Random photos of stations I have visited

[mojo]

 

Musashi-Fujisawa.

[mojo]

 

Hidaka eki-mae.

 

 

A rare PC-FX card for computers. It added the ability to play PC-FX games on your computer (almost all are dating sims), but also added some 3D graphical capabilities that were unused apart from some demo software. The plan was to release an upgrade for the PC-FX itself to add 3D capability, but the platform died before it could reach the market.

[mojo]

 

The moon didn't come out very well. It might be savable with the RAW image.

 

Ogose Station.

[mojo]

 

A video from yesterday:

 

 

Edited December 26, 2023 by mojo

[cteno4]

6 hours ago, mojo said:

Yeah, I also regret selling my childhood machines now. Do you mean a ZX81 or ZX82? Friends has Spectrums, they were interesting machines. Clearly built down to a price, but some games were surprisingly good. I've done some Z80 assembler for a hobby project I've been working on, so now any Z80 based machines are more interesting.

I had the original ZX80. At $199 it was a fraction of the cost of other computers of the time (my mom’s kaypro I think was $1500 at the time) and affordable by a student. I think it was another $80 then when I expanded ram to 4K. Was cool, such a small computer. I used a micro cassette recorder for storage. Also had a Sinclair led watch kit, quite fun. I liked the z80 as a lot of functional programs available cheap. Basis was nice as it has both z80 and 6502 so could span cp/m to Apple. For a while I was king with a 256k RAM disk! I then jumped ship to Macs in grad school.

 

jeff

[Gunzel]

14 hours ago, mojo said:

I have a PowerBook G4, and it's a bit meh... I have seen a few videos about Macs of that era that got me a little bit interested, but I'm not taking to them. I want to rebuild the battery pack, and today I found a dual USB and Firewire 2.5" HDD enclosure so it will be easier to work with.

 

Maybe the earlier ones would be more my thing. I used to run MacOS 7 on my Amiga, which at the time was the fastest "Mac" you could get. They aren't easy to get into though, lots of Apple specific hardware it seems. The G4 was bad enough, took about a dozen attempts to find install discs that worked.

i had a PowerBook G4 for work back in the day but it didn’t really leave me with much nostalgia for it. And compared to the Pismo G3s before and the unibody MacBooks that came after, it wasn’t very sturdy. I have a couple of those external drives now they are very useful. 
 

i think you may be disappointed in the older Mac’s too compared to your Amigas. Though I love them, Macs really were a bit underpowered and overpriced back in the day. For the 90s ones as well you have issue these days of spindly plastics. I just bought a donor PowerBook 160 on Buyee to fix my one. Though mine is is pretty good shape when it was being shipped to be recapped the clips on the retaining ring for the trackball disintegrated letting the ball bounce up and down and out a dint in the LCD panel. 
 

Those Sony PVMs go for 5-10x that price here, I wonder how much they weight

 and whether they are PAL capable? Probably best not to find out 🙂 I gave away my CRTs when we moved into an apartment 😢

[Gunzel]

On 12/12/2023 at 12:31 AM, mojo said:

Need to find a better place to take a photo of this one. It used to be all cats and Shiba dogs, but for some reason these crabs seem to be popular now. Personally I find it a bit weird because although I don't touch them to most Japanese people they are food.

I’ve just been going back through your thread mining it for good HARD OFF locations because we have booked a quick trip in February/March. Anyway it’s crab season and these are ads to travel on the Shinkansen to Toyama and get some fresh crab to eat. I don’t usually have the patience to eat crab so Japan is great because it is often fully prepared for you. 

[mojo]

17 hours ago, cteno4 said:

I had the original ZX80. At $199 it was a fraction of the cost of other computers of the time (my mom’s kaypro I think was $1500 at the time) and affordable by a student. I think it was another $80 then when I expanded ram to 4K. Was cool, such a small computer. I used a micro cassette recorder for storage. Also had a Sinclair led watch kit, quite fun. I liked the z80 as a lot of functional programs available cheap. Basis was nice as it has both z80 and 6502 so could span cp/m to Apple. For a while I was king with a 256k RAM disk! I then jumped ship to Macs in grad school.

 

jeff

 

That's interesting. It was £99 in the UK, but I don't know what the exchange rate was like back then. Am I right in thinking that the US version had a better keyboard? Was it Timex branded? The 4k ROM with BASIC was a work of art in many ways. It wasn't good per-se, but cramming so much functionality into 4k was impressive. Reminds me of their calculators that took a Texas 4-function calculator chip and managed to cram scientific functions into it.

 

Rumour has it they had more Sinclair Watches return than they ever made, they were so unreliable. Sinclair had an obsession with LED displays, when everyone else went to LCD. Hopefully yours was reliable!

 

 

8 hours ago, Gunzel said:

i had a PowerBook G4 for work back in the day but it didn’t really leave me with much nostalgia for it. And compared to the Pismo G3s before and the unibody MacBooks that came after, it wasn’t very sturdy. I have a couple of those external drives now they are very useful. 
 

Those Sony PVMs go for 5-10x that price here, I wonder how much they weight

 and whether they are PAL capable? Probably best not to find out 🙂 I gave away my CRTs when we moved into an apartment 😢

 

The Powerbook G4 looks a bit like a kid's toy now... I seem to remember they were better at the time. Back in the day I had to replace a HDD on one, which meant taking it almost completely apart. Must have been a nightmare for warranty work because HDDs are the most common point of failure.

