-childish-puppet-like reply. Oh wait.. that's TechMoan 's channel! Whoops.
While I'm sure David appreciates all the offers the general public graciously submit to him, he only has so much space. That being said, if anyone out there wants to donate a working commodore 64, 1541, and an action replay cartridge, I'll gladly accept it on his behalf and relive the days of me coding cracktros.
What part of the world do you hail from?? I am in Australia, if anyone wants to send me a Commodore 64, 1541, Action Replay. I would gladly accept it too.
same here, i have tons of old diskettes of C64 games i used to play but nothing to play them on now..i regret throwing out my failing C64 SX when i was a stupid kid.. id gladly take a C64!!
Yeah, I'm a bit p'd off at 12 year old me for disassembling and discarding a load of old stuff, like the 20MB Apple hard drive which came with a Mac Plus someone was throwing out. Fortunately I still have the Mac (and external floppy drive) but I don't have any working System disks for it. What a moron.
Just an F.Y.I. the sockets on the back of the TR-626 will be separate audio outputs not connections for drum pads. At that point I think Roland only had the PAD-8 which was MIDI only at the time so had no need to release a machine with pad inputs.
Love seeing the CoCo stuff. I was first introduced to computing in the 80's with the CoCo 2 in 3rd grade, and would always visit Radio Shacks because they would always have a CoCo I could mess around with on display. It was my first computer (the Color Computer 3) and I had it for 5 years. At one point I had it upgraded to 2 MB of RAM, ran OS-9 Level II and RiBBS. 720K 3.5" and 360K 5.25" dual Floppy drives with the Multi-Pak Interface (Upgraded PAL), Disto controller with the RTC, super deluxe RS232 Pak, etc. Tried to get a SCSI HD working on it at one time, but never got the drivers or hardware to work properly. I learned how to program on that thing and even at one point wrote the music to a commercial game in the early 90's for it. I credit the CoCo line for my love of computers, electronics, and technology that I have today and it will always have a special place in my heart.
hey man dont feel bad about tossing out something that you dont want or need if you tell them NO and they send it to you any way then its not your problem just toss it and continue on. your not a salvation army donation center for someones broken junk. Love the T-shirts by the way.
David, maybe we could build an experimental eco-conscious house with all of the junk you have to throw away. Imagine a house built from broken RAM chips and AOL trial CDs.
Two queries: 1) Have you considered renting out a storage space like Clint from LGR to keep stuff? 2) Now that you do this full time, would you be doing two videos a week anytime? :)
If I were you, I would go like Lazy Game Reviews and get a storage unit. UPDATE: People, you don't get what I'm saying here. I'm suggesting he should get a storage unit to allow for more things HE WANTS like Commodore 64s or even Commodore 16s(which is unlikely considering how rare they are).
Why pay to store smashed RAM and CPUs and floppy disks with someone's mom's shopping list from 1982 on it? He was very tactfully telling people he just doesn't want their junk.
He already said he's keeping what he does want, which is about 1% of what's offered... David is a grown man. He can make his own decisions about what to keep and what to cast aside, and once again, that is what he was very politely telling you in the video. I didn't misunderstand what you meant. I took the shot at a humorous retort to explain the point he already made and you sorta took it too seriously.
I don't know why, but I laughed really hard at the story about the floppy disk, broken memory modules, and Pentium4. In all seriousness though, I really do appreciate that the @8-Bit-Guy limits the donations because it also keeps these videos down to a digestible length. Keep up the good work!
David I am offended. Have you been discarding all of the broken GPUs from 1996 that I've been sending you?? What a jerk. *satire* - keep up the good work
I love your channel!! I'll admit, I'm not as much of a nerd as you, and a lot of the stuff you feature on your channel I have to educate myself about, but everything you create is interesting, informative, and entertaining and I enjoy seeing new content from you. Sorry people keep sending you crap lol. Keep making great videos!!
Those are outputs for each of the sounds on that Roland Tr-626. The 626 was an upgraded digital version of the Roland TR-606, which was an analog drum machine.
The fact anyone thinks he is eBaying stuff is crazy. It would be super obvious and hard to hide. Plus with retrobrite and some of the other things he does destroys the collector factor of them. Sad but true. I undertstand not wanting complete junk. P4s and destroyed ram aren't even worth anything. Even if you scrapped them it would probably end up costing money to dispose of them.
Thanks for letting us know what's going on. I'm sorry to hear you've been having those issues. Thanks for all your awesome videos. I look forward to more in September.
You do right to turn stuff down, especially crap items. It's a great channel, fun stuff and I love the restores and showing stuff how it worked! Keep up the good work!
