Hi everyone,

Recently I had a nice chat with a gentleman on a Discord channel (theoldnet) who showed photos of his beautiful (original) Altair 8800 and also told me about some of the reproduction/clone systems that have been created.

The Altair 8800c is a fully functional Altair 8800 built from scratch using only new equipment and boards.
https://deramp.com/altair_8800c.html

Assembling these systems isn't as easy as ordering a kit and putting it together - some parts need to be sourced from different places - and there are some options for how to build the system. Another option is the Altair-duino:
https://adwaterandstir.com/altair/

Until recently, reproduction Altair cases were being made by Mike Douglas (deramp.com), but he sold the last of the Altair 8800 Clone cabinets he had, and after ten years of making them has decided not to continue.

The good news - I received an email from Mike Douglas informing me that Chris Davis who makes the Altair-duino will be taking on production of the Altair 8800c cabinet. Chris can be reached at chris@famousdavispro.com for Altair-duino and Altair 8800c cabinet information.


Chris/akacastor


--- Maximus 3.01
* Origin: Another Millennium - Canada - another.tel (21:1/162)

Recently I had a nice chat with a gentleman on a Discord channel (theoldnet) who showed photos of his beautiful (original) Altair 8800
and also told me about some of the reproduction/clone systems that have been created.

Altair 8800c: https://deramp.com/altair_8800c.html
Altair-duino: https://adwaterandstir.com/altair/

The good news - I received an email from Mike Douglas informing me that Chris Davis who makes the Altair-duino will be taking on production of
the Altair 8800c cabinet. Chris can be reached at chris@famousdavispro.com for Altair-duino and Altair 8800c cabinet information.

Nice reporting - I'm enjoying the 8800c website, thanks. :P So are you going to put one together over time??? Very neat projects.



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--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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The good news - I received an email from Mike Douglas informing me that Chris Davis who makes the Altair-duino will be taking on production of
the Altair 8800c cabinet. Chris can be reached at chris@famousdavispro.com for Altair-duino and Altair 8800c cabinet information.

Nice reporting - I'm enjoying the 8800c website, thanks.
:P So are you going to put one together over time???
Very neat projects.

I am trying SO HARD to not start buying Altair parts to put together! I really better do something with my KIM-1 clone first, I keep falling further behind as the fun projects queue grows!! The Altair 8800c certainly does look beautiful.

Another Altair-related treat - CBBS/TN at cbbs.mitsaltair.com:8800 is running CBBS (the original BBS software by Ward Christensen) in the AltairZ80 simulator. I know you've logged in before, Paulie, just mentioning this here for anyone else interested. It's neat to be able to login to a CBBS system, and I found it a lot more user-friendly than I had expected it to be.
https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/bbs/cbbs-nv/


Chris/akacastor

--- Maximus 3.01
* Origin: Another Millennium - Canada - another.tel (21:1/162)

I am trying SO HARD to not start buying Altair parts to put together! I really better do something with my KIM-1 clone first, I keep falling further behind as the fun projects queue grows!! The Altair 8800c certainly does look beautiful.

I understand man, I understand - the KIM-1 would be super fun to dig into... I do try to get each of my systems working and 'useful' before going to another, but it doesn't always happen...

My IIe is complete and working, but fully vintage; 4 5.25" drives, 2 3.5" drives - but I never got a 'current' solution like the Big Mess o Wires SDCard floppy emulator... floppies are so hard to come by that its almost a requirement.

Another Altair-related treat - CBBS/TN at cbbs.mitsaltair.com:8800 is running CBBS (the original BBS software by Ward Christensen) in the AltairZ80 simulator. I know you've logged in before, Paulie, just mentioning this here for anyone else interested. It's neat to be able
to login to a CBBS system, and I found it a lot more user-friendly than
I had expected it to be. https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/bbs/cbbs-nv/

Yes yes, I've visited CBBS before - and so should everyone else interested in retro computing. However, you did remind me to call in TODAY. :P



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--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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My IIe is complete and working, but fully vintage; 4
5.25" drives, 2 3.5" drives - but I never got a
'current' solution like the Big Mess o Wires SDCard
floppy emulator... floppies are so hard to come by that
its almost a requirement.

