Of course when an Amiga fanboy trashes an early 90s PC you can never be completely sure it was an accident. 😉

Errius wrote on 2020-10-02, 07:52:

Of course when an Amiga fanboy trashes an early 90s PC you can never be completely sure it was an accident. ;)

They laugh untill you bring up what computer got the original DOOM experience first. 8)

486 Power!

SodaSuccubus wrote on 2020-10-02, 08:03:

Errius wrote on 2020-10-02, 07:52:

Of course when an Amiga fanboy trashes an early 90s PC you can never be completely sure it was an accident. 😉

They laugh untill you bring up what computer got the original DOOM experience first. 😎

486 Power!

Hmm.. Ironically, though, Amiga users were the biggest PC lovers. Secretly. Shush!
They all had their powerful bridgeboards and software emulators which they were proud of.
To "play" business software, of course. Quite some hardcore Lotus 1-2-3, Clipper, Turbo Pascal and Wordperfect users among these.
Running Windows on their Amigas occasionally got them "high", according to the reports of private investigators. 😉

SquallStrife wrote on 2020-10-02, 04:18:

I wrote a lengthy post on his Patreon explaining what might have caused his continuity probe to appear "dead short" (though if you look closely, the meter says 15 ohms), he mentions this in the follow-up video. tl;dr My educated guess is it's either the primary of a transformer, or the degaussing coil's PTC thermistor in its cold state. I don't know what his Fluke meter considers a dead short, but apparently 15 ohms fits the criteria, I find that concerning.

as I said in my previous post, I did look up the specsheet of the fluke 115 used and it beeps in continuity on under 20 ohms, this does not mean "dead short"
dead short is defined as having zero resistance (or close to, there's always cables)... continuity testing doesn't necessarily mean "dead short" 15 ohms is definitely far from it.

yes, the meter consideres this a "short" but that is not the definition of "dead short" and it's up to the user to actually look at the display as well and consider the value and the circuit tested and not just the beep.

The problem is that an ordinary multi-meter can measure the resistance, but not inductivity or impedance.

So it can only measure ac/dc values only, but not really coils or the RF aspect of a component.

That's also why some capacitors or transistors are appearing to be apparently fine, but in the end, the circuit (say a radio) still doesn't work, because the meter is unable to detect their usability for RF.

For such things, an L/C meter is required.
It can be used to retrieve inductivity and with some formula you can calculate the right value for the impedance (beware, frequency dependant; formula has to include "f").
Or you use a square-wave signal generator (AF/RF), a variable resistor and a scope.
With these you can make out at which value the signal correctly appears and check the val. resistor's value with an ohm meter.

A multi-meter alone can be used to guess the high-impedance/inductivity and low-impedance/inductivity sides of a transformer, at best.

Edit: Text completed.

I really don't think it has ANYTHING to do with a Commodore bias or IBM/PC disdain, it's just who he is. He is practical regardless of whatever hardware he is working on. This time he was a bit too practical. It wasn't the first time he did this (he botched other repairs and retrobrights etc.) but it was never this destructive and/or he was not this prominent back then.

Don't get me wrong, I still like the 8bit guy and I think that IBM is still repairable and not all that worse off than it started. I will keep following his videos because I think he makes good content. I find him as a person to be rather offputting but that's just me, and he doesn't have to make himself likeable to me, that's not a problem.

SquallStrife wrote on 2020-10-02, 04:18:

He's definitely a Commodore guy rather than a PC guy, loves his PETs, VIC-20s and C64s to bits. […]
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Tetrium wrote on 2020-10-02, 03:57:

How he values the IBM has a resemblance of someone who simply doesn't value (old) PCs, which is something I have seen others write on forums like for instance vintagecomputing, where there are more people who are much more interested in computers which are not PCs.

He's definitely a Commodore guy rather than a PC guy, loves his PETs, VIC-20s and C64s to bits.

I wrote a lengthy post on his Patreon explaining what might have caused his continuity probe to appear "dead short" (though if you look closely, the meter says 15 ohms), he mentions this in the follow-up video. tl;dr My educated guess is it's either the primary of a transformer, or the degaussing coil's PTC thermistor in its cold state. I don't know what his Fluke meter considers a dead short, but apparently 15 ohms fits the criteria, I find that concerning.

Anyway, the scarring to the PSU is minor and will never be visible once the lid is on, and everything else is probably simple to fix once properly diagnosed. As you say, people make mistakes. C'est la vie.

