0070 Testing portable TVs and a plethora of PC parts (plus a book and hard drive autopsy)

[@StephenGutknecht]

Adriean has a new "professional attitude", an energy that he is committed ;) Thanks for the great content.

[@StephenGutknecht]

I used to work for Paul Allen in his internal consulting and ran his private e-mail servers in late 1990's. You have talent!

[@Ramdileo_sys]

Well yeah... is his job now..... full time KZbinr. 👌​.... and one of the good ones.. at different of those kids that just watch a shitty TV show and make weird faces in front of the camera 💤​....

[@chadhartsees]

Hah! Sorry about the foam on the OverDrive Chip! I hope it'll clean up nice! We definitely had the chip remover tool... I remember last seeing it in 2002, however. It was amazing seeing the motherboard and memory card boot. I was probably 9 or 10 the last time I saw that - and honestly, I probably didn't take much interest in it then! No corrosion! It just worked. So cool. We were definitely 'keep the box' people, obviously, even as grade schoolers!

[@charliehart4884]

24:13 so cool to see our old computer hardware. So much sim city, railroad tycoon and Front Page Sports Football was played on this system…. And perhaps the occasional book report… 😂

[@benjaminvanderjagt]

"Mommy, what's an exotic dancer?" "Where did you hear that?" "On the radio at Adrian's Digital Basement." "Whose basement??" XD

[@MrBillmcminn]

A friend of mine had an Emerson boombox with a TV. When he brought it over when I had friends over, I had a 3.5 mm to coax adapter and when had a set of rabbit ears hooked up I tuned between channels 70 and 83 and could listen in on analog cell phones. Then hooking up the cable I could tune the adult movie channel slightly off frequency and the picture was less scrambled. The late 1990’s was fun times

[@ukzoinks]

Love that you are not even slightly afraid of the long video format. Where other tubers claim they have to keep it short because of The Algorithm, you give us what we want, something we can sit down and spend some time watching.

[@majorhayze]

We teach the algorithm what we want to see. Anything shy of 3 hours on this channel I’ll happily watch/listen to in the workshop! :D

[@Falloutrip]

RE: shipping costs for heavy stuff - I have used Pirateship many times and highly recommend it! I had to ship a 40lb collapsing ladder back for a return and it only cost me right around $20. It would've been easily twice that directly through UPS, fedex, etc.

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

Nice! I really need to sign up as I occasionally ship stuff too, and I'm blown away at how bonkers the prices normally are if you just walk into a store or the post office.

[@kelli217]

Over the years I've had three--no, four--portable LCD TVs. The first one was a RadioShack Portavision. It was one of those black-and-white models with the mirror to reflect the image because, to save battery life, the screen used ambient light as its light source, with a frosted translucent panel behind the LCD. (There was also an included EL backlight that could be clamped on, for use in dark environments, but it tripled or quadrupled the battery consumption.) I actually still have this one, though I'm not completely sure that I know where the backlight is anymore. The next one I got was a color one that used basically the same technology as the TV-400 you have there. However, the tuning indicator was vertical and went across the entire screen. I don't know if it was a Casio; it could have been another Portavision, rebranded from a Casio. Let's see... the third one was a Sony with a weird teardrop form factor. It had slightly better contrast, and better battery life, but no A/V input. Both of them quit working and wound up being trashed. The last one was definitely a Casio. It was from their active matrix 'Crystal Vision' line, and it had by far the best contrast, because it was using an early version of the technology we have in LCDs now. Very low light leakage, and rapid response. Alas this one also wound up in the trash, because I left it alone for too long with alkaline batteries installed, and the leakage destroyed some vital bit of circuitry, so that even after cleaning the battery compartment thoroughly, it still wouldn't work.

[@livinincalifornia]

What's amazing is how you managed to turn the volume up exactly at "exotic dancers" lol

[@ArthurAllen2]

I still have a similar Casio, as my primary TV for a few years. I got it used, and it might have had some moisture damage because a solid black screen was not solid black. You could see cracks in the LCDs. The strangest thing is that I would watch it in bed and go to sleep. When I woke up, everything I saw had a grid, as if my eyes had adjusted to the large pixels and stayed that way overnight until finally being corrected in the morning. It was good while it lasted, but I'm very grateful for today's LCD screen technology.