Your IIe sounds amazing and I am very jealous and I want my own very much! :) So many disk drives! That's badass, you could run a BBS on that with tons of files.


Chris/akacastor


--- Maximus 3.01
* Origin: Another Millennium - Canada - another.tel (21:1/162)

My IIe is complete and working, but fully vintage; 4 5.25" drives, 2 3.5" drives - but I never got a 'current' solution like the Big Mess o Wires SDCard floppy emulator... floppies are so hard to come by that its almost a requirement.

Noice. The floppyemu works pretty well. I have some foibles here with mine, but I'm unsure if its marginal on the ribbon cables, changing them does seem
to alleviate issues for a while, or its the floppy controller, although I had tried a few different ones...

I don't have any of the genuine Apple drives, just the half height 5.25's. I mounted 2 of them with a selector switch into a box with the emulator, so I
can flip the switch and boot from either a floppy or the emulator.

Spec

--- Its made of prefabulated amulite.


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: A camel is a horse designed by a committee. (21:3/101)

My IIe is complete and working, but fully vintage; 4 5.25" drives, 2 drives - but I never got a 'current' solution like the Big Mess o Wir SDCard floppy emulator...

Noice. The floppyemu works pretty well. I have some foibles here with mine, but I'm unsure if its marginal on the ribbon cables, changing them does seem to alleviate issues for a while, or its the floppy controller, although I had tried a few different ones...

Hmmmm - I've heard a lot of good about the Big Mess O Wires one... I just haven't had the $ to order one yet. You know... I saw another youtuber product that converts a 5.25" metal drive shell into a floppy emulater - but man ... he's charging like $250 for a 3d printed piece of plastic; and $440 for an entire kit w/ the metal shell... I just can't get behind that. Retro computing should be open source and I AGREE, I'm sure it took weeks and months to design the product - but I cannot get behind charging for it. Let alone a fair price ($50) but ... $440??? Freaking insane IMO.



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--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbS>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)

On Sunday, May 5th paulie420 said...

Hmmmm - I've heard a lot of good about the Big Mess O Wires one... I just haven't had the $ to order one yet. You know... I saw another youtuber product that converts a 5.25" metal drive shell into a floppy emulater -

for it. Let alone a fair price ($50) but ... $440??? Freaking insane IMO.

Yes, I agree. Too much money, I was also looking for the STL files. Too much! Not at all worth it.

Anyway, there is little use for FloppyEMU once you have a hard disk, folks like "qkumba" have made just about every single game and software title PRODOS compatible and so it can be loaded onto a hard disk.

But FloppyEMU is useful for many other things, it can also act as a hard disk with the right card on an Apple IIe, and also on the IIgs and macintosh computers, I use it on many different computers for all kinds of purposes, worth every penny.

The best hardware add-on for Apple IIe, in my opinion, is the ReActiveMicro Drive/Turbo IDE Controller, $95, and the Phasor v1.0, $135 (kit), and the replacement PSU board $70, though, I only did this one time so that I could have a spare board that I can recap at my leisure for the other apples. I think the "super serial card" is the best ebay purchase you can make, its better than using any kind of WIFI Modem and has multiple uses.

For example, you can run "unix" on your apple IIe, "a2osx", and, host a serial tty so that you can "login" to your apple 2 over serial from another computer. A WIFI modem can't do that. It's also better to just use a linux host as a serial tty login, and then use it as a jumping point to telent or ssh to a BBS, because you have full software control of everything, and you can write software to transliterate for incompatible character sets, etc.

The other card I'd *like* to get but is also too expensive, is an apple II mouse card, used on ebay or $80 new from maceffects, it has very little use except for "a2desktop", which also has very little use, but it is fun to show the evolution of "desktop GUI" from apple IIe, IIgs and early 68k Macintosh.

Anyway, I've gotten into this retrocomputing thing, particularly apple computers, because that's my nephew's interest right now. He's 9 years old.
Kids don't really understand 6502, 68k, or x86. They just know brands, and Apple is popular among kids. He also likes IBM and Microsoft, and so he's got an old Thinkpad with windows XP.

