Retro Thing

eBay: Canine Music Synth From The USSR

I have no idea why this vintage Russian toy synthesizer features French cartoon character "Pif le chien," but I suspect it has something to do with his adorably socialist outlook on life. Or perhaps it is to disguise the fact that the front panel of this little analog synth is embarrassingly sparse.

It features a built-in speaker and line out. No MIDI, no programs, no display, and a mere 24 keys. It runs off 9VDC. How does it sound, you ask? Awful [mp3], but in a very cool way.

eBay: VINTAGE SOVIET ANALOG SYNTHESIZER "PIF" [Thanks for the heads up, William!]

1968: Wonderland Arcade

Wonderland Arcade occupied a corner of the Bonfils Building in Kansas City, Missouri from the mid-1940s until the building was renovated in 1983.

"Every season, every morning, two old ladies make their way through the milling crowd at 12th Street and Grand and enter the spectral funshow known as the Wonderland Arcade. Inside, they ignore the pinball, the screaming video games, and the hotdog breakfasts, and stride directly to the ancient mechanical fortune teller enclosing a gypsy mannequin which looks about their age. They slip in their coins, and receive a paper fortune which allows them to continue their day. Then they recede into Downtown.

The fortune-teller machine has only six fortunes to dispense. In fact, that's all it's ever had. Over the years, the ladies have collected hundreds of copies of each fortune. And still they return.

Such is the magic of this place. It is a siren's island, and there are those who cannot resist its call." ~ Kansas City Magazine, Nov 1980

Read more here.

Stone Age Commodore KIM-1 On eBay

Lawrence Bezuska emailed me the other day, wondering if I would be interested in buying his early Commodore computer. My first instinct was to eagerly purchase it, but common sense (and a lack of closet space) prevailed and he listed it on eBay. I told him it would probably fetch around $400.

The KIM-1 was the first computer made by MOS Technologies (Commodore). It came as a fully assembled bare board, with a six-digit LED display and a hexadecimal keypad (with 1152 bytes of RAM and 2K of ROM). They were produced until 1981, enjoying considerable success as low-cost hobbyist and educational machines. The incredibly successful Commodore PET-2001 was based on the KIM-1 architecture but included niceties such as a case, power supply, monitor, keyboard, and cassette drive.

I first encountered a KIM-1 in Heaven, a dusty computer graveyard that occupied storage space on the top floor of a University building while I was a teaching assistant. Heaven was filled with stacks of old KIM-1 boards that must have been removed from a computing lab, along with old Northstars, Decwriters, VT-100 terminals, and all manner of unidentifiable minicomputer hardware. Part of me likes to think that all that history is still there, waiting to be rediscovered, although it was probably scrapped years ago.

Lawrence's Rev E board appears to be in excellent condition (although untested) and the auction closes in just over a day.

KIM-1 Vintage Computer, 6502 commodore [eBay]

Transistor Radio Redux

I've linked to this collection before, but here is some more gratuitous radio porn to inspire your weekend. Props to Mr. Roadsidepictures from Kansas City, Missouri for sharing his collection with the world on Flickr.

He comments, "Right now they're keeping each other company in storage. I love to work on them, but haven't had the time for quite a while. Most of them do work and there are recap kits available if they don't work. I'm shakey, so it's kind of tedious sometimes."

Copper Sprites

According to my handy but hopelessly outdated dictionary, a sprite is "a small or elusive supernatural being." In the digital world, a sprite is a graphical image -- often found in a computer game -- that moves around the screen. Pac-Man, for example.

Jim Harris of 'This is Obsolete' recently whipped up a collection of etched copper plates with aluminium and brass inserts that depict classic video game sprites. So far, he's created five images including a couple of Pac-Man ghosts and a satisfyingly weathered aluminum space invader. He's got plans to continue the series with Mario and others.

I'd love one of these on the wall of my Evil Mad Scientist Lair. Not just because it's cool, but because this sort of stuff captures the ephemeral characters from video games in a concrete, physical way. And that's a good thing, because it serves as a constant reminder that sometimes simple games from the past are every bit as satisfying as modern multi-million dollar epic adventures.

Jim reports that the collection is currently being exhibited at The Rock Inn, Kemptown as part of The Brighton Five Pound Fringe.

Sprites (2012) Preview
A flickr set of the first five pieces in the collection