[@neilthomas6042]

Nice to see the mini TVs. In UK we are all digital, no analogue signal. Wales were I live, apparently the first country to go all digital.

[@mce_AU]

When a worker at my old work retired, we would engrave a platter with memorable goodbye/thankyou text. I retired during covid and didn't get one. 😞

[@JesseTheStig]

Hello from Pennsylvania! I love watching these mail call videos because you never know what you are going to see!

[@jessiec4128]

I have many of those magnets. I use them for many things. I usually got them off of the metal piece. And used them on our icebox. Sometimes they would break, but that made more icebox magnets, holding pictures and other things.

[@naib_stilgar]

We got that same CDROM kit for our 486 DX33 in 1993 and for all I care those were the best speakers I ever owned.

[@mikepartin571]

Good use for the platters. Getting some cheap clock actions and numerals, they make pretty nice little wall and desk clocks as well

[@ShadeAssault]

Not only for wind chimes, but the platters also make fantastic drink coasters.

[@tvtoms]

I left behind a Realistic B&W tv boom box at my old place in 2016. I had one or two of the color tv's as well as I used to manage at RadioShack and scrapped all sorts of products. Used to pick up analog cell phones in the UHF band while bored at work in the evenings.

[@sideburn]

I converted one Sony watchman into a handheld pong and another into a Bluetooth oscilloscope for playing oscilloscope music through it. Both are on my KZbin channel.

[@bjwoodruff]

Love seeing these early on Patreon.

[@SC-CAJUN]

Hi Adrian! Pirate Ship rocks! Not only are the prices good, but if you ever need their chat support, it is “pirate themed” and is both hilarious and effective

[@sideburn]

Just don’t use it for international shipping. I just got reamed on the price and they put a $125 value on the item so it cost $45.00 for the recipient to receive it.

[@marshallberry8943]

An excellent use for hard drive magnets is a magnetic stud finder. carefully hover over the wall with one of those strong magnets and you are garenteed to find the nails or screws in the drywall, even under the drywall mud joints.

[@JohnGotts]

One thing I like about your channel is that you focus on more common retro hardware. Some retro channels focus on stuff that no younger (20 something) people at the time could really afford to buy. For example, I have no connection to Amigas or Atari STs or real IBM hardware not because that stuff wasn't interesting but because that stuff was in the thousands of dollars. You perfectly reach the demographic of people in their 40's, who mainly grew up in the 80's. 70's computers were around and could be had second hand, 64s, Vic 20s, and 128s were affordable, and starting in the early 90's most people bought PC clone hardware. There was never a window where buying an Amiga or Atari ST made financial sense, and once clone hardware started to hit around 1992 that's what everybody switched to. Items that cost $3,000-4,000 in 1988 are interesting historical artifacts but you didn't own one unless you're in your 60's now (30's then) or had very rich parents. What is nice about tech today is that we've democratized everything. Everyone can afford most everything. An Apple phone for $1,200 seems like the most expensive thing the average person today would really want. In the 80's $1,200 wouldn't be enough for an Amiga if you actually wanted a monitor and software but it would buy a nice used car.

[@Ghozer]

a bit of trivia, in 1990 Toshiba made the first Glass platter for hard drives, originally for laptops, from 2000 many other manufacturers started moving over to glass-based, some for desktop, but mostly laptops, since around 2015 pretty much all laptop HDD's, have glass platters! So be careful opening up newer drives, especially laptop ones :)

[@DavePoo2]

The SEGA Game Gear with it's LCD colour screen was also 3 watts. I think about 1/2 of that power went into the mini fluorescent tube back light. Seems like that was the state of the art back then in portable colour LCD tech (the GG screen was also very washed out and blurred quite a lot).

[@button-puncher]

OMG so smeary. I had one. I loved it but HAD to use niCad rechargables. CCFL (cold cathode flourecsent lamp) backlit. Essentially a tiny version of the curly compact flourescent bulbs.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@button-puncher and even by the late-00s, laptops got a _couple extra hours_ of battery life by switching from CCFL to LED backlights... in some cases that was a 100% battery life increase between models.

[@button-puncher]

@@kaitlyn__L Definitely. I remember the first LED backlit laptop at work, a Dell Latitude E6500. I was blown away by the brightness and richness of the colors too. In 2009, I think.