 

I too thought about the weight of those PVMs for a moment, but I think it's probably more than I can carry at the moment! I was lucky, I was able to find a Philips CM8833 mkII going very cheap locally, and basically unused. Someone bought it for a CCTV system and never used it. It probably needs to be re-capped now, but it does work and the picture looks perfect. What I really need is a monitor capable of 15, 24, and 31kHz.

 

 

7 hours ago, Gunzel said:

I’ve just been going back through your thread mining it for good HARD OFF locations because we have booked a quick trip in February/March. Anyway it’s crab season and these are ads to travel on the Shinkansen to Toyama and get some fresh crab to eat. I don’t usually have the patience to eat crab so Japan is great because it is often fully prepared for you. 

 

The poor crabs!

[mojo]

 

Some Hard Off branches have started labelling used HDDs this way, and it's really helpful. The first number is the number of power cycles, the second one is the number of hours it's been on for. Very useful for telling how hard a life the drive has had.

 

 

Manhole cover in Fuchu.

 

[mojo]

 

 

[mojo]

 

All at Higashi-Fuchu Station.

[mojo]

 

Inagi. I assume they know what "badass" means, but maybe not that it's not normally a word associated with hair dressing.

[mojo]

 

At Mizunokuchi Station.

 

 

If I thought I could carry that I'd love to make it into a clock or something! If it's not immediately apparent, it's the display from a bus. The top part has a scrolling message showing the next stop and so forth. The lower parts show the prices in yen based on how far you have travelled.

 

 

 

 

[mojo]

 

Nagatsuta Station.

 

Just now on the NHK News they were talking about a scheme were you can donate money and get various experiences in exchange. One example was some guys who paid to take a JR safety class, the same as what employees have to take.

[mojo]

 

Yokohama.

[mojo]

[mojo]

 

Night Sight or not? It looks better in HDR, but my laptop doesn't have that.

 

 

 

This display showing restaurants in the shopping centre also shows if they have space, and if not how long you can expect to wait. Great idea.

[mojo]

Yokohama Cube thing videos:

 

 

And one from yesterday:

 

 

[railsquid]

2 hours ago, mojo said:

 

Inagi. I assume they know what "badass" means, but maybe not that it's not normally a word associated with hair dressing.

 

I presume you have never had the pleasure of Hair Slug in Daikanyama, Tokyo.

[cteno4]

3 hours ago, mojo said:

That's interesting. It was £99 in the UK, but I don't know what the exchange rate was like back then. Am I right in thinking that the US version had a better keyboard? Was it Timex branded? The 4k ROM with BASIC was a work of art in many ways. It wasn't good per-se, but cramming so much functionality into 4k was impressive. Reminds me of their calculators that took a Texas 4-function calculator chip and managed to cram scientific functions into it.

 

Rumour has it they had more Sinclair Watches return than they ever made, they were so unreliable. Sinclair had an obsession with LED displays, when everyone else went to LCD. Hopefully yours was reliable!

It was about $2 to the pound so I expect they set the $199 psychological price like the £99. I got mine early on and it was Sinclair and I think the same uk version, the timex brand I think was a bit later. I think you are right the later timex (maybe zx81?) had a better keyboard, the original chiclet keyboard sucked and had to type carefully and was tiny for my huge mitts. I bought mine very early out of an ad in Byte that Sinclair put out. Yes it was a very efficient design, had to be at that price point at that time! Wasn’t super useful, but fun. It’s still somewhere in the basement in a box with my clear developer newton. I should put them on display. I lost the user manual but picked up a xerox of one years ago. Basis 108 was very useful and got me thru most of real work in college and first half of grad school. Luckily the Mac and laserprinter came along for my 500 page dissertation production at the end of grad school! Would have been tedious on the basis and dot matrix…

 

the watch kit was a tricky one, the case was rather flimsy plastic and pc board was flexible and the assembly was tricky to make sure the whole thing did not flex the wrong way and cause a reset. Took assembling it like a dozen times and carefully shaving tiny bits off the inside of the case to get it to work consistently. I shared the watch (I think we went halfsies on it as it was a splurge at the time) with my dad and he forgot he had it on when on shipboard (he was a research ship captain) and plunked his arm in the water doing something and it died. Most all digital watches and calculators were led at the time, lcd screens came blasting in just after that. The having to push a button to see the time was a pain and display tiny so you couldn’t glance quickly, it took a little focus to read them. It was the cool factor at the time, it was like 1976 and I was starting high school!

 

amazing how many manhole covers you are finding. Good drainspotting!

 

jeff

[mojo]

 

First to Tsukuba for breakfast, then to Kenkyugakuen where apparently the T1000 is in development.

 

 

The Hard Off Mobile. They will lend it to you if you need a big van to move something.

[mojo]

 

To Shimodate to get on the Moka Tetsudo. They have a steam service, but just diesel today.

[mojo]

[mojo]

 

Moka Station.

 

 

They have a steam exhibit there, but because I'm an idiot I didn't stop to check it out.

[mojo]

 

Did a great job getting the camera level there. But at least it's a 50MP photo, so I should be able to fix it. I was tempted to ask if I could stand at the front... There is a hand rail, and I could have filmed out the front. Too shy.