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VC Restmod?

Chuck(G)

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During my illness, I've watched entirely too much TV. While I'm not tempted to get into Bering Sea gold mining, I was taken by the idea of the auto restomod--taking a vintage car and equipping it with a huge fuel-injected engine and big drive train.

Does something like this exist in the vintage computer world? Should I consider this for my MITS 8800?
 
Ahhh the Bering Sea Gold show....watched for a couple of seasons....always thought Emily was hot...the fighting brothers and many others not so much. I get that the shows are performances and edited to maximal put the fun in dysfunction, but..well, whatever.

As to your question, I don't know, but I think that this guy (running Linux on a 4004) might fit the bill. Way over my skill set and wickedly impressive in a bizarre way.
 
Ahhh the Bering Sea Gold show....watched for a couple of seasons....always thought Emily was hot...the fighting brothers and many others not so much. I get that the shows are performances and edited to maximal put the fun in dysfunction, but..well, whatever.

As to your question, I don't know, but I think that this guy (running Linux on a 4004) might fit the bill. Way over my skill set and wickedly impressive in a bizarre way.
Naw, that just demonstrates Turing-completeness... :(
 
Doesn't count--it's built on a clone..
I don't see why that matters since you'd be gutting it and just using the case anyway. Unless your goal is to upset people because you trashed a real Altair...
 
A retromod is taking the old car and gutting it and using new tech (large ABS braking systems with much larger modern tires, new crate motors and transitions, completely new wiring, new stereo system, etc.).

I would prefer just to buy a 100% new car that has the same styling as the old model but none of the rusty bits.

https://revologycars.com/car/1967-shelby-gt500/

Anyway, the closest thing I have to retromod on computers are P2/AMD K6 AT motherboards that are drop-in replacements for older AT systems. You can gut any old machine and stick a new MB and PS into it but still have to deal with cable hell and no airflow you get with old cases so why bother.

When Intel released the 8086K somebody modded a XT machine using that CPU, even made a CGA looking LCD monitor for it.

 
A retromod is taking the old car and gutting it and using new tech (large ABS braking systems with much larger modern tires, new crate motors and transitions, completely new wiring, new stereo system, etc.).

I would prefer just to buy a 100% new car that has the same styling as the old model but none of the rusty bits.

https://revologycars.com/car/1967-shelby-gt500/
That mustang is still a restomod. The body and all the trim are exact reproductions of the original car. It's simply cheaper than sourcing and restoring original parts, which is expensive and time consuming.
 
I am aware. It's still a restomod. They are starting with a 1967 Mustang body, stamped in Taiwan.
 
Should I consider this for my MITS 8800?

If you don't want it anymore I'd happily trade you a much better box to put a modern computer in. Or if you go through with it I'll pay shipping for the bits you rip out.

Yes, "sleepers."

A couple decades ago the march of progress gave us some really small motherboard form factors, and from that technological awakening spawned the everlasting joy of Mini-ITX.com, the website where no container, including "vintage" computers galore, was safe from having a lackluster PC stuck inside of it. These days, of course, you can get a lot more powerful computers in even smaller packages, but... I dunno, I still treasure the old days, and if I ever need a reminder why sleepers are, uhm, pretty freaking lame, I know where to go.

To be fair, some of these things were decently tasteful:

mac-itx-0001L.jpg

But if I'm honest it's the complete and utter abortions that keep my love alive.

wraithse0001.jpg

Doesn't count--it's built on a clone..
I don't see why that matters since you'd be gutting it and just using the case anyway. Unless your goal is to upset people because you trashed a real Altair...

Yeah, I guess I'm going to echo @Plasma and ask what the actual angle is here. If your plan is to just gut an Altair 8800 and use it as a stupidly expensive box to stick a gamer PC into I don't think anyone's going to be particularly impressed with the technical virtuosity of the feat. Not to say some people aren't going to find this cool, there's those people out there who pay four figures just to use objectively kind of terrible keyboards salvaged from mainframe terminals on their PCs because they love the aesthetic of it. (I wonder if these are the same people who subscribe to those Youtube channels where some shreking spoiled-ass kid farms views by vandalizing Lamborginis and other tiresome displays of "I'm too rich to care".)

I mean, it's your thing to do what you will with. It just kind of feels very... conspicuous consumption-y? Maybe you could sell it to Mr. Beast when you were finished with it.