[@chad2787]

LCDs were pretty terrible until the mid-00's. There were some with decent color by the late 90s but the response time was horrendous. The transition away from cold cathode fluorescent definitely saved some power. I finally made the jump to LCD on the PC around '05 or so and maybe around '07 for the TV.

[@jerryspann8713]

That TV boombox should be the perfect candidate for a full restoration.

[@bzert281]

What i love to do wirh a Neodymium hard disk magnet is drop it into an Altoids tin, then you have a EXCELLENT. fridge/utility magnet. The still room for a small circuit in the tin too. Ling live the Altoids Magnet!

[@kpanic23]

Hey Adrian, I have an ST3144A hard drive sitting on my shelf, drive PCB is fine but the drive mechanics are damaged (headcrash). I could have sent you the drive PCB to make your drive working again, but now you saved me the costs of shipping… 😂 I always keep broken hard drives, because you never know when you end up with one that's broken in a different way. Then you're able to build a working one. And these old drives are getting more and more difficult to find.

[@orionfl79]

That boombox TV thing is too cool! In the early 80s around the time I was born my Dad worked as a security guard at that Emerson factory in Secaucus. Later on he got a job at a high school in North Hudson and we used to pass by there whenever he took me to work with him.

[@Chris_In_Texas]

4:11 Now the max channel is 36. Channel 37 was for astronomy only, and 38-59 is mostly owned by T-Mobile now for both 5G and 4G.

[@glonch]

I bought my TV-400 at Subic Bay NAS when I was stationed at Clark AB in the Philippines. It was great for the time... watched many shows on it.

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

Heh interesting! Was it your only TV?

[@glonch]

@@adriansdigitalbasement2 I also had a 27" Zeinth but always wanted a handheld one. Yes, the screen sucked but it worked for me. I had the 1.5" CRT B&W Panasonic for a few years prior to getting the Casio.

[@kaitlyn__L]

"XMS, EMS, whatever" is so validating, I never remember which one is Expanded and which one is Extended - they both start with "ex"! And you know a lot more about DOS than me. Knowing you struggle with that too makes me think I should just never expect to remember :)

[@rommix0]

As far as compatibility goes, XMS always wins. EMS had weird managers that would break certain games on newer computers. XMS is the way to go.

[@markriley9664]

On the hard drive magnets, I've used them in my wood shop to hold the wrenches for routers or keys on drill press.

[@jeromethiel4323]

Adian's Analog Attic. ^-^ I am moving and ran across two book boxes i used to use as computer sound systems from back in the 90's. A good boom box was so much better than the cheap speakers you could get back in the day. The boom box would be louder, and should have at least two way or three way speakers, to contrast the computer speakers of the era which had at most one speaker per pod, and very low volume levels (as compared to a boom box). So i may be doing some re-work myself in the near future.

[@vaelenorg]

My grandfather used to make clocks out of old hard drive platters. :)

[@kaitlyn__L]

I know I mentioned it the last time you showed some portable TVs, but I am weirdly nostalgic for Casio's "scrolling line" tuner and watching it bounce around. I was just compelled to Google for images, and I think it must've been an SY-20 (or something very similar). The green line filling the entire screen and being vertically oriented, instead of being a thin horizontal line just on one side, is exactly as I remember it. As is the colour, placement of scan buttons and volume control, and speaker placement. Even that model which is from a fair bit later than the one you talked about here, had pretty short battery life (just a few hours), dim picture, poor contrast... and most importantly of all terrible tuning anywhere except deep in a city! So using while camping or fishing, as it was sold for, had a really noisy picture. Use in a car caused the picture to come in and out with terrain and speed. I was so pleased once there became better ways to watch live broadcasts on the go, but all these years on I'm also weirdly nostalgic for how crappy it was... hmm.

[@FlustereDev]

Hey, I'm also from Pennsylvania, and have that same TV-boombox! How neat!

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

Heh -- maybe PA was a hot-bed for sales of those units back in the day?

[@AnthonyRBlacker]

While watching you look at the MegaLITH RAM expansion board for the 286... the thought occurred to me that man oh man we are SO spoiled today with Plug and Play. I remember sometimes HOURS of messing around with dip switches and jumpers to get the right interrupt settings (maybe not hours but still) plus God forbid you didn't know what the speed settings for your motherboard were if you changed CPUs on a test system or something, man it was TOUGH and there was no internet back then either!!! Wow.. we have come a LONG way in a VERY short period of time when it comes to Personal Computers!

