28 november 2020
sorry for the lack of updates these days
I had to find ways to keep myself busy during lockdown to avoid falling into existential crisis and depression
dunno if the antidepressant is helping there, but I feel okay-ish.
it's still making me a bit tired I think. and reducing my appetite.
so I got some very modern computers to mess around with. among which, a Macintosh LC that did not work at all.
bit of nostalgia there, these 68k Macs were the first computers I ever used. mom even told me that I knew how to use the computers without even knowing to read -- I had just memorized that 'menu X line Y does Z' and such.
anyway, we had some nifty games on these, some of them that only ever had 68k Mac versions.
later the Macs were given away to the local school, iirc, and we had PCs instead.
so, as I was able to get my hands on one of these again, I wanted to see if I could get it going again.
given my limited electronics and soldering skills, would I be able to make it work at all? the answer is yes, apparently.
the thing needed new capacitors, as is common with electronics that old. the power supply wasn't working correctly, which was why it didn't turn on at all -- the motherboard was actually working fine when connected to an ATX power supply, minus having no audio.
the power supply needed some cleanup and rework to get going after the recap. eventually I got it working reliably.
I had more trouble getting the motherboard working after my cleanup and recap attempts, but eventually, doing things properly made it work.
I still had no audio though. had to do a bit more troubleshooting and fixing to get it working.
all in all, considered where we started from, not bad. I'm still waiting to get a scsi2sd to replace the dying HDD.
I also got a random PC. it's a stock build from Packard Bell, with a Pentium MMX CPU running at a whopping 200MHz.
it works, but has some stability issues. I cleaned up the RAM slots and reseated the RAM, that seemed to help.
it's running Windows 95. I'll have to see what kind of fun shit I can get into it.
I got the date for my gender marker change hearing. it's going to be in 4 months.
probably not going to be too dramatic. from what I see, it's looking good.