I have all 3 here.
Agreed. As an example, on my Sun386i's I had three blown power supplies.
All three failed due to the "donkey engine" power supply that booted up
the main power supply logic with a 300v to 12 volt system that quite
honestly was badly engineered garbage.
Rather than replace all the bad components (and have it fail again in 20
years) I simply put in a small 300 volt to 12 volt DC-DC converter.
Problem solved, supply works, life is great.
Is it a valid repair? Yes. Is it not "100% original" nope, and I don't
care too much. However one of the supplies was a total wreck from
someone else trying to fix it so I guttted it and installed a modern
PC-AT supply that provided +5,+12,-12,-5, and supply good signals.
Is it a valid repair? Yes. It's pretty much 0% original but it works
perfectly.
Now the question of "what to do with these things" is another issue :-)
C
* I have emulators for many of the machines I own, because often,
answering a question can be best/fastest done that way
* I have "need to get things done on this" machines, where problematic
components are replaced by contemporary equivalents. I know I'm a "young
un" on this list of Mini computer owners, but al most all of my daily
driver home computers have their floppy drives replaced by SD card or
USB equivalents. Because, when I want to enjoy firing up an app or
game, I want to enjoy the game/app, not spend an hour/day/week
diagnosing and fixing the system. I also use these to demonstrate the
units for interested visitors, and these are the machines I take to show
to demo and such
* I have all stock machines, because, sometimes, only the original will
do. Validating specific behavior for emulator writers, checking failure
modes on certain apps, understanding actual latency/delays associated
with original equipment, etc. These units are used for even the mundane
efforts of determining PCB sizes or heights for folks who wish to build
add-ons and such.
I can't imagine I am the only one of the list with this setup (though I
do understand having a daily driver PDP 11 and an all stock PDP 11 might
be un-realistic, and so that owner has to make the decision on how to
keep the machine configured.)
But, for all the smaller units, I must be in a larger community who does
this.
So, while I don't have the same goal as the OP in replacing all drives
with Goteks, I honestly do have that configured already for all my
daily/weekly use machines. I lost no existential sleep over doing that.
In the spirit of the original thought, though, where I find myself
scratching my head are the folks who have replaced every IC on their
vintage system with an aftermarket FPGA "equivalent" (loosely used
here). The resulting board, with all of the expensive FPGA devices,
costs much more than obtaining a second stock unit, and when every IC
has been replaced with FPGA, I am not sure I see the value over just
obtaining an FPGA-based design where all of the IC functionality has
been aggregated into 1 larger HDL-based device. The "keyhole" nature of
replacing each individual IC seems expensive, prone to issues, and still
relies on constraints of the original motherboard and/or mobo design.
But, I smile and nod when I see them at shows, since it must make sense
to the owner, and that's how they enjoy the hobby.
Jim