[@ResurrectionRetro]

I restored the exact same boombox on my channel last year! Had to double take when you pulled that out of bubble wrap. Watch out for the clear panel over the front of the tube can fall off sue to old age on the glue.

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

Nice -- any tips for trying to get the mech working? Any difficulties?

[@ResurrectionRetro]

From what i remember just a standard mech for the tape. I actually had two of them and did a parts swap as the case was damaged . I still have a working tape deck and TV power/flyback board if you want them!

[@sideburn]

I use a roku connected to a powered rf modulator to broadcast to a tv channel and get those mini tvs working. People used the Sony watchman say football and baseball games.

[@freeculture]

I have that hard drive ST3144A, still works with a few bad sectors. Also have its younger sibling from the same family (same manual i still have) ST3096A and also works fine. Well last time i tried them like a decade ago...

[@Torbjorn.Lindgren]

Hard disk metal platter - it varies depending on age, it can be aluminium alloy, glass or ceramic (and probably others I've missed), and then covered in a thin layer of magnetic material. The fact that the magnetic storage is in a thin layer means more rigid materials now allows many more very thin platters, modern drives are now contain up to 10 platters in a 26.1mm thick 3.5" hard disk! Obviously lots of other technology was also necessary for this to be practical, like very thin heads and helium enclosure (reduces friction and turbulent losses). Additional note: Not all disks will have full-sized disks, IIRC 15k 2.5" disks sometimes? always? uses smaller (~2") platters because the smaller platter results in lower seek times and the lower capacity was a sacrifice to further distance them from regular 3.5" hard disks, depending on material the lower edge speed might also the required platter thickness.

[@Rodville]

I take the magnets and tie a string to it and I can sweep the floor under my desk for when I inevitably drop a screw or few.

[@fnjesusfreak]

I used to have an Emerson 5" BW portable TV / AM-FM radio (that thing was big for a portable, I sat my SNES on top of it). It took AC or 10 D batteries and had 300Ω inputs in the back for UHF and VHF - so I used it as the display for my SNES.

[@samcostanza]

When I dabbled in going into IT back in the early 2000s, we used to have to destroy tons of hard drives, so we'd pull the magnets out and strip the platters for one of the guy's wife, who was making windchimes. The magnets would be used to play hard disc grenades. You'd walk past someone's office, and toss one at their file cabinet. The resulting BOOM would scare the daylights out of the recipient.🤣

[@Toonrick12]

At least company fridge was a good place to put messages, it seems.

[@davidmiller9485]

My wife makes personal planters out of hard drive cases. She puts a plastic liner, dirt and then a small plant which can be hung on the wall in really small places to brighten up a room. They are quite popular. To bad she's not interested in either selling them or doing an instructive video on how to make them. Like the rest of us, as she gets older the less she wants to do certain things.

[@alain99v6]

the high channel UHF were re-allocated to analog cellular phone networks later they removed channels again for more cellular networks in digital

[@jdebultra]

I mount those magnets on my various work areas in the shop. I use them to magnetize my high quality, most used, one piece (ancient) drivers. Not only do I love old hardware, I adore high quality 70's - 80's hand tools.

[@Vermilicious]

I'm a bit amazed that people kept the boxes back then, and that they even survived so long afterwards. I'm sure many collectors would like those!

[@chadhartsees]

I hope so! We were ridiculous box keepers for a long time.

[@evileyeball]

When you talk about 8mb being Street cred on a 5170.... I remember when I had Street Cred for the 8 Gigs i had in 2008 on my Core 2 Duo E8400 based machine. People called me CRAZY I showed them when I was still running that machine well into 2019.

[@markmuir7338]

The hard disk platter wind chime has such post apocalyptic vibes: a future society that has regressed technologically, finds remnants of our old tech and uses them for simpler purposes with no idea what their original use was.

[@PrinsessePeach]

My first PC was a 386 SX 16 MHz with 5 MB of ram and an EGA monitor. That PC had to count the ram three times at every boot. I did get it in the early 90’s don’t remember exactly what year it was.

