A rescue with a twist

[RobertB]

     When I go off to rescue someone's C= collection from the dumpster, I'm usually there to pick up Commodore and Amiga items.  I say no to PC items.  However, when I went to Fremont, California a few weekends ago to pick up another load from a friend, he gave me Commodore PC items, like manuals and CBM PC disks.  Now all I need is a Commodore PC, be it a Colt/PC-10, PC-20, PC-30.    That's not counting the Amiga 2000 with Bridgeboard nor the Commodore 286 laptop nor the Amiga GVP A530 hard drive with 286 daughtercard that I have.

               Truly,
               Robert Bernardo
               Fresno Commodore User Group
               http://videocam.net.au/fcug
               The Other Group of Amigoids
               http://www.calweb.com/~rabel1/
               Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network
               http://www.sccaners.org

[RobertB]

     I think it was in the early 2010's when I went to far northern Washington state to rescue a collection. In that collection was a Commodore PC20-III.  Well, it lay unrepaired and unloved for a long while.  I visited the Seattle Commodore Computer Club in 2019, and I saw a fully-working PC20-III, running a color game with sound and joystick control.
     The pandemic struck, and I didn't think about it again... until late last year when I visited SCCC again.  I was hoping to see the working PC20-III again, but it wasn't there.  I decided that instead of having to wait to see it, I would fix mine!
     I brought it over to friend Duncan in Santa Clara, and he determined that it was a more generic PC clone than a Tandy 1000.  The mechanical hard drive was frozen, but the disk drive booted with a DOS 5.0 disk.  The computer worked!
     So, now the upgrades have begun.  VGA card, XT-to-IDE adapter, IDE Compactflash (for the hard drive), a slew of PC games installed, and now just the wait for a few components in order to finish the Sound Blaster clone board (for sound and joystick control).

          Won't this be a surprise when I show off
          the completed machine?!
          Robert Bernardo
          Fresno Commodore User Group - http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
          Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network - http://www.portcommodore.com/sccan

[RobertB]

     Hurrah!  Duncan M. of The Other Group of Amigoids (San Jose, CA) repaired the PC20-III.  He replaced the old HD with a Compactflash card, giving it DOS 6.0.  Then he upgraded other components of the computer-—maxing out the memory, plugging in a more efficient NEC V20 CPU, adding a 3 1/2" floppy disk drive alongside the standard 5 1/2" floppy drive, building and installing a Snarker Barker sound card (Sound Blaster clone) with 3D-printed volume control wheel, and putting in a RGBI-to-VGA video card.  On the CF card, he installed a slew of PC games, especially games that used sound through the sound card.  He admitted that he hadn't finished rebuilding a CH (Kraft) joystick for me to use on the PC (joystick connecting to the port on the sound card), but that if I wanted to use a mouse on the computer's mouse port, I could use an Amiga mouse.
     As an old PC, it is slow to boot up, and the CGA games are not really that colorful.  I'm thinking of installing GeoWorks onto it, so I can get that GEOS desktop feeling. 

           Truly,
           Robert Bernardo
           Fresno Commodore User Group - http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
           Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network - http://www.portcommodore.com/sccan