I'm trying to encourage it, he's had this interest for about a year and a half now. He's also into retro game handhelds (gameboy etc) and old mobile phones.
I really don't understand those myself, I got him a $50 alibaba handheld that can play any gameboy/sega/snes game he wants and he barely touches it, he just wants to *have* the real things, even broken and battered.

He doesn't care that the cellular phones are too old to work with the cellular network, or that he doesn't have any games for the gameboy, he just likes showing off that he *has* it. This is something youtube culture has really brainwashed our kids with, we have grown men making content for children, and their excitement for nostalgia has looped around onto the zoomer generation.

He and his brother were into Pokemon cards, something that was a little bit popular when I was their age. They care about *having* them, but when I taught them how to *play* it, they lost all interest in it! It took all of their fun out of knowing *why* a card is rare or expensive, that it is because they are useful in a deck. They only cared about *having* them, they sort of role play what youtubers do, to open a pack and get really excited when they find a rare card. They could care less what the fine print says about what makes it rare!

But with computers, he's learned DOS commands to play simcity 2k on his thinkpad and he's learning Mac OS system 6 with his Macintosh SE, I was humored to see his simcity save games stored in random folders, but he's beginning to get the hang of folders and files. Even though these "skills" aren't directly useful, the concepts will certainly give him an advantage if he wants to persue a path in computing or electronics later.

--- ENiGMA 1/2 v0.0.14-beta (linux; x64; 18.18.2)
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Hmmmm - I've heard a lot of good about the Big Mess O Wires one... I just

99% it seems to work flawlessly.. the thing I have is a clone made by I don't know who, so that may also have something to do with it.

Retro computing should be open source and I AGREE, I'm sure it took weeks and months to design the product - but I cannot get behind charging for it. Let alone a fair price ($50) but ... $440??? Freaking insane IMO.

There's a lot of outrageous pricing going on out there. Some of it seems to have dropped off a bit, but some are still looking for gold plated prices.

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: A camel is a horse designed by a committee. (21:3/101)

But FloppyEMU is useful for many other things, it can also act as a hard disk with the right card on an Apple IIe, and also on the IIgs and macintosh computers, I use it on many different computers for all kinds of purposes, worth every penny.

Smartport HD, if its all you've got... go for it, but not the fastest
solution. I had one before getting a mass storage solution, and of course
total replay came along afterwards.

The best hardware add-on for Apple IIe, in my opinion, is the ReActiveMicro Drive/Turbo IDE Controller, $95, and the Phasor v1.0, $135 (kit), and the replacement PSU board $70, though, I only did this one time so that I could have a spare board that I can recap at my leisure for the other apples. I think the "super serial card" is the best ebay purchase you can make, its better than using any kind of WIFI Modem and has multiple uses.

I can get on board with the MicroDrive Turbo... not sure about the phasor..
not much used it to any real extent just the MockingBoard comaptibility..
about half of its potential. Spare PS makes some sense, have to say touch
wood I haven't had any PS failures.

The super serial card is kind of a no brainer if you want to connect a IIe to anything, you could hitch it to a Pi, use it as a Telnet pad. The old
WiModem or a printer.. not sure what else you'd be doing with it. Haven't looked for a long time, but they were priced pretty hiddeouusly there for a while.

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: A camel is a horse designed by a committee. (21:3/101)

[Talking about the 3d printed Apple FloppyEMU Disk Drive Case]

Retro computing should be open source and I AGREE, I'm sure it took w and months to design the product - but I cannot get behind charging f it. Let alone a fair price ($50) but ... $440??? Freaking insane IMO.

There's a lot of outrageous pricing going on out there. Some of it
seems to have dropped off a bit, but some are still looking for gold plated prices.

Also - I will support and agree with projects charging... just not $450 for what boils down to an .STL creation. Sure, it prolly took weeks to do but I just can't understand the pricing... $20 to cover yer time? Sure - but not to take advantage of the retro community w/ an ask for $400 for plastic. :P



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--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbS>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)