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  • Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 cable wrongfully fitted to RS232, no boot?

    From whizzi@gmail.com@21:1/5 to All on Mon Feb 8 15:33:33 2016
    Hi,

    Today I've rescued a complete Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 with RS232 interface and modded Tandy monitor (now having a disk drive).

    The Tandy and RS232 are both heavy modified. The old owner could tell me it has a High Grafics mode, memory expansion and double density mod. Next to this I also found schematics of RTC clock, a stop flicker fix, lowercase characters.

    I opened the machine and it's a mess of cables and piggy backed mods. Also I found a Z80 CPU so it's probably running faster too.

    My problem is, the things doesn't boot. When I turn on the machine (with or without RS232 interface) I get a lot of characters on the screen, but nothing more. About 50% of the time it is in 'high resolution', the other times are just big letters.

    Any idea of what's wrong with this oldie and if I can be revived?

    Up until a month ago the machine did boot up without RS232 interface and before that the interface worked (but that's > 10 years ago). I'm not sure if the old owner did try to connect the RS232 to the machine.

    Photo I made today: https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/12651322_1029784760415486_6197670391314019514_n.jpg?oh=a2092d74375e3bd5e6e2e7e0ebd79957&oe=5730BE64&__gda__=1463001043_b92e7e228001498d84d46b39fb34137d

    I hope this one can be saved, even only to see all the mods made to this machine.

    signed,
    Bart

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  • From Batchman@21:1/5 to whizzi@gmail.com on Sat Mar 12 16:05:02 2016
    whizzi@gmail.com wrote:

    Any idea of what's wrong with this oldie and if I can be revived?

    I'm guessing that the problem is `too many mods'.

    Have you tried removing the expansion interface to see if the keyboard (cpu unit) does work OK?

    I recall that you should hold down BREAK at switch on but cannot recall why that was so. It's been so long since I last used one.

    Batchman


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