Built the ZX80 as a kit many decades ago. It worked pretty OK (especially in view of the tiny memory), and I used it to control the house central heating system for many years (after I started to play with "real" (i.e. PC Clone) computers). Amazing what was possible with just 1k RAM.
Man that supermac brought back memories. I used to work for the distributor/service centre back in the day as a technician. When Apple pulled the licencing all we sold was Umax scanners....lol
Personally I don't have a problem with you selling stuff, donation or not once it becomes your property you can more or less do whatever you want with it(fyi you could also rent one of those storage warehouses or whatever they're called if money is not tight). What I have a problem with on the other hand is that you're never gonna be able to show all/most of these unless you start putting out more then 2 videos a week! :( I don't know if daily videos is viable for you/your type of content, but I'd love you to bits if you could try to squeeze in at least around 4-5 videos per week.
Ha, seeing the old Magnavox Odyssey II carts sure brought back memories! Caution; if you intend to take the PCB out of the carts, the plastic handle halves interlock, and they can get brittle with age. I believe there's a screw hidden under the paper label, too.
The TR626 jacks are individual instruments outputs, for external mixing. For instance you may want to add reverb to the snare drum, but not the bass drum. An interesting and frequent use of these individual outputs is to use one instrument track (typically the rimshot) to trigger events, for instance as a clock for a synth arpeggiator.
Sell the junk at auction and donate the money to some relevant cause. Maybe a school for the blind so they can have talking computers or something. Most will completely understand that you cannot keep items that is sold but, with that being said. There is valuable metals including gold in there. Perhaps partner with someone who has time to strip the items that doesn't have any real value and, again, give the 💰 to a repritable charity.
One more thing ...if I did send you something and you would it sell it to fund the channel, I probably work not be offended. Just check with me first to make sure it is not a loan.
FYI the Atari Jaguar had overlays for the control panel. The panel was a numeric just like the Intellivison, and many games including Doom came with an overlay. With Doom, it assigned the numbers to the weapons i.e. 1 for fist, 2 for pistol etc. Very neat.
The controller overlays were on some consoles other than the Intellivision. Atari 5200, Atari Jaguar, and Colecovision had overlays, and there are also a few computers that did too. The IBM PCjr, ZX Spectrum, along with the numerous different partial overlays for the IBM PC, Kaypro, etc.
I think if it helps the show to sell the stuff that is not relevant to the show would be the same as a Patreon sending money. Or should he just hang on to the cash and never spend it too. I my case if I sent something he had, he should sell it and get what he needs for the show. Just send cash and let him find the stuff to do the show. Oh!! Great show 8 Bit Guy.
Just for clarification on that Tele-Games Pac-Man. The Tele-Games systems were not "clones" as we know them today. Rather, they were made BY Atari, with Atari-branded and -marked internal parts, under a marketing deal with Sears. Remember, at the time, Sears sold almost solely Sears private-label products. The very first home Pong systems were made due to the financial backing of a large Sears order for such a co-branded system, in fact.
On the TR-626, those are actually separate outputs for each drum voice (so they can be processed separately through external effects). And the Atari 5200 and Atari Jaguar also had controller keypad overlays.
LOL I had a ZX-80 (a clone, at that LOL) computer circa 1982. I actually made a real keyboard for it. I sourced a manufacturer of computer key modules, ordered all the individual modules and assembled them in a DIY double-layered circuit board that I designed myself. The manufacturer was skeptical that I was up to the task, and conditioned the sale to my showing him the design with the circuit board layout, etc. He was so well impressed that he not only sold me the modules, but also engraved all of the many characters and symbols on each individual key (some of them had 3 commands per key), at no extra cost. He even offered me a job! -Which I politely declined as I was just starting at another company.
I liked two of your shirt designs enough to place an order for them as soon as I saw them in this video. Keep the cool videos and t-shirt ideas coming...
Without reading 1000+ comments to see if anyone else has said anything similar.. I would like to say; The Roland TR-626 has separate AUDIO outputs. No pad inputs (use MIDI!). It has a 5 volt pulse output, that I used to clock (via user port interrupt) a sequencer I wrote for my C-64 (which was connected to an EDP Wasp synth). Another useful extra is that you can use the tape sync to run an MC-202 microcomposer in sync (TR-626 tape sync out to MC-202 tape sync in).
