alecu
A Microdigital TK85 connected to a Grundig television that shows a screen filled with the word ALECU

← All projects · Ongoing

Restorations

Bringing vintage computers back to life, for my collection and for EspacioTec.

I restore vintage computers: cleaning, replacing worn parts, chasing faults, and making the machines run again. Some are part of my own collection, others belong to EspacioTec, the museum where I volunteer.

Apple Lisa

The inside of an Apple Lisa with its main board exposed and test probes attached
The Lisa's main board on the bench, wired up for testing.

An Apple Lisa from my collection. Once it ran again, I wrote a demo for it: Alisando el Camino took second place in the oldskool demo category at FlashParty ‘26.

Photos and write-ups of the restoration are coming to this page.

Virtuality 1000CS

Trying on a Virtuality headset and holding its hand controller at the workbench, next to the open Amiga 3000 board
Trying the Virtuality headset and hand controller at the workbench.

An arcade virtual reality cabinet from the early 1990s, built around a Commodore Amiga 3000. This one belongs to EspacioTec, and I’m restoring it together with the museum’s team.

The restoration started in February 2024, and the computer boots again. The board had corrosion around the battery and the ROM sockets, a broken trace between two of the custom chips, and a faulty RAM chip. We repaired all of it, recapped the power supply and ran an eight-hour memory burn-in without a single error. The headset is next: its left visor still has a damaged cable and is missing the red channel.

These are the first milestones from the restoration log. Photos and a proper write-up are coming.

On the bench

These are the machines currently being restored, for my collection and for the museum. Their stories will show up here as they come back to life.

  • TRS-80 Model III (1980), my collection: Tandy’s all-in-one Z80 computer, with the monitor built in.
  • Commodore SX-64 (1983), my collection: a portable Commodore 64 with a built-in colour screen and disk drive.
  • Amstrad CPC 464 (1984), my collection: a Z80 home computer with a built-in cassette deck.
  • BBC Micro Model B (1981), EspacioTec: Acorn’s 6502 computer, a fixture of British classrooms.
  • Oric Atmos (1984), my collection: Oric’s 6502 home computer, the successor of the Oric-1.

EspacioTec

EspacioTec is a computing museum in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, run by the Asociación Civil Unión 20 de Agosto. It began as an electronic waste recycling project and now keeps a permanent collection of computers, consoles and calculators that visitors can use, along with talks and community meetups. It organised the first Latin American Vintage Computer Festival, VCF Latam 2026.

I help with restorations at the museum, and I wrote an article for its blog about retyping a 1986 game from a magazine.

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