Vintage Computer Festival Midwest Chats & Interviews
The Vintage Computer Festival Midwest is a fun event in the Chicago suburbs. It's a chance to connect with fellow enthusiasts and see some incredible vintage hardware. I wanted to show a bit of my exploring and conversations with people. This was my second time visiting.
A lenticular Commodore 64 motherboard image on display.
I was immediately drawn to a display featuring a Commodore 64 motherboard. The presenter even had a cool visual effect: if you moved your head back and forth, the RF shield appeared to lift off, revealing the components underneath! Also the glass acted like an actual magnifying glass, which was neat to look through.
100 year old typewriter next to the C64 photo.
Taking photos.
A typewriter collector had brought a piece that was almost a century old, stating that he picked it up for cheap at a garage sale.
A whole table full of various types of camera technology.
This wooden electronic chess set really stood out. It was a Fidelity, made back in the 1980s. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship.
The internals of a Chuck E. Cheese animatronic setup.
The creator of the exhibit explained that the system was based on a 6502 processor like a lot of the technology at that time and how they re-created a lot of the circuit boards that make up the animatronic system.
This is a deep dive into the hardware that makes it all work.
The system was based on the same team, and some tech, that designed the Atari 2600.
Solid state drives have changed quite a bit over the years. I spend a lot of time editing videos, so I'm always dealing with large files and need a lot of fast storage. I recently did a new PC build, and with that, I got a new SSD for the operating system. This particular drive, the MSI SPATIUM M482, came bundled with my motherboard as a bundle. Watch the video on YouTube for more information or if you prefer video over reading: The MSI SPATIUM M482 2TB NVMe SSD Drive Specifications and Features The MSI SPATIUM M482 is built on 3D NAND flash memory and comes in the common M.2 2280 form factor. It uses a PCIe Gen 4x4 interface with the NVMe 1.4 protocol. For the 2 TB model, MSI claims a sequential read speed of up to 7,300 MB/s and a sequential write speed of up to 6,400 MB/s. They also rate the meantime between failure (MTBF) at 1.5 million hours. For those unfamiliar with these terms, 3D NAND is a type of flash memory where memory cells are stacked vertically in multiple l...
I recently picked up a bunch of Thermalright fans for a new PC build, specifically the TL-G12 (120mm) and the TL-C14 (140mm). At the time, they were pretty inexpensive, and the promise of fluid dynamic bearings (FDB) along with PWM control sounded like a great deal on paper, so I bought quite a few of each. In this article and related video I go into detail about their installation and use. Check out the video on YouTube for a lot more information: Boxes for the Thermalright TL-G12 and TL-C14 fans. Specifications listed on the TL-G12 fan box. Specifications for the 120mm TL-G12: Speed: 1500 RPM (+/- 10%) Noise: Rated 23.6 dBA or greater. Airflow: Up to 62.6 CFM Connector: 4-pin PWM with a daisy-chain feature. Extras: Includes rubber pads on the corners for vibration dampening and standard case screws. One thing I noticed on the G12 frame is the lack of an airflow direction indicator, but it's a standard fan design, so it's easy enough to figure out. Specifications shown on ...
(I used Claude AI to generate this article based on my video's transcript, so keep that in mind it might not be perfect even though I've gone through it to correct any issues I see. Also keep in mind that I've done further testing with an ASUS Proart 4060 compared to the MSI 1060 on my old PC and noticed a few situations where the CPU was limiting performance such as FFXIV minimum framerates.) https://youtu.be/yR6XPvt-F0A I recently decided to take a look at the GIGABYTE RTX 4060 low profile version. This was the cheapest RTX 4060 card I could find as an Amazon Warehouse Deal, and I was curious to see if my old computer would benefit from upgrading from a GTX 1060 6GB to this new card. Low profile! My current system is built around an Intel i7-6700 CPU, which is likely to be the main limitation in this comparison. I was particularly interested in the sound profile of this card given its tiny size. I don't take a look in the video, but potential benefits of AV1 encode/d...