Hey Dave. My wife and I met you at the Long Island retro expo, you signed your CD for us on Saturday morning. We've been big fans for a long time. I just want to echo the sentiments of others here and reiterate that you are *not* a jerk if you do what you have to do when people treat you with disrespect. Don't be afraid to push back when people do exactly the opposite of what you ask them to. That makes them the jerk, not you. We very much enjoy all your videos, we enjoyed your presentation at the game expo, and we want to see you continue to enjoy doing what you do, so don't let these jerks get you down. That being said, as a fellow nerd I am acutely aware that sometimes you still feel like a jerk even after being reassured you're not; so I hope the empathy in my words is coming through. Secondly - if you remember me from the expo, I'm an unusually big guy. I would love to buy most of your t-shirts, but I would need both a big *and* a tall size. Most reputable t-shirt vendors can get "tall" sizes - the cost may be a dollar more but I'd happily pay that as the number of places that *actually* bother to make tall sizes are so few. I take a 2XL tall or I'll sometimes even get 3XL tall because it becomes a 2XL tall after a few rides in the dryer. I understand that you have to order in quantity, so this is a request for your *next* run. Anyway, keep your chin up and keep doing what you're doing - a lot of us love what you do; unfortunately UA-cam is full of jerks and it's just a cost of doing business, but they are not your audience and never will be. Thanks for all you do!
You know I am actually glad I started watching your channel man. Lots of nifty stuff. I hope to soon have my own channel to review some games from so many different consoles.
99.9% of your viewers won't fault you for clearing out the uninteresting stuff with better stuff. I love these videos and if you need to get rid of stuff to keep it going then please do so :)
Love your channel! Every time I look at your I find new things I did not know about. You made me wanted to start my own collection, we don't have a good electronic base here in Romania. Sorry to hear about your terrible...keep on the good work!
You have to remember there are a lot of 'special' people out there. They live in their own world and will just do as they please no matter what you say.
If someone offers something, and you turn them down because it's not something that will work for the show, and they send it anyway, *they* are the jerk, not you.
Otherwise he'll turn into EEVblog. Not that thats a bad thing.
He could sell what he don't need/want and raise money for some charity. I think,also, most of the people wants to donate is just trash witch is a legitimate reason to turn down things.
He *could* sell the stuff but why should he take time out of his life to do so? The sender could have easily done that themselves.
How do you send something if you don't know the adress you are sending it to?
Yeah that's just being really rude. Go donate it to Goodwill or just toss it away. Why you'd go to such lengths to send your old shit to a guy on UA-cam, is beyond me.
And I assembled that Intel 8085 kit!
The Obsolete Geek Please upload more :(
Can I see it
Good to hear, have fun with it.
I'm editing the video of the build as I type this! I'm trying to cut the video down to under 40 minutes. It's over an hour right now!
The Obsolete Geek ok
Cool dude!
The 8 bit guy is really genuine cool guy... I don't understand how people can hate.
He wears his underwear backwards. He has eyeballs for testicles.
you know the reference yeah ha boy
Really polite too
Why's? Because pend good hard earned money to send him things whether valuable or not. Plus, as he mentioned, the floppy disc with a handwritten label, did he at least check it? Seems like he didn't. What if someone were trying to share a game or program with him for which they didn't want to part with the original? Now, he'll never know since he threw it out. That's why he will now get "hate".
ngiants22 well they should have labelled the disc properly or attached a note explaining what it was. They might as well have taken a shit on his doorstep.
why? Because he looks like Lee Harvey Oswald
You're doing the right thing. Don't feel bad about it.
The Atari Jaguar comes to mind, about the overlays for the game pads. And that came out in what 96?.
spencer s I was thinking of the VECTREX actually myself... but the overlays go on the screen not the pad 🤓
spencer s I'm going to guess gaming consoles are not his specialty.
93
Yep. I thought jaguar too
The odyssey2 also uses overlays, but on the keyboard. And i think a few colecovision games also used overlays on the gamepad.
The most polite person in the whole internet
That is why he's my favourite retro computer channel.
Vadim Geheim I always thought he had aspergers.
Well, not exactly. There is a tinge of disinterest in his voice when he gets something he's not particularly fond of.
Vadim Geheim : Sounds like Dr. Sheldon Cooper !!! ( Lol ) . Seriously, this guy is the fu...ng Máster !!!
He is the type of guy that even when he turns you down you would not feel angry at him at all and you would even enjoy it because of the way he tells you.
fundraiser for 8bit guy second house
GTVS I am sure he wouldn't mind
GTVS or a storage facility like the one that LGR has
adventureoflinkmk2 yea
At least he buys stuff rather than begging for free stuff
Now he has a new studio and the old one was torn down and his wife is using it as storage
That ZX80 is an awesome donation, here in the UK they go for hundreds when they work. Easy to fix too. The real bonus is the casing is super brittle, and the one you got looks fully intact! Usually the corners are broken off. 😊
Yes indeed, I was amazed to see it intact, that's very unusual.
