Posts tagged "tandy"
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Building my own mechanical keyboard for the CoCo 1
Yep, it finally happened. The backwoods repair that I did to my Tandy TRS-80 Colour Computer’s keyboard membrane failed. Turns out that garden-grade self-adhesive copper tape and some electric paint is not a lasting replacement. Let’s do something that will last a little longer.
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Ascending Mount FujiNet
In case you haven’t heard of it, FujiNet is an ambitious open-source community project. Its intent is to be the only peripheral you will ever need to get for your old computer. That’s a lofty goal if ever I’ve heard one. I’ve been in and out of the project over the last few years, but I hadn’t actually gotten (or finished) any FujiNet hardware. Let’s revive my troubled CoCo1 with a cartridge that does it all.
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Tandy 1000SX is cleared for flight
Now that the Tandy 1000SX finally works, it’s time to set it up for something useful. By which I mean playing Sopwith off of a Gotek floppy drive emulator.
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Big Blue vs. The Tandy 1000SX
Thanks to the incredible kindness of another Tandy nerd, I’ve gotten a replacement Light Blue chip, but will the Tandy 1000SX finally work properly? Let’s ask the four years that I spent trying to figure out what else was wrong with it.
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MC-10 Hammered
Radio Shack worked hard to get their machines into every possible price tier of the home computer market, so what happened when they went super-budget? Nothing good. Thanks to hard-working community members, this unloved 6803-based computer has gone from doorstop to delight, so it’s high time that I picked one up. Of course, by law, any computer I pick up has to be at least a little broken.
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Attempting CoCo 'brane surgery
Without a working keyboard, the CoCo that I’ve been working on over the past few months might as well be a fancy desk ornament. When I took a look at the keyboard last time, the membrane had some pretty serious damage to its carbon conductive traces. Before spending money to replace the keyboard, I’m first going to try and fix those traces with the conductive paint I already paid for.
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Get the Tandy 102 (batteries out)!
Sometime last summer, I spotted a local classifieds listing where someone was selling a “Tandy laptop.” After some interrogation, I determined that it was probably a Model 102. Another Kyocera sibling to join my NEC PC-8300?
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Not conducting myself appropriately - a CoCo keyboard inspection
When I got the CoCo up and running in the previous entry, I noticed that the keyboard wasn’t working particularly well. I found myself with some spare time to dismantle the keyboard, and unfortunately it has not yet been fixed. That doesn’t mean we can’t still learn a thing or two.
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A literal Trash-80
The internet is both really good and really, really bad for my hobby. On the one hand, it lets me buy cheap broken computers and shows me how other people fix them. On the other hand, sometimes people offer me machines and then I take them.
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A surprising new friend for the 1000SX
Apparently, trying to get old computers is a lot like waiting for a bus. You spend months looking at the internet for Tandys, buy a bad one, and then two more nice ones come as soon as you get on. Maybe it’s not entirely like a bus, because that metaphor assumes I can get on all three at the same time. Also this one has a 286, so it’s like a really fast bus.
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Another try at the whole Tandy thing
Clearly, I haven’t suffered enough pain from the Tandy 1000SX, so I made a choice to re-enlist. This time, it’s a completely untested 1000EX that I found as part of an auction.
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Foiled again by the Tandy 1000SX
We fixed the 1000SX’s power supply, and tested the motherboard for shorts. There’s nothing left to do but put the computer back together again and see if it works. And take it apart again. And to wish I had a fully-operational chip fab and precision schematics of every custom IC. Yeah, this one is gonna take a little more time.
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Tandy 1000SX power supply is back from the dead
When we last encountered the Tandy 1000SX, it decided to bravely blow itself up rather than face us in battle. With a lot of elbow grease and a little bit of solder-slinging, this testament to 80s shopping-mall computing will live again.
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Will It Short? A Tandy 1000SX motherboard inspection
Last time on the Tandy 1000SX show, I blew a hole in a power-supply capacitor without even getting the machine to boot. Talk about ungrateful! At least it gives me an excuse to buy more tools.
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Tandy 1000SX power supply has an oops
I picked up a Tandy 1000SX recently. My plan is to use it for experimenting with Tandy graphics and sound, and maybe even port a few hobbyist games to the platform. As per usual with my pick-ups, this one needs a little bit of work before it can be usable.
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NEC PC-8300 pickup
When I was much younger, one of the first portable computers I was exposed to was a Tandy TRS-80 Model 100. It was a surprisingly useful 80s portable machine. A real mechanical keyboard, modem capability, real ports, an okay screen, 20 hours of battery life on a set of AAs: it had everything. As a result, they were really popular with journalists (upload your story from a payphone!), scientists (take readings of your instruments at the site!), and industrial use (what’s wrong with this plane?)