[@morantaylor]

The hard drive maganets as also handy for hanging cables on metal surfaces the holes are the right size for cable ties :)

[@Clavichordist]

Drive magnets make great clamps for gluing things. I had a Western Digital drive blow up on me in a similar fashion. A friend of mine was using my system for final edits for a book she was preparing for output to the resolution ECRM VR-30 imagesetter at my brother's prepress company. When the hard drive blew up, she went into a panic of course because these edits were nowhere else and the drive blew up before she could backup the book. I contacted a company that repaired hard drives and they said that generally with drive failures like that the chances of recovering the information are slim. Given the cost to repair the drive was extremely high, we figured there wasn't much that could be done. At that point, she resigned herself to having to start over and go back to an earlier backup while losing a few days of edits in the process. With the drive being more or less a brick, I took a controller board off another identical Western Digital drive that failed and put it on the fried drive, and it worked! Yes, it worked! She was able to output her book and the old Frankenstein drive lived for another few years before I replaced it with something different.

[@nkwarfield1]

Hard drive platters make great shaving mirrors

[@JibunnoKage-YouTube-Channel]

Made may different variants of wind chimes from old hard drives! Even from RA80 Disk Packs... which were about 16 inches in diameter. Made my first disk chime about 13 years ago!

[@freednighthawk]

The broken TV Boombox, you should take the TV circuit out of it, I'm sure it's a whole separate unit inside, and turn it into a micro display. 3D print a housing for it.

[@jamesross3939]

I love the SWTPC t-shirt, I need one of those!

[@palin1124]

I have that same Emerson TV combo. I used to watch Saturday morning cartoons on it as a kid. I hope you do a video on it is like to give mine some TLC, but would like to follow your lead.

[@member57]

I wanted that boom box TV back in the day.

[@tiporari]

I had an RCA branded handheld TV similar to that Casio that had a fantastic early LCD (not TFT). The tech very quickly improved. I still have it, and it still works!

[@fattomandeibu]

If I remember rightly(but could be wrong), the "reverse CRT" was first used by Clive Sinclair(yes, as in the ZX Spectrum) in the Sinclair TV-80, aka FTV1. The failure of that TV was one of the reasons Sinclair's computers were sold to Amstrad. Costing them £4m to produce and sold less than 20,000 TVs.

[@CasinoWoyale]

On the contrary, it was the failure of the flat screen TV that led to Sinclair getting into the business of producing microcomputers.

[@fattomandeibu]

@@CasinoWoyale That was a different, earlier effort called MTV1 that used a 1" regular CRT. The TV-80 was 1983.

[@delimitnc]

Just a note about the sleeve for your Casio: mine held up great till it started the infamous rubber reversion process within the span of a month, stored out of sunlight in a climate controlled environment. Anything with that soft touch feeling/coating is worth checking on periodically, they're all timebombs I think.

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

Eww.... yeah not surprised it took a sudden turn.

[@kingforaday8725]

I remember the days when there was a plethora of tiny TV's. As in 5 inches and under. Stand alone, boombox combos, DJ units with a microphone, etc My coolest one is a Sony TV-511 with a rotating screen! If the price is right, which it usually is, I pick these up whenever I see them. I frequently get comments along the lines of these things are useless because these cannot pickup todays TV broadcast. However, there are ways to connect even current generation PS and Xbox consoles! Some older gaming consoles can be directly connected depending on getting the right output/input combo. Granted its not very useful and mostly just a "cool, how did you do that?" Kinda neat for a party or having friends family over.

[@StephenGutknecht]

Adrian sets The Standard for the 1980's Users Group Presentation Guidelines and Tips

[@dhpbear2]

18:00 - Hell, I can see the frickin' PIXELS! :)

[@Hiraghm]

I used to have one of those "portable" tvs that was about the size and shape of a Commodore SX-64. 5" tv crt, AM/FM, cassette player/recorder. I recorded the entire series of cosmos onto cassette, then listened to for years. I was disappointed when I got it that I couldn't record even low-quality video onto cassette.

[@Spokavriel]

Labtec might be bare minimum in speaker response but the circuitry is good. I find swapping them out for some wide range speakers gave pretty good but no bass performance. My Go-to replacement speaker would probably be something 4 Ohm and designed for public address so it has good frequency response through all the vocal range tones.