What if you made a series out of the items that you never wanted. Packaging fails. I would have probably enjoyed watching you face palm as you open that smashed pentium processor.
20 20 i would like to watch that to. Send him a box full of AOL free trail cds. Lol jk
i can see people being upset hearing that you sell stuff on ebay (which you dont). but having heard that you trade with other youtubers helps keep this genre of retro electronics alive.
the intel dev kit you traded to obsolete geek was probably a good trade considering he may have had more knowledge about the item and wanted to do a review, while for you, it may have just sat on a shelf. the trade essentially made content for another channel, and your own.
Really appreciate your honesty!
I'm from Marfa, TX, thanks for the shout out. Okay, I'm not really, I lied. :(
I didn't watch the whole thing yet, but I wanted to note that that is an Intellivision II console. Those are actually somewhat rare as they did not sell well compared to the original. They're essentially the same console, but feature a few changes that render some games unplayable (for the most part, games that don't use the standard system boot screen). They're also a bit smaller and feature detachable controllers, something the original did not have. I also personally think the original looked much better with it's wood paneling.
bonus fact: you have one of (if not THE) first games to have a soundtrack, Snafu.
EDIT: Finished the video, the way you handled the unwanted donations was MORE than tactful.
Matt Murphy I have one.
your picture had me fooled. GG
Matt Murphy your profile pic sucks. No one can get fooled
me
Shhh...there's a fly on you.
I suspect that people who send you unwanted items (even after you've refused them) are doing so because they can't BEAR to discard the items themselves. They're borderline hoarders and by "setting the item free" into the world (by sending it to you) they have abdicated any personal responsibility (or feelings of guilt) for having made a decision to trash the item. Perhaps they think of you as a "no-kill electronics shelter". (Try not to let it get you down. Don't be too discouraged or frustrated by it.)
Thanks for your videos. I enjoy them very much and look forward to seeing what you'll be doing next.
It could also be that they crave attention and would like him to mention their name in his video. Or perhaps they envy his life.
I wish people would randomly send me stuff! A man can dream. Great vid as always
It would be great for some people, but imagine if you didn't have the space.
spencer s Space is never an issue. Postage probably is though not being in the US 😁
I have some used tissues --- what's your address?
Tom Servo sure it's The 8 Bit Guy, 555 Acacia Avenue....
If you really want a smashed Pentium 4 CPU, I can probably hook you up...
Thanks again for having us over. It was so cool getting to see your studio and nerd out!
Good for you for sticking to your gut feelings on how to respond to these people. Sounds like you are at a crossroad and need to decide whether or not to grow your channel into something bigger or keep it small and exactly what you want it to be. I think either path is fine in the end but you need to decide what you want to do. If you go the bigger path and expand you NEED help! Ask for volunteers even if its only for a few hours once a week helping to sort/arrange/clean up/move stuff to a new storage location like lazy game reviews has. Get another person on board to do reviews or videos on the stuff that you don't really care to cover but want to include on your channel. Otherwise scale back and keep your current ground and cover a very narrow amount of content. In the end your happiness matters too not just ours. If you aren't happy, then why do it?
I say if you go bigger, open a museum for antiquated computer technology
My jaw dropped when you pulled out that TR-626. I can't wait to see that on the 8-Bit Keys channel!
You lucky man, you got a free TR-626! Those are individual outs for each of the sounds coming out of the drum machine. It's essentially an upgraded 505 with latin percussion sounds. The 505 and 626 are a bit the unsung brothers of the TR family, fetching much much lower prices than the 606, 7x7, 808 and 909.
I have a TR 626, I don't use it much, but anything Roland is normally worth keeping.
If I remember right on mine one key doesn't work quite right.
I'm interested what you will do with it, I'd like to see you use it or make a video about it.
Thanks.
Don't worry about the haters. I found you channel and I truly enjoy watching you explain and demonstrate the old tech. I remember some of it and some others, I was like, wow, that was around in the 80's. Keep up the good work.
That ZX80 computer, (thanks for pronouncing it correctly by the way), somebody sent you will be worth a small fortune if it works. They're rare in the UK now as well.
Maybe the ZX80 could open up a lucrative seam of British 8bits on this channel. Sinclair's tend to be built to a to a price point, so laughably or ingeniously made. ZX80 up there with Turing as British computer royalty as far as I'm concerned. Started a huge home computer boom, with more computers per household in UK than any country at the time. Prefer 6502 Acorns myself. Lots of content on both those machines out there.
Nice idea. I'd love to see 8-bit Guy do some more stuff with the old UK computers. I know it's a pain getting them working in the States with power adaptors for voltage, and adaptors for the TV output.
