The most collectible items in the realm of vintage computers often weren’t the most popular of their era. Quite the opposite, in fact. Generally the more desireable systems were market failures when they first launched, and are now sought out because of a newly-appreciated quirk or simply because the fact that they weren’t widely accepted means there’s fewer of them. One of the retro computers falling into this category is the Apple III, which had fundamental hardware issues upon launch leading to a large recall and its overall commercial failure. [Ted] is trying to bring one of these devices back to life, though, by slowing its clock speed down to a crawl.

The CPU in these machines was a Synertek 6502 running at 1.8 MHz. With a machine that wouldn’t boot, though, [Ted] replaced it with his own MCL65+, a purpose-built accelerator card based on the 600 MHz Teensy 4.1 microcontroller in order to debug the motherboard. The first problem was found in a ROM chip which prevented the computer loading anything from memory, but his solution wouldn’t work at the system’s higher clock speeds. To solve that problem [Ted] disabled the higher clock speed in hardware, restricting the system to 1 MHz and allowing it to finally boot.

So far there haven’t been any issues running the computer at the slower speed, and it also helps keep the computer cooler and hopefully running longer as well, since the system won’t get as hot or unstable. This isn’t [Ted]’s first retrocomputing rodeo, either. His MCL chips have been featured in plenty of other computers like this Apple II which can run at a much faster rate than the original hardware thanks to the help of the modern microcontroller.

What do you do when someone gives you a Wurlitzer 3100 jukebox from 1969, but keeps all the records? If you are like [Tijuana Rick], you grab an Arduino and a Rasberry Pi and turn it into a really awesome digital music player.

We’ll grant you, making a music player out of a Raspberry Pi isn’t all that cutting edge, but restoration and integration work is really impressive. The machine had many broken switches that had been hastily repaired, so [Rick] had to learn to create silicone molds and cast resin to create replacements. You can see and hear the end result in the video below.

[Rick] was frustrated with jukebox software he could find, until he found some Python code from [Thomas Sprinkmeier]. [Rick] used that code as a base and customized it for his needs.

There’s not much “how to” detail about the castings for the switches, but there are lots of photos and the results were great. We wondered if he considered putting fake 45s in the machine so it at least looked like it was playing vinyl.

Of course, you don’t need an old piece of hardware to make a jukebox. Or, you can compromise and build out a replica.

[Kerber] got his hands on a classic 1950′s General Electric fridge, and converted it into this classy vintage kegerator.

As his build log shows, it took an intensive restoration process to get this fridge back in shape. He completely stripped it down, scraping off the sixty year old insulation, fibreglass, and glue. Then the chassis was sanded down to a smooth finish and painted black. R-19 insulation was added to replace the old stuff.

Next up was electronics. An Arduino, DS18B20 temperature sensor, and a solid state relay were used to regulate the temperature and prevent frozen beer. There’s also a Guruplug server that reads data from the Arduino every minute. It makes this data accessible through a web page, so the temperature of the kegs can be monitored from anywhere. [Kerber] admits that this is overkill, but leaves room for future expansion.

The kegerator draws about 180 Watts, and runs for about 6 minutes per hour to keep the temperature regulated. This is pretty impressive considering the age of the fridge. The final restoration looks great, and serves up data along with the beer.