[@joshhoman]

Wind comes are as good a possibility for those hard disk platters as any other. Mirrored lights are another possibility.

[@pjbth]

Oh man I picked up one of those sony watchman things from value village for like $10 it's so cool just a bummer there's no signal anymore

[@Wikcentral]

depending on how the door is supposed to attach, but one could probably design and 3d print some parts to be glued to the tape door to recreate what was once there. I feel some Clear PETG would blend in well

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

Even if it was black, I would be OK with it... it's not really visible. But I have zero CAD design skills so there is no chance I would ever be able to replicate such a thing

[@Wikcentral]

@@adriansdigitalbasement2 you would pick up on some 3d modeling really quickly. I highly recommend learn fusion 360 in 30 days series by Products Design Online here on YT. 3 or 4 videos would get you far enough to doing basic designing.

[@acidhelm]

Stuart's channel was the first channel that I ever subscribed to. He also made a second book about terrible old games.

[@acidhelm]

@@davidmiller9485 Stuart Ashen, his channel is named Ashens.

[@solarbirdyz]

PC-11 is an epoxy plastic repair material that can be sculpted. I've used it to repair plastic parts where parts were actually missing in several cases. The problem will of course be figuring out the correct shapes.

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

Can you squish it into holes, then let it harden later? That might work

[@solarbirdyz]

​@@adriansdigitalbasement2 I think you could cast it. You'd need some sort of easily removable cast material, though, like... wax. Wax would certainly work. (Initially it's _very_ sticky and goopy so if you mean shape it by pushing it into another part of the device, I don't think that'll work; I think it'll stick to what you push it into.)

[@IDPhotoMan]

I wish you would have hooked up your uhf streamer to test out those tv's. So cool, i have one and watch my old Toshiba now and then.

[@Neodra]

When you started talking during the 4 meg memory part I got serious LGR vibes😀

[@raycreveling1583]

I do a lot of USPS Shipping. USPS just implemented ground advantage a few months ago as a comparable product to UPS ground. Before that your only option was Priority mail. That's the equivalent of UPS 2day or 3day. If you're sending books or media then media mail is the most cost effective option.

[@maniatore2006]

I have a biger Sony Watchman that works just fine, and also i have an Epson LCD TV that is from 1988 and hat a much better LCD than the Casio. Thank you so much for that video.

[@nticompass]

Ashen's book is great, it's got lots of fun stuff in it! Highly recommend.

[@envisaged-uk]

Back in the day I had the Sinclair Handheld TV, which took the square lithium batteries, but boy were they hard to find when I lived in North Wales. I did however discover that if I staid outside the games arcade, I could tune it in to watch people playing the likes of Defender etc which I thought was cool. Regarding magnets, DO NOT walk past a metal handrail when you have four N52 magnets in your pocket, it takes forever to remover yourself from the handrail, speaking from experience hahaha.

[@raypalmer7733]

I still have my Casio TV-410 (yes its a 410 and not a typo) In the original thin foam box and still have the Instruction Manual with its as well. It was good for its day and let's not forget that in 1990 (or there abouts) a small CRT was hugely costly.

[@Ojref1]

Those Casio pocket TVs were also sold at Radio Shack rebadged as Realistics. Like you said, man those passive TFTs were crap, even brand new.

[@ste76539]

I remember buying a Casio pocket TV in the early 1990's. I ended up taking it back to the shop who weren't going to give me my money back. I argued my point, telling them it wasn't fit for purpose because the batteries wouldn't last long enough to even watch a full tv episode, and if I had to use a DC power cable then it wasn't a portable tv anymore. Got my money back 🙂

[@senilyDeluxe]

Hey that's the same model combo TV Boombox I pulled out of a dumpster just a few weeks ago. Already AV-modded it. You gotta scratch one trace on the TV board for video (very near the IF can, don't let the test point in the middle of the board fool you) and another on the mode selector switch to make it stereo (also had to add a 300 Ohms resistor to ground), it's the one that goes vertical in between the pins. Mine's Elite branded, it's 100% identical though*. I also had to disassemble and clean all the switches (the record/playback switch is interesting as it's solenoid driven), it had the same tape volume problems as yours. I'm kinda surprised all the belts in the tape deck of mine work. *) Waaait the tape counter is next to the FM stereo indicator instead of under the speaker. Yeah, the tape mechanism is different. And the antenna input is an European standard antenna input instead of 3.5mm. Tips for repair: Even though it looks like the three function switches on top only come out as one, they come out individually and I guess you only need to fix the function selector (radio tape TV) I got a stack of these Casio portable TVs. They always leak capacitors, but not many in there, so a quick and relatively easy fix. Just don't ever remove the LCD PCB even if there are caps on there, leave them alone.