I'm one of the Sinclair generation from the 80s. Who made a successful career in programming thanks to Clive Sinclair.
Electrically, the zx80 was mostly equivalent to the ZX81...
Main differences were:
1.A lot more chips in the ZX80(the ZX81 used a custom chip that Sinclair called the ULA that substituted for many of the chips in the ZX80).
2.no SLOW mode(the NMI circuitry needed for this was not in the ZX80)
3.the ZX80 BASIC was a 4k fixed point BASIC.....the ZX81 used a 8K floating point BASIC
BTW, in each case, around 512 bytes was used for the character set, so the actual BASIC was smaller than 4K or 8K
There was a conversion kit available for the ZX80 to convert it to the 8K BASIC...it came with a overlay for the keyboard.
You ended up with a unit that worked exactly like a ZX81 except that the SLOW mode was not there(since the hardware for this was not available)
And it has surprisingly good case condition, without broken edges.
But sadly, as my experience says, of stuff has good looking case, it was probably broken long time ago and sit on a shelf woke
bruh I had three of those in my house
Hey, I'm in one of those pics! It was great visiting you Dave, I hope I will be able to do it again soon.
Also, I had a Vectrex when I was a kid. Even had the 3-D glasses. Really wish I still had it.
Atari 5200 & Colecovision also had controller overlays.
So did the Atari Jaguar and even a few Atari 2600 titles.
Hehe, I said the same thing on that part of the vid.
Some programs for the pc had overlays for the keyboard (wordstar and wordperfect to name just two). I had a stack of cards that fitted the zx spectrum 48 keys with space for you to write something.
The 5200 had overlays?
The Jaguar had them too.
I usually don't watch these videos in full, mainly because they are long. but today, I watched it. You are one of my favourite old-school tech UA-camrs. Keep up the good work!
I love these unboxing videos
It's like being a kid and christmas comes monthly.
Dukefazon ya
Dave! You are such a nice person, like every time you talk about channel difficulties or your non-youtube stuff in general you seem so kind! The 'open-door' pictures were really nice to see, too.
I need to see an edit of that "I can't handle all of these (donations)" meme.
Don't feel too bad. You have to look out for your channel and content. And about your content, it's awesome! I've relived a LOT of my electronic youth through your videos. Thanks for all your work and care in making 8-Bit Guy.
The Roland TR626 doesn't have trigger inputs; they're audio outputs for individual drum sounds. You may want to put different effects on different sounds, or a click track for a drummer to sync to.
Anamnesia Yep, I was wondering if anyone else noticed that. Individual outputs can be pretty useful too (external processing, like you mentioned). And I'm not familiar with the 626, but one may be able to use MIDI to trigger individual sounds anyway. Not that it's necessary, as it's got a built in sequencer
slipknot, you're correct - you can trigger via MIDI. Its like a cute baby 707, fun to play with
I'm glad you mentioned the whole donation of broken and worthless stuff. I used to work in goodwill, and I hated people that donated vinyl records and obsolete computer parts because people weren't buying them and running out of shelf space for stuff that's more popular. We told the donators to not give us those stuff, and told them to send them to recycling centers. Keep it up David.
"It's dead Jim!"
I love the way how computer programmers think extremely logically. I noticed improvements in my logical thinking since I began studying programming.
Many consoles had controller inlays... Atari Jaguar and Coleco Colecovision come to mind
Beat me to it! On Friday I was thinking of my Atari 5200... Star Raiders comes to mind. But the Intellivision was first. I had the Colecovision too but I don't recall any games that used keypad , or at least any game for which I saw the need to search the game box for such inclusion.
But I've spent the past two days trying to compose the best unfunny-childish-puppet-like reply. Oh wait.. that's TechMoan 's channel! Whoops.
Did the Atari 2600 BASIC keyboard controller have overlays?
Dude, don't sweat it - you're one of the nicest people on UA-cam. Keep up the good work!
While I'm sure David appreciates all the offers the general public graciously submit to him, he only has so much space. That being said, if anyone out there wants to donate a working commodore 64, 1541, and an action replay cartridge, I'll gladly accept it on his behalf and relive the days of me coding cracktros.
What part of the world do you hail from??
I am in Australia, if anyone wants to send me a Commodore 64, 1541, Action Replay. I would gladly accept it too.
same here, i have tons of old diskettes of C64 games i used to play but nothing to play them on now..i regret throwing out my failing C64 SX when i was a stupid kid.. id gladly take a C64!!
pmodern2000 If anyone wants to send me a working commodore 64, go ahead aswell 😂
what they said
Yeah, I'm a bit p'd off at 12 year old me for disassembling and discarding a load of old stuff, like the 20MB Apple hard drive which came with a Mac Plus someone was throwing out. Fortunately I still have the Mac (and external floppy drive) but I don't have any working System disks for it. What a moron.