I dunno, personally I kind of feel like Sleepers have genuinely been done to death and, let's face it, an Altair is roomier inside than many PC cases so it's not really going to be much a physical feat to stuff a bloodcurdling-ly powerful motherboard and video card and whatever else qualifies as a "big drive train" inside. You don't even really need to modify it at all; just yank a few cards out and you'll have enough room to stow a laptop inside that outspecs the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1975 by more than five orders of magnitude if you count the GPU. And of course this is eight or nine orders of magnitude compared to the original 8-bit CPU. This is roughly the equivalent of taking a Ford Model T and making it capable of traveling approximately 6% of the speed of light and, again, this is by just chucking a gamer laptop or one of the higher spec Intel/ASUS NUCs loosely into the box. (IE, to stretch this bad metaphor a bit, you didn't even bother taking out the original motor, you just used some twist ties to hang a box near that goofy thing that they use instead of a distributor) Go completely ape and spend mid-five figures on the fattest GPUs you can find you'll add another zero to the end and *really* be able to enjoy those relativistic effects.

Are you planning to make the switches do anything that contributes to the final product, or are they just going to sit there dead? (I dunno, maybe you could split the difference and wedge a microcontroller behind the front panel that makes them blink randomly at first, and then move up to having them able to control an Altair emulator? I mean, it's not a unique idea, that's what all the replicas do, but this would be the *expensive* version.)

Honestly what seems to be more in vogue these days is add-ons for vintage computers that don't involve "gutting" them, it's all about wedging some device into them that massively enhances the apparent functionality of them (IE, can at least with some plausible deniability be described as an "upgrade"), but is really a fast embedded computer that uses a little ball of CPLD/FPGA logic and clever software to take over the old machine and wear it like a skin suit. Poster child for this is the PiStorm "upgrade" for Commodore Amigas, which actually converts your Amiga 500/1000/2000 into a somewhat awkward set of peripherals for a Raspberry Pi SBC.

It's not *quite* the same thing, but there are a number of boards out there for wedging Raspberry Pis and other small SBCs into an S100 card slot and using them as master or slave CPUs. You could always go that route; I mean, it still gives you the bragging points of having a CPU a bazillionty times bigger inside. But I guess if you just want an Altair-boxed gaming PC that's not going to scratch that itch.
 
I am aware. It's still a restomod. They are starting with a 1967 Mustang body, stamped in Taiwan.

Yes. Looking at the website it actually looks like they sell both complete new-build kits(*) and "restored" cars that are licensed as if they were original cars but have had nearly everything replaced.

(*) This is actually a pretty important distinction. It's a pretty big hassle to sell "new" cars given all the regulations, safety/emissions/otherwise, that new cars are expected to meet, so it's a pretty common strategy for these companies to use/abuse the rules regarding both "kit cars" and what qualifies as a "restoration" to grease the wheels. Frankly the impression I'm getting from digging around this company is they're basically laundering kits into "new cars" but, whatever.

Over a decade ago there was another company that was selling "brand new" '56 Chevy Bel Air convertibles, and their website was very open about how they were getting away with it; they were basically scouring junkyards all over the country, buying whatever rusted hulks they could find that still had the VIN tag attached to the firewall, and sawsall-ing out that one small section of the car to build a brand new car around. Apparently that was enough to let them register the cars as "used" original models. (It did have the amusing side effect that on many of the titles the resulting car would appear as a four door sedan or whatever, despite clearly being a convertible in the VIN tag's new life.) I'm going to guess that Revology's "restored" cars keep about that much of the original mustang.
 
I'm mostly convinced Chuck is just trolling.

I am guilty of putting a mini ITX board in a C64, but in my defense it was actually an empty C64X I got for cheap on ebay.

I seem to recall somebody putting a mini ITX board in a watermelon back in the day. That was mildly amusing.
 
Good restomod
Back-to-the-Future-DeLorean-(2).jpeg


Bad restomod
210116150915-david-hasselhoff-kitt-car-restricted.jpg


Really bad restomod
my-mother-the-car-they-just-dont-make-quality-tv-v0-j73civclitjc1.jpeg
 
During my illness, I've watched entirely too much TV. While I'm not tempted to get into Bering Sea gold mining, I was taken by the idea of the auto restomod--taking a vintage car and equipping it with a huge fuel-injected engine and big drive train.

Does something like this exist in the vintage computer world? Should I consider this for my MITS 8800?

Good restomod
Back-to-the-Future-DeLorean-(2).jpeg


Bad restomod
210116150915-david-hasselhoff-kitt-car-restricted.jpg


Really bad restomod
my-mother-the-car-they-just-dont-make-quality-tv-v0-j73civclitjc1.jpeg
Real good restomod . . .

C1.png
 
I once received a Commodore CBM 8032-SK that was fried by lightning. I replaced the CRT with a LCD screen and the motherboard plus power supply with those of a PC. Some pictures can be seen here: CBM-PC. I mainly used it to create floppy disk images using the original Commodore drives as source device.
 
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