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

The Last Good Thing About VHS Tapes

When you get into the retro game, you'll meet people who will do anything to justify their devotion to their old favorites. It's subjective; love what you love! You don't have to come with some inalienable reason to justify your retro lust. Sometimes those discussions can be fun and interesting. For example, LP collectors have a whole raft of reasons "explaining" why vinyl is superior and remains relevant today. The CD vs. LP argument will continue unabated forever - fair enough. There are some valid technical points that are worth taking about.

It gets weird when folks feel that same pressure to rationalize their love, and it's for something that doesn't have much going for it. I've met people who try to tell me that cassettes sound better than CDs, or that a well mastered VHS tape looks better than a DVD. Those aren't good arguments to try to make; cassettes are far noisier than CDs, and a VHS tape has about half the resolution of DVD and lots of analog noise in the picture. Nothing is going to change those technical shortcomings. Enthusiasts will never win the argument on technical merit, so they should move the benefits discussion elsewhere.

Like we've always said here on Retro Thing, it's okay to like something just because you like it. Sure, it's great to uncover some hidden and forgotten benefit of something old - we do it here all the time. Recently I've been watching some Laser Discs on a modern high def LED TV. The display is far too precise, and the images look just awful... but the LDs still have a distinct (and admittedly odd) benefit in this modern world that has nothing to do with image quality. They're often mixed in with LPs at the thrift - so I can get a Criterion Collection remastered feature film (which used to cost easily $80+) at ten to the dollar. When DVDs came out and were clearly here to stay (for a while anyway...) my friends with large VHS collections tried to come up with elaborate rationalizations of how their VHS tapes still had an edge somehow. They don't, nor do they need to.

Back then, I do remember saying that the only remaining benefit of a VHS or cassette tape is that is that it stays at the point you left it. You have to re-cue DVDs and CDs if you leave off in the middle. The jokey meme I've included with this post reminded me of that argument. It's a funny place to draw your line in the sand. So by all means, collect what you want to collect, watch what you want to watch. No one can tell you not to like it. Point with pride at your wall holding thousands of VHS tapes... but understand if I'm busy on moving day.

Contra Sweater - 8-bit Knit

PLEASE tell me that this belogs to one of our readers. If it does, you have the most badass grandma in the history of badass grandmas.

Sadly, it's a Photoshop fake (the gradient on the "C" in the logo is a tip off) - but you were pretty excited there for a few seconds, weren't you?