Thanks for having us over a few months back! We had a great time. They thought it was cool to see their mug on youtube. Keep up the great work.
I'd like to say , i am so freaking glad i got that silly Korg POLY 800 over to you before you said this
I agree with you, it sucks upsetting people who want to give you stuff but you're right when it comes to the relevance of your show. Keep it up!
Just an F.Y.I. the sockets on the back of the TR-626 will be separate audio outputs not connections for drum pads. At that point I think Roland only had the PAD-8 which was MIDI only at the time so had no need to release a machine with pad inputs.
Love seeing the CoCo stuff. I was first introduced to computing in the 80's with the CoCo 2 in 3rd grade, and would always visit Radio Shacks because they would always have a CoCo I could mess around with on display. It was my first computer (the Color Computer 3) and I had it for 5 years. At one point I had it upgraded to 2 MB of RAM, ran OS-9 Level II and RiBBS. 720K 3.5" and 360K 5.25" dual Floppy drives with the Multi-Pak Interface (Upgraded PAL), Disto controller with the RTC, super deluxe RS232 Pak, etc. Tried to get a SCSI HD working on it at one time, but never got the drivers or hardware to work properly. I learned how to program on that thing and even at one point wrote the music to a commercial game in the early 90's for it. I credit the CoCo line for my love of computers, electronics, and technology that I have today and it will always have a special place in my heart.
hey man dont feel bad about tossing out something that you dont want or need if you tell them NO and they send it to you any way then its not your problem just toss it and continue on. your not a salvation army donation center for someones broken junk.
Love the T-shirts by the way.
You're the coolest and the nicest person ever! Subbed a week ago and I would rank this one of my top 3 channels.
David, maybe we could build an experimental eco-conscious house with all of the junk you have to throw away. Imagine a house built from broken RAM chips and AOL trial CDs.
Your videos are always fun and interesting. People will always find something to hate and your super chilled.
If you can't fix that Vectrex, I'll gladly take it off your hands 😋
I love that you keep your donations relevant. Most of your viewers will understand.
Two queries:
1) Have you considered renting out a storage space like Clint from LGR to keep stuff?
2) Now that you do this full time, would you be doing two videos a week anytime? :)
While everyone was in the 1980's when the ZX80 came out, Sinclair was thinking in the 2010's with their thin computers XD
8:40 he looks a lot more tan in this pic
Sid B Lol
hahahahahaha
holy shit, i got scared and then lmao!!!
Some Retr0bright can fix that.
Just FYI, the jack sockets on the Roland TR-626 are outputs so the individual sounds can be separately processed and mixed, not trigger inputs. :)
If I were you, I would go like Lazy Game Reviews and get a storage unit.
UPDATE: People, you don't get what I'm saying here. I'm suggesting he should get a storage unit to allow for more things HE WANTS like Commodore 64s or even Commodore 16s(which is unlikely considering how rare they are).
Why pay to store smashed RAM and CPUs and floppy disks with someone's mom's shopping list from 1982 on it?
He was very tactfully telling people he just doesn't want their junk.
No, I mean for other things he DOES want.
Panda he doesnt want all that garbage
Thank you! Finally nice to see someone on the internet that has a brain...
He already said he's keeping what he does want, which is about 1% of what's offered...
David is a grown man. He can make his own decisions about what to keep and what to cast aside, and once again, that is what he was very politely telling you in the video. I didn't misunderstand what you meant. I took the shot at a humorous retort to explain the point he already made and you sorta took it too seriously.
I don't know why, but I laughed really hard at the story about the floppy disk, broken memory modules, and Pentium4. In all seriousness though, I really do appreciate that the @8-Bit-Guy limits the donations because it also keeps these videos down to a digestible length. Keep up the good work!
Hey! 8bit guy you are a nice guy
You're not a jerk for turning down stuff and throwing away garbage.
Just keep doing what you're doing. You have a great channel.
David I am offended. Have you been discarding all of the broken GPUs from 1996 that I've been sending you?? What a jerk.
*satire* - keep up the good work
you can send me all of the 3Dfx boards you'd like.
stc 726 it's. A. Joke. Click read more before replying.
Denzel :D ghahaha!
I love your channel!! I'll admit, I'm not as much of a nerd as you, and a lot of the stuff you feature on your channel I have to educate myself about, but everything you create is interesting, informative, and entertaining and I enjoy seeing new content from you. Sorry people keep sending you crap lol. Keep making great videos!!
This DIP T-shirt is really cool!
I bet it feels great to be given the ok for sending him something and having it featured on the show. I'll have to do that one day!