Agreed. And I can tell from experience that IBM really tried their best to make their PCs as inaccessible as they could 🤣. Those screws really surprised me when I first bumped into them.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-10-01, 20:06:

Well, at least this little mishap caused some discussion. Which is good, because it makes people think on their own. 🙂 […]
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Well, at least this little mishap caused some discussion. Which is good, because it makes people think on their own. 🙂

Or as an old saying goes: Nothing is worse than insensibility. (translated; I don't know the English saying.)
I assume only a few people really realize what a great and important gift an opinion is.
No matter whether it turns out to be "right" or "wrong" in the end, it helps us to sort things out by providing us with a counterpart. This helps us a lot to reflect the situation and often also to find out the truth.

Totally agree with you here! 😀

And very important that people think and continue thinking on their own. Never really been much of a fan of lemmingtrains 😜
I've seen this with how people view WinME, just to name a single example. The vast majority of people who say ME is 100% crap have no idea what they are talking about in the literal sense.
Everything has its quirks and one of the fun things I learned from this hobby is to learn to appreciate things I didn't understand at first, even coming to like or love what I used to hate when I was really more of an uninformed/inexperienced guy (like for instance now I actually like Northwood and have come to appreciate Netburst a bit more and before that I've learned to appreciate pre-Pentium stuff a LOT more! Though that was mostly just not really knowing anything about them except their names perhaps).

Discovering how everything works is one of the bigger joys of this hobby 😁

I've seen this with how people view WinME, just to name a single example. The vast majority of people who say ME is 100% crap have no idea what they are talking about in the literal sense.

I'm with you on WinMe. I was on the lemming train for a while in the early 2000s, refusing to upgrade from 98SE. I always kept a WinMe disc around though, because the drivers that shipped with the OS worked out of the box with a lot of hardware I ran on Windows 98, and this generally made life a lot easier when I worked on friends' machines. A lot of us got by with dialup or slow DSL then, so easy access to drivers that worked was a big deal during this period. I run WinMe now (dual-booting with MS-DOS 6.22 on another drive to sidestep the DOS mode issues) on a P3 800 and I have had zero driver issues from day one. I liked that it had USB out of the box, especially, and that it worked with more RAM than Windows 98 could. The longer I have been in this hobby the more I have come to appreciate stock stability, and Windows Me delivered. I suspect a lot of the angst the OS received might have been avoided had it been released a year or two earlier.

But back to 8-bit Guy. Are his methods sometimes questionable? Yes. Did I dislike what he did to that rare machine? Absolutely. Will I stop watching his videos entirely? Well, probably not. Whether he learns his lesson or not, he is still a net contributor to the retro community despite his being somewhat reckless.

I don't mean to pour oil into the fire, but I just noticed that the 8-bit dude is currently busy building his new shack (so to say) in the garden (as his second YT studio)..
He uploaded a video (part 1) of his progress recently (before the mishap with the rare IBM) :

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uFP-fU0FsF0

Maybe that's one of the reasons he rushed so much. The video also says that the temperature is/was quite hot (41'c) in his tome town. Since there's no part 2, he might be still busy finishing his new studio..

And the fact that he builds a studio means it could well be possible that he intends to make videos professionally for a living. If that's true, he might face some other financial challenges we don't know of.

Anyway, I don't mean to defend his mistakes in that rare IBM vid. I'm just collecting information. Hope you don't mind.

He probably has to dismantle the current studio to facilitate the move, so he probably didn't want to delay that project by getting stuck with this video for a few weeks. It's a fair bet.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-10-03, 18:50:

And the fact that he builds a studio means it could well be possible that he intends to make videos professionally for a living. If that's true, he might face some other financial challenges we don't know of.

He has been, for several years now. He quit his job back in like 2015 or 2016, now living off YouTube and Patreon revenue.

Dont forget he also made 2 games already and is working on his third now. Attack of the PETSCII Robots:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyf7tiSO9vo

Also if you are more interested in his "daily life" he did a video about that as well 2 years back as "celebration" of the 200th video and 1 year anniversary of doing it full time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PjzOvcymzI

Btw: I very much like the 8-Bit-Guy and watch all his videos (next to LGR and Retro Recipies one of the 3 retro-computer-youtubers I watch). But I agree that the IBM PC video was partially painful. He also has a second channel called 8-Bit Keys btw. Videos are rather rare but very enjoyable even if you have no clue about keyboards or music. For me it's just magic if he easily makes Ultima Music coming out of it. 😉

Split the monitor discussion to here: MCGA monitor at 15 KHz?