[@arcanescroll]

I have that exact same boombox tv model, I absolutely love it. Mine doesn't play cassette anymore either, it worked for a couple minutes before the belt died and I haven't had a chance to replace them. The TV gets a surprisingly good picture and the sound isn't bad. I never thought I would see another like it 😊

[@h12jrg]

I had the Casio Tv430 in the uk which used the pal signal and the picture Quality was better. The year was 1988

[@adrienholtzman7354]

The boom boxes look extremely similar to Panasonic ones from the same time period.

[@Zoli1972s]

I had this CASIO TV (well, the PAL version of it) back in the 90's and the screen was very watchable, not dim at all, only when the battery voltage got low. I watched it pretty much every day at work when I had standby shifts, when I was working as a train conductor. I watched so much Star Trek TNG on this one. The picture quality wasn't that bad back in the day, compared to the other stuff you could get. But You're right about the power consumption. I always had to have 3 sets of rechargable AA batteries on me, to run this thing for one standby shift 😀, and there was no power socket in our ready room. Unfortunately, one day when I had to do train service, I had my backpack in a staff locker cabinet on the train, and someone (one of the passengers) broke the thing open while I was doing my work and stole my whole backpack with the TV in it. Months later a colleague found the backpack at the train line thrown into the woods.

[@jerryspann8713]

At 13:23 after he moves his hand away, you can see an electronic erase head.

[@annareismith6843]

Me to. Love watcing these.

[@Hiraghm]

Tech Tangents or Perifractic could probably fix that door... Tech Tangents, iirc, has a technique of mixing baking powder and superglue (?) to "build" broken/missing parts.

[@falksweden]

Would probably be quite easy to 3D-print new brackets for the tape door. Also some kind of adapter for using modern rechargable cells in the battery compartment.

[@superslammer]

When I was a kid, Trix was giving away one on the cereal box :) I wanted it so bad. It was a watchman I'm pretty sure.

[@superslammer]

If you give the platters a clearcoat bfore touching them, they look even better :)

[@johnvosh1986]

Love you channels and content! If you think the shipping was expensive on that box, I'll give you something just as bad. I order some pieces of Lego of Bricklink and shipping was $25! The box was 12.7cmX12.7cmX12.7cm and only weighed 400 grams and it cost $25 to go from Ontario to Alberta thru Canada Post!

[@2009numan]

that jack on the side of the sony watchman was an earphone jack Adrian

[@2009numan]

Cool video Adrian

[@PXAbstraction]

Hey Adrian, what POST card are you using? I just got a motherboard with a Pentium 233 that doesn't POST and I'd like to try my hand at troubleshooting it. I found a few of them on Amazon, but they all have very mixed reviews. Just curious what one you're using since it seems solid. Thanks!

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

Ah grab one of the cards from Aliexpress or Amazon: www.aliexpress.us/item/2255801058980488.html That one specifically is what I use. ISA + PCI connector .... and a speaker. Very handy

[@codahighland]

I had a SpeedStar Pro back in the day! I can't remember if that was before or after the SpeedStar 24.

[@sokoloft3]

Tech Tangents has a video on using super glue and baking soda to build up material to fit plastics like that door. That might work, haven't done it myself.

[@SiaVids]

Not all hard drive platters are made of metal, some are made of glass so may be less than ideal for using as wind chimes.

[@CDE.Hacker]

I remember in the early 2000's I put one of those Pentium overdrive chips in a 486 dos card for my dad's power Macintosh 6100. Wild times back then. Trying stuff not knowing if it would work.

[@sonicunleashedfan124]

I love your channels and content. What I do with hard drive platters (mostly ones out of 3.5” drives) is I use them as coasters, especially ones that have had some sort of head crash, like one out of a Quantum ProDrive ELS I got from a friend