Get some volunteers to build another level on your house! No more space problems!
Porki Chili Three years later...
"Welcome to the 8-bit skyscraper!"
Shit I'll drive down to help with that.
Porki Chili Donate and send 8 bit a brick, evenually he can build an extension.
Those are outputs for each of the sounds on that Roland Tr-626. The 626 was an upgraded digital version of the Roland TR-606, which was an analog drum machine.
Kinda of off topic but could you do a video on restoring an older aluminum MacBook?
Don't let the time wasters get to you mate. You're a nice guy. I look forward to every episode you post. Fist bump from the UK.
The fact anyone thinks he is eBaying stuff is crazy. It would be super obvious and hard to hide. Plus with retrobrite and some of the other things he does destroys the collector factor of them. Sad but true. I undertstand not wanting complete junk. P4s and destroyed ram aren't even worth anything. Even if you scrapped them it would probably end up costing money to dispose of them.
You get an unreal amount of stuff sent to you. Interesting to see. Thank you for sharing.
Oh great! The household trash is piling-up and I'm too lazy to take it to the curb and The 8-Bit Guy doesn't want it! What am I going to do now?
Send it to me ASAP
Ray gervin
Stolpeh0j 92. 2820 gentofte.
Denmark
Thanks for letting us know what's going on. I'm sorry to hear you've been having those issues. Thanks for all your awesome videos. I look forward to more in September.
Dungeons of Daggorath, Ernie Cline and his Ready Player One followers would be proud!
I finished reading it a few days ago for my school homework and it is my new favorite book!
You do right to turn stuff down, especially crap items. It's a great channel, fun stuff and I love the restores and showing stuff how it worked! Keep up the good work!
Built the ZX80 as a kit many decades ago. It worked pretty OK (especially in view of the tiny memory), and I used it to control the house central heating system for many years (after I started to play with "real" (i.e. PC Clone) computers). Amazing what was possible with just 1k RAM.
Man that supermac brought back memories.
I used to work for the distributor/service centre back in the day as a technician.
When Apple pulled the licencing all we sold was Umax scanners....lol
MUSEUM! MUSEUM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MUSLIM MUSLIM, wait wrong comment
Just keep doing what your doing man :). Been watching since iBook days and always loved the content :).
Personally I don't have a problem with you selling stuff, donation or not once it becomes your property you can more or less do whatever you want with it(fyi you could also rent one of those storage warehouses or whatever they're called if money is not tight).
What I have a problem with on the other hand is that you're never gonna be able to show all/most of these unless you start putting out more then 2 videos a week! :( I don't know if daily videos is viable for you/your type of content, but I'd love you to bits if you could try to squeeze in at least around 4-5 videos per week.
Thanks for being honest with us dude. Great job on the channel thus far and I hope it goes well in the future too.
Hi 8 bit guy
Oh, Hi Mark
Ha, seeing the old Magnavox Odyssey II carts sure brought back memories! Caution; if you intend to take the PCB out of the carts, the plastic handle halves interlock, and they can get brittle with age. I believe there's a screw hidden under the paper label, too.
I wish I would get as much awesome stuff as he gets :(
Guess I'll have to be a better UA-camr first heh...
EpicLPer like that ram and Pentium4
Do you have a HUGE warehouse for all the crud?
The TR626 jacks are individual instruments outputs, for external mixing. For instance you may want to add reverb to the snare drum, but not the bass drum.
An interesting and frequent use of these individual outputs is to use one instrument track (typically the rimshot) to trigger events, for instance as a clock for a synth arpeggiator.
Sell the junk at auction and donate the money to some relevant cause. Maybe a school for the blind so they can have talking computers or something. Most will completely understand that you cannot keep items that is sold but, with that being said. There is valuable metals including gold in there. Perhaps partner with someone who has time to strip the items that doesn't have any real value and, again, give the 💰 to a repritable charity.
One more thing ...if I did send you something and you would it sell it to fund the channel, I probably work not be offended. Just check with me first to make sure it is not a loan.
You’re awfully generous with other people’s time
FYI the Atari Jaguar had overlays for the control panel. The panel was a numeric just like the Intellivison, and many games including Doom came with an overlay. With Doom, it assigned the numbers to the weapons i.e. 1 for fist, 2 for pistol etc. Very neat.
I wouldn't say you're being the jerk, if the people sending crap in to to, they're the jerk, cos they're taking up room in your bin... :\
The controller overlays were on some consoles other than the Intellivision. Atari 5200, Atari Jaguar, and Colecovision had overlays, and there are also a few computers that did too. The IBM PCjr, ZX Spectrum, along with the numerous different partial overlays for the IBM PC, Kaypro, etc.
