This was intended to be a quick project, but it turned into a huge ordeal. A failed power supply meant that several custom chips were irreparably damaged.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.