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Evie's Conquests
- Thread starter EvieSigma
- Start date
Here's my Mac IIfx, it's quite nice aside from a small crack on the left. No broken tabs on the lid, no corrosion inside, fresh batteries instead of dead or leaky ones...good stuff.
Also I found a DE9 to Mini-DIN8 serial cable at the thrift store that I hope will let me hook up my 512k to a newer Mac for LocalTalk purposes.
Also I found a DE9 to Mini-DIN8 serial cable at the thrift store that I hope will let me hook up my 512k to a newer Mac for LocalTalk purposes.
agent_js03
Well-known member
This makes me chuckle a little bit, because I remember when I was in high school and Apple started selling these G5s... and at that time 100 for it would be an absolute steal, even with no ram and hd. They were top of the line at the time. I remember the web form where you could build your mac to order, and I maxed everything out and the estimated total was like $3K or something crazy like that. They had these in the computer lab at the community college where I took dual credit courses, and I used to drool over them.
I got a Tandy 1000! Works great and looks pretty good after extensive scrubbing. Unfortunately I didn't get that god damned proprietary pain in the ass keyboard with it...
What's cool though is that this is the original original Tandy 1000 (the original 1000 also had a 1000A revision that updated the BIOS and modified the motherboard).
What's cool though is that this is the original original Tandy 1000 (the original 1000 also had a 1000A revision that updated the BIOS and modified the motherboard).
Back in the mid-90's I had a Tandy 1000TX I bought at a garage sale for some piddling amount of money. It makes me sad it's been lost to the sands of time, it was such a ridiculous thing, basically an IBM PCjr with a 286 upgrade. Had a 30MB hard card that was incorrectly low-level formatted with the wrong interleave when I bought it so it had an effective data transfer rate of around 17K a second. (An RLL HD in an XT is usually good for around 130Kps.)
I keep hoping I'll just stumble across one, but I think I'm about a decade or so too late for that. Prices of them aren't exactly insane, but they have been going up. And, yeah, far too many are missing the keyboards.
I keep hoping I'll just stumble across one, but I think I'm about a decade or so too late for that. Prices of them aren't exactly insane, but they have been going up. And, yeah, far too many are missing the keyboards.
There were adapters to use "other" keyboards on Tandy 1000s back when they were new. I do think most of them were for XT-protocol keyboards, which doesn't help a whole lot.
Thing is, though, is I actually really liked the original Tandy keyboard. It wasn't the best-feeling thing in the world but it was compact and had friendly layout. It's part of what gives the machines their unique charm.
Thing is, though, is I actually really liked the original Tandy keyboard. It wasn't the best-feeling thing in the world but it was compact and had friendly layout. It's part of what gives the machines their unique charm.
Here's a picture of the adapter Tandy sold. I'm sure calling them "rare" is an amazing understatement.
It seems like an adapter to convert from PS/2 to Tandy would be exactly the sort of thing someone would have programmed an Arduino or the like to do by now, from an electrical standpoint it should be pretty straightforward. (There are plenty of "PS/2 to XXX" adapters for other computers, unless there's something amazingly difficult or undocumented about the Tandy keyboard protocol I would think the software would be reasonably easy as well.) There's at least one thread on the VCF about someone planning to work on one but it didn't look to me like he'd actually come through.
Honestly what I'd like to see is an adapter to convert the Tandy protocol into PS/2 or USB. Even though it'd be *slightly* sacrilege to gut a working one there's part of me that'd love to take a Tandy 1000EX or HX and stealth-upgrade it to a modern computer. (I believe the internal keyboards on those models speak the same protocol as the external ones.) EX might be better of the two since you could easily put a CD-ROM drive in place of the built-in floppy drive.
It seems like an adapter to convert from PS/2 to Tandy would be exactly the sort of thing someone would have programmed an Arduino or the like to do by now, from an electrical standpoint it should be pretty straightforward. (There are plenty of "PS/2 to XXX" adapters for other computers, unless there's something amazingly difficult or undocumented about the Tandy keyboard protocol I would think the software would be reasonably easy as well.) There's at least one thread on the VCF about someone planning to work on one but it didn't look to me like he'd actually come through.
Honestly what I'd like to see is an adapter to convert the Tandy protocol into PS/2 or USB. Even though it'd be *slightly* sacrilege to gut a working one there's part of me that'd love to take a Tandy 1000EX or HX and stealth-upgrade it to a modern computer. (I believe the internal keyboards on those models speak the same protocol as the external ones.) EX might be better of the two since you could easily put a CD-ROM drive in place of the built-in floppy drive.
Yeah, unfortunately that Northkey adapter isn't of much use; the keyboard in question had a "Tandy Mode" built in, all his thing is a wiring adapter to compensate for not having the appropriate cable for it.
Here's a post on an Arduino forum where someone brings up the idea and the consensus there was again "shouldn't be a problem" but, again, doesn't look like they followed through. There's an attachment that includes the relevant pages from the Tandy 1000 service manual with a scancode table and timing diagram so, yeah, apparently someone still needs to get around to doing it.
If someone wants to give me a free Tandy 1000 I could use some motivation to break out the Arduino junk...
Here's a post on an Arduino forum where someone brings up the idea and the consensus there was again "shouldn't be a problem" but, again, doesn't look like they followed through. There's an attachment that includes the relevant pages from the Tandy 1000 service manual with a scancode table and timing diagram so, yeah, apparently someone still needs to get around to doing it.
If someone wants to give me a free Tandy 1000 I could use some motivation to break out the Arduino junk...
Heh. Believe me, I was (at least mostly) kidding. While I do suspect it'd be a pretty easy project (to the point that I suspect there are people on this forum that could get a prototype working over a long weekend) I probably wouldn't be able to get around to doing it myself for a long, long time.
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How ya gonna do it? Well, you're gonna PS/2 it! The solution is IBM!
It has a 386DX-20 and 6MB of RAM installed, which is certainly better than if I had picked a 16MHz machine with 1MB.
It came with this mystery 16-bit MCA card installed. I have no idea what this card is for at all.
It has a 386DX-20 and 6MB of RAM installed, which is certainly better than if I had picked a 16MHz machine with 1MB.
It came with this mystery 16-bit MCA card installed. I have no idea what this card is for at all.
