So, about this Tommy Geez thing. Been meaning to tackle it for ages, just sitting there gathering dust in the garage. Finally got around to it last weekend.
Getting Started
First thing, I had to haul it out. Heavier than I remembered. Plugged it in, held my breath. Nothing. Dead as a doornail. Knew it wouldn’t be easy. Popped the case open – wow, the dust bunnies in there were legendary. Got the vacuum and the compressed air out, spent a good hour just cleaning the insides. Looked a bit better, but still no power.
Checked the power supply unit. Looked dodgy. Found my multimeter, tested the output. Yep, barely a trickle. That was problem number one. Remembered I had an old box of spare parts from years ago. Rummaged through that mess for like, another hour. Found a similar PSU, not identical, but the specs looked close enough. Bit of a gamble, really.
Making Connections
Had to fiddle with the connectors, they weren’t quite standard. Typical. Snipped a few wires, soldered them onto the new PSU leads. Taped it all up properly, didn’t want any shorts. Felt like I was doing surgery on a fossil. Plugged it back in, fingers crossed. This time, a little light flickered on the front! Progress!
Okay, power on, but still no boot screen. Just a blank stare. Checked the board again. Looked for bulging capacitors, any obvious damage. Found one cap near the main chip that looked a bit puffy. Right, back to the spare parts box. Didn’t have an exact match. Ended up ordering a pack of assorted capacitors online, had to wait two days. Annoying.
Software Shenanigans
While waiting for parts, I thought about the software. Tommy Geez runs this really old OS, super obscure. Where was I going to find the boot disk? Remembered I’d backed up a bunch of old stuff onto CDs years ago. Spent an entire evening going through dusty CD binders. Felt like an archaeologist.
- Label: “Old System Disks” – Bingo!
- Found about five discs labelled “TG Backup”.
- Tried reading them on my modern PC. CD drive groaned.
- One disc finally read. Had the OS image!
The capacitors arrived. Fired up the soldering iron again, carefully replaced the bad one. Cleaned the contacts on the memory chips too, just used a pencil eraser, old trick but it works. Put it all back together.
The “Now” State
Hit the power switch. Lights came on, fan spun up… and boom! A boot prompt appeared on the screen. Couldn’t believe it. Took ages, but it was alive. Managed to boot from the CD image I found. The old Tommy Geez interface popped up. Slow, clunky, but working.
Why bother? Good question. Partly nostalgia, I guess. Used this thing way back when. Partly just to see if I still could fix this kind of stuff. Everything’s so disposable now, plug-and-play, black boxes. Sometimes you just want to get your hands dirty, you know? Figure things out piece by piece. It’s not practical, cost me a weekend and a few bucks for parts I probably didn’t strictly need. But seeing it run again… yeah, that felt pretty good. So that’s Tommy Geez, now. Back from the dead, sitting on my workbench, blinking away.