I think if it helps the show to sell the stuff that is not relevant to the show would be the same as a Patreon sending money. Or should he just hang on to the cash and never spend it too. I my case if I sent something he had, he should sell it and get what he needs for the show. Just send cash and let him find the stuff to do the show. Oh!! Great show 8 Bit Guy.
Oh really? You really seriously think a damaged Pentium 4 and destroyed RAM chips would be worth anything to sell?
Just for clarification on that Tele-Games Pac-Man. The Tele-Games systems were not "clones" as we know them today. Rather, they were made BY Atari, with Atari-branded and -marked internal parts, under a marketing deal with Sears. Remember, at the time, Sears sold almost solely Sears private-label products. The very first home Pong systems were made due to the financial backing of a large Sears order for such a co-branded system, in fact.
Please continue translating your videos!!! It's my way to practicing english. :D
On the TR-626, those are actually separate outputs for each drum voice (so they can be processed separately through external effects). And the Atari 5200 and Atari Jaguar also had controller keypad overlays.
At this rate, soon you'll have most retro machines.
Saktuscactus even the Nintendo Play Station?
Madd the Sane Maybe
All your retro are belong to us.
LOL I had a ZX-80 (a clone, at that LOL) computer circa 1982. I actually made a real keyboard for it. I sourced a manufacturer of computer key modules, ordered all the individual modules and assembled them in a DIY double-layered circuit board that I designed myself. The manufacturer was skeptical that I was up to the task, and conditioned the sale to my showing him the design with the circuit board layout, etc. He was so well impressed that he not only sold me the modules, but also engraved all of the many characters and symbols on each individual key (some of them had 3 commands per key), at no extra cost. He even offered me a job! -Which I politely declined as I was just starting at another company.
I bought me a couple shirts. Yeah if people don't get it's not your fault.
I liked two of your shirt designs enough to place an order for them as soon as I saw them in this video. Keep the cool videos and t-shirt ideas coming...
let us donate money to him so he can buy storage space like lgr is doing :)
Without reading 1000+ comments to see if anyone else has said anything similar.. I would like to say;
The Roland TR-626 has separate AUDIO outputs. No pad inputs (use MIDI!).
It has a 5 volt pulse output, that I used to clock (via user port interrupt) a sequencer I wrote for my C-64 (which was connected to an EDP Wasp synth). Another useful extra is that you can use the tape sync to run an MC-202 microcomposer in sync (TR-626 tape sync out to MC-202 tape sync in).
Who likes 8 bit guy videos?
Hey Dave. My wife and I met you at the Long Island retro expo, you signed your CD for us on Saturday morning. We've been big fans for a long time. I just want to echo the sentiments of others here and reiterate that you are *not* a jerk if you do what you have to do when people treat you with disrespect. Don't be afraid to push back when people do exactly the opposite of what you ask them to. That makes them the jerk, not you. We very much enjoy all your videos, we enjoyed your presentation at the game expo, and we want to see you continue to enjoy doing what you do, so don't let these jerks get you down.
That being said, as a fellow nerd I am acutely aware that sometimes you still feel like a jerk even after being reassured you're not; so I hope the empathy in my words is coming through.
Secondly - if you remember me from the expo, I'm an unusually big guy. I would love to buy most of your t-shirts, but I would need both a big *and* a tall size. Most reputable t-shirt vendors can get "tall" sizes - the cost may be a dollar more but I'd happily pay that as the number of places that *actually* bother to make tall sizes are so few. I take a 2XL tall or I'll sometimes even get 3XL tall because it becomes a 2XL tall after a few rides in the dryer. I understand that you have to order in quantity, so this is a request for your *next* run.
Anyway, keep your chin up and keep doing what you're doing - a lot of us love what you do; unfortunately UA-cam is full of jerks and it's just a cost of doing business, but they are not your audience and never will be. Thanks for all you do!
You know I am actually glad I started watching your channel man. Lots of nifty stuff. I hope to soon have my own channel to review some games from so many different consoles.
99.9% of your viewers won't fault you for clearing out the uninteresting stuff with better stuff. I love these videos and if you need to get rid of stuff to keep it going then please do so :)
Love your channel! Every time I look at your I find new things I did not know about. You made me wanted to start my own collection, we don't have a good electronic base here in Romania. Sorry to hear about your terrible...keep on the good work!
David don't let comments or people get to you in anyway. You do an amazing job and we love you. :)
congratulations you are the nicest, most polite guy on UA-cam. here is your trophy sir 🏆
You have to remember there are a lot of 'special' people out there. They live in their own world and will just do as they please no matter what you say.