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Can I Fix this 46 Year Old Computer? | Commodore KIM-1
Can I Fix this 46 Year Old Computer? | Commodore KIM-1 Repair
#Fix #Year #Computer #Commodore #KIM1
“Tech Time Traveller”
I’ve had this Commodore KIM-1 for over a decade and have never even once seen one sign of life from it. It has been basically a paperweight (and not a very good one at that!) for a long, long time. Who knows when it worked last?
But I have persisted over the years, and thanks to the efforts…
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Edit: Sorry about the background music. I dialed it to -35db and somehow in processing on YT it perked up again. There's a lot of free background music on offer out there for YTers but so much of it has obnoxious segments – trumpets, guitar, drums, pianos, etc. I get that the artists (whom I am grateful for) dont want to be boring, but that's kind of what we want background music to be. I wouldn't mind trying something other than slow jazz but there's just not a lot out there that fits as proper background music, and I feel like the right music makes the video feel more professional. Anyway, next video I will assassinate any loud instrument solos I come across.
Sorry it's been.. um.. a really long time.. but, life happens. Anyway, I managed to squeeze this little side project in, filmed and edited in record time. Sorry – no animations/3d.. it would have added weeks to this and Youtube would bomb it anyway. But the next video will have those, and it's not far from being finished!
I think the most annoying part is how the 6532 RIOT chip (as used in the Atari 2600) has a completely different pinout from the 6530 RRIOT, even though they're basically the same inside. So you have to have an adapter board. The board you used is about as slim as you can get it.
And the worst thing a board like this can do for you is… nothing. You turn it on and nothing happens, while you're wondering if something is getting fried. I have an old board I've been working on where the reset circuit was stuck on. It took me a while just to confirm that was really the problem. I had to mess around with cutting and un-cutting traces before I found that it came from a trace that ran under five chips. Llifting a 74LS00 pin and bodging on an electrolytic capacitor to ground (there was already a pull-up on the reset line!) gave me a better reset circuit. I still haven't figured out yet what was wrong with the original reset circuit.
But now I know what you mean about the feeling of finally getting an old board fixed up, even though I still have a lot left to make mine useful because it wasn't supposed to be a trainer.
I have vague recollection that there were 3rd party terminal and tape drive connectors available for the KIM-1; was that the case?
Does this thing have an "expander" unit like the Heathkit ET-3400 had (the ETA-3400 box), so your single-board computer could get input-output to a simple terminal and thus you could run Tiny BASIC on it? I've never heard of one for the KIM-1, but you know that the cadre of '70s-early '80s homebrewers would come up with something…..
If you had enough of this KIM-1 then I could try to find some Canadian Dollars and offer you a new home for this computer. There are numerous fields where it can be used, as an egg timer of as a trainer for Morse-code. I saw a book once with a large dozen of possibilities for programmes. To be honest, it isn't mutch that can be done. Sitting pretty is the almost the only real task for a KIM-1.
I hate to see wires soldered direct to edge connector gold plated pads.
Sorry for being dense but what is the point of that "computer"? It can´t be made to only add single digit numbers, even a mechanical calculator would do it faster that this demonstration. What was it made to do by design, why does it exist at all?
I really want to know how these would have worked for HVAC!
yeah thats a great feeling when you see something runs for the first time.
id recommend getting some flux and copper braid for repairing the shorted lines.
i also couldnt see buying the hakko at that price and went with a zd-915. That with a hot air gun (for the ground vias) was magic doing some recap work on some motherboards recently.
The KIM-1 was made by MOS Technologies. Not Commodore. It was a prototype. It wasn't even branded.
I think I learned assembly on a kim ! in college in Newfoundland in 1987. I'm not sure but the keypad and display looks familiar. I remember it was in a black suitcase.
13:55 – I have a golden rule on my projects. Absolutely NEVER use stamped pin sockets. Use ONLY machined pin, gold plated, sockets and you will never get the "I have to press right here to make the board work" problem ever again. Yes. The machined sockets cost more. Still cheaper than the lost time. TIME. The only resource you can never replace.
put some red plastic film over the displays for enhanced readability
Do you have a link for that solder sucker ?
Wish I could find a KIM-1 for $115. I kick myself for not getting one of the clone kits when they where on ebay just to mess around with one. Oh well I guess the Git-hub with the reproduction gibber files and PCBwaaaaaaay is my only hope for another poor Canadian that is in this hobby 🙁
When did they start calling the 6530 a "RRIOT" chip? I always called them the "Kitchen sink chip", as in "everything but the…"
Nice! Very satisfying to see life in this old board again.
I don´t mind the music or the loudness. All´s good here.
Микролаб КР580ИК80 907 🙂
I just love that end 70's era "analogue" routing!
wow
Congrats on the successful rescue! Reminds me of my own multi-year effort to get my TIM-1 system (based on the MAI "Jolt" with a 6530-004 chip) running reliably. It would run for a while, then refuse to fully boot. Finally tracked it down to a marginal jelly-bean 74xx chip and a bad socket. Sheesh. The key piece of troubleshooting equipment was an HP 1662 logic analyzer with which I could watch the CPU trying to run, then fly off into hyperspace. The bad chip was in the address decode logic that enabled the 6530's ROM.
I built the system in the mid-1970's. The CPU and TIM chips were purchased from the Wescon show where they debuted; the Jolt board was purchased a year later after I got tired of trying to wire-wrap what would basically be the same thing. Already getting lazy, so young in life. It's got a Bay Area TVT for the terminal, high speed paper tape reader, and an 8-bit DAC that did data acquisition for my masters project. Blows my mind that an Arduino can do the same, so much better, for so little cost.
I have paper tapes for Tom Pitman's Tiny Basic, an assembler and text editor, and a few random utilities from the day. Now all I do is play Hunt the Wumpus on it. Fun times. I wouldn't mind finding any other games, if they even existed.
Yeah, best solder-sucker right there.
Some re-printed KIM-1 manuals on Tindie, BTW.
Great video, I love seeing old hardware that I know nothing about!
yeah you 100% need to use a turn pin socket with them round legs.
The reason why those of us in the USA don’t buy Canadian eBay stock is because Pitney Bowes breaks everything.
Ah, the joys of closed source hardware to make an additional buck. Wonder if I should finish my variant of the 6532 adapter I started years ago (never owned a KIM-1 but was asked if I wanted to repair one years ago – I declined because very early minimalist systems don't exactly interest me). Design was based on open source documentation from 2013 by Ruud Baltissen.
Congrats on getting it running! It’s too late now, but I would have purchased the proper card edge connectors to solder your leads to instead of soldering directly to the card edge of the KIM-1. You’ll never be able to remove the tinning you added to those nice gold plated cards edge pins.
If you wired up an external screen to it and wrote a program, I think the KIM-1 would make a decent novelty clock to have in the office or workshop. Would at least save it from being stuck on a shelf collecting dust unused.
Interesting to see it in use. Thanx. A personal preference: i think background music made it hard to follow along. But I guess ymmv as one say, could be my brain.
Ótimo video muito bom, o incrível KIM bons tempos aqueles computadores com teclado HEX.
The reason those chips die is because their I/O lines are ran straight to the edge connectors with absolutely no protection whatsoever. It's a shocking design! They should have added some ESD and short circuit protection. I know they were trying to keep costs down, but they were selling these into an environment (schools/colleges etc.) that were going to absolutely abuse them! Terrible design! 😆
You should contact @Davesgarage
He's done a couple of vids on his kim1
as it's replacing failed part? on basically "ford of cars – any if black", look wrong why blue? greens the default colour of PCB's,? Idea to make more pleasing on the eye? could not mount on the back of the PCB board? same sockets pins everything just build burger/pancake, in reverse you will not able see the chips as they will , squashed to the back of the kim-1 motherboard, and the win, win, no new chips on view? and assuming the Kim-1 is mount base, in display case the back wil not be on view? and as is no an entry hole where old chip was located, the history art, restoration, old chip cleaned up, bit sticky foam or something placed back in the hole, (just check shorting thing out, as only cosmetic now?
why would anyone pay 600 bucks. for a kim-1. it can't be 'nostalgia' for if you (like me) figured out how to use them when they were new (and so were you 😉 you can just build your own nowadays. brand new. for like. 50 bucks. and put all the other chips in there you want too lol. i mean i can see why people pay like 20K for a white ceramic chip version with the rotate bug and all that.
thosebelong in a musem. all the rest of em are just old evaluation kits, somewhat abused as prehistoric plc's, for a bunch of chips of which millions are sold each day to this very day. lol.I have watched Adrians Digital Basement quite a few times. And in some of the videos he has posted where he was repairing Commodore 64's, he has found new chips that are replacements for some of the older Commodore chips. Now I can't say for certain, but maybe someone in the Kim-1 community might know of replacements for the RRIOT chips