This is a computer that I built when I was 21 or 22. Used to manage RS stores in the early ‘80s. Please forgive my hackery. It is a green screen. Used a b/w tuner. Worked great. Used to play the cc version of Donkey Kong on this one. I don’t think this is the one I piggy-backed the memory chips. Used to do a lot of that back then. Parts were leftovers from repairs at the computer center. Model 3 this, model 4 that. I think I did hot-glue most of the parts inside. Don’t recall why I pulled it apart. Had several ccs so maybe I robbed parts from pond to the other. The keyboard wiring was the funnest part to figure out. Most keys were grouped the same, just had to do those wires to fix it. Chicklet keyboards weren’t as cool as these. Glad you are taking the time to fix it. I recently moved and Tim seemed like a good steward. Waiting to see what becomes of this.
One of my childhood friends Dad's worked for Tandy and the TRS-80 "Trash 80" was my first hands-on keyboard exposure to PC's. We were in the FW area. He then gave me an Adam Computer and I don't remember the specs but I hooked it up to our vacuum tube cabinet TV and it had two cassette drives. My first and only ever store-bought system was the Tandy 1000SX in '86 for about $3,500. I built a 8086 clone the same year with another elementary school friend. I've been in IT since. It's awesome to watch your vid's that help to preserve our tech history.
My first computer was a TRS 80 with a cassette tape drive. I eventually added a floppy drive. They were singled sided. I would cut out the other side and was able to flip it over and double the capacity. Brings back a lot of memories.
In 1980 I got a job at a Radio Shack and worked overtime to be able to afford a TRS-80 model I with 4K of RAM and Level I BASIC. Over the years I added 16K RAM and LEVEL II BASIC ROM (and upper lower case letters) upgrade, a krazy-glued piece of green plexiglas to the RCA, an expansion interface, eventually 5 1/4” disk drives, an Omikron CP/M adapter to dual boot into CP/M, and ultimately started using BBSes through a 110 baud modem, and finally an Epson MX-80 printer. Digitized my first audio through the cassette interface using a machine code program I keyed in hex from an 80 MICRO magazine. Learned a lot from it.
What a Classic Vintage TRs-80 computer shame some working parts were missing Adrian when you open it up I bet it worked fantastic back in the day I am always fascinated to see classic vintage computers whether they working or not Thanks for sharing the above TRS-80 Computer with us all Adrian's Digital Basement, its greatly appreciated by me so thank you best regards Tony
Used trs in early to mid 80’s and eventually bought what they called a transportable. Prior to laptops, it was early one portable enough to carry on a plane. The keyboard was the lid on its end cover a 9” mono screen and the disc drives. No harddrive, just two 128k floppies. Boot drive and data drive. Even had to take an incomplete for a paper in grad school, because the floppy became corrupted. Had to retype the whole 50 page project to graduate. Lol. I never forgot about backing up files after that. Loved the video.
I started with a TRS-80 model 1 with 16k memory, just the keyboard and monitor. I had three external 5.25 floppy drives. Only keyboard input at the dos level. I upgraded to 32k expansion and got a 1500 baud modem. At that time you could connect to many different bulletin boards systems, some had 800 numbers for toll free calls. Good memories. Thanks for the video.
I still have my original trash 80 which I bought in 1980 or so. It was 4K when I bought it and I remember buying an upgrade (memory chips that we soldered in parallel over the existing chips) and a plastic glue on 16k emblem (?) to replace the 4k one. Cassette load and save (CLOAD CSAVE) before hard drives were cheap enough for the general public, and "special" cassettes that in the audio trade we called leaderless. Later I bought a machine code converter module. What a difference that made. Still have them and the player recorder too. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Yeah, as a member of the Coco community, I know of, as well as know Tim Linder. Very cool guy who's one of the biggest contributors to the CoCo community. Very cool guy!
I did a CoCo3 repack in a full AT tower back in the day, but this repack is just... brilliant... Aside from the sketchy gauges of wires used and the fact that it appears that very few of the components were actually mounted.
Yeah, I did something similar with a CoCo 2 back in the day. I made a computerized board game from an old CoCo 2 for my nephew, even with the disk controller and a disk drive. The board game was 3 dimensions and also moved around when the game told you to move certain sliders to alter the gameboard paths. You could also use it as a regular CoCo 2 if you wanted. I used an old, tiny, PC power supply and modded it to work with the CoCo 2 as well. I made my own case from wood and the 3D board game sat on top of it. You hooked it up to your TV and I wrote a complete program to interact with the board game portion for a full playable game.
A TRS-80 model 1 selfbuild kit by the name LNW-80 was my first computer… and my second an Apple ][ (also self-assembled) that first resided in a self-built housing, later moved to a PC minitower that just perfectly held all the necessary components, even the add-on boards (clock, floppy, memory, 80-column, Z80) fitted well, with a little rebuilding of course. Memories, memories!
My youngest uncle had two TRS-80's. One was a standard and the other was a color. He had Muscular Dystrophy so he couldn't do sports or anything like that, so grandma and grandpa got him the computers to fiddle with. I remember them being set up in the livingroom and thinking they were so cool. While in school, he fell asleep during class and didn't wake up, I was told he had a heart attack, he was 16. They got rid of those computers, it was 1987 and I suppose they were long in the tooth by then but I really just wanted to play a few games on them as a 3-4 year old. I might have been young but I remember having a great time watching him play games with me.
The fact that the tuner was tossed in to make the TV work just kills me. I mean, it probably works great but... just... wow. I'll just imagine that they're massive picture adjustment pots instead.
When I worked at Motorola I worked on the development of the Color Computer for Tandy. I have an old Color Computer in my attic that I have not looked at since I put it in the attic in 1992. When it first came out I worked with a co-worker and we sold an eprom programmer and a static ram board that plugged into the game port. I have been thinking of digging it out just to play with it but I currently don't have space to set it up. Watching your video brought back some old memories of the fun I had working on that project.
I did something similar with an Amiga 500, putting it into a case for some CP/M machine with was very flat and deep and featured 2 floppy drives on the front. it worked very well and was the perfect size for the A500 main board. pity I never took any pictures of it.
Back in the mid 80s I repacked my BBC B, 6502 second processor, 1MHz bus to SASI interface and SASI to MFM controller into an ICL desktop computer case - essentially, a Rair black box, but rebadged by ICL in beige. It had two 5.25” full height bays, so I had one actual ST506 in there and, as I remember, a half-height 80 track DSDD floppy. The serial came out to DB25s on the back, and the keyboard cable, which was