Welcome to the Retro Hack Shack!

I went after a free Craigslist Commodore haul and came home with quite a pile: a boxed VIC-20, three Commodore 1541 drives plus a VIC-1541, a breadbin Commodore 64, a C64C, three C64 power bricks, a VIC-20 power supply, manuals, dust covers, floppy disks, a head cleaning disk, and an Atari 600XL that got added…

There was something especially irresistible about these two red Panasonic cassette recorders because, at a glance, they looked like the kind of vintage gear that ought to have worked forever. The problem was that looks didn’t mean much once power, belts, switches, and motors had spent decades aging in storage. In this video, I took…

This TV boombox came home from e-waste with a built-in CRT, dual cassette decks, and a list of problems right away. The power LED lit, but one tape door wouldn’t eject, the case had plenty of scratches, and the front TV cover was damaged. I had been looking for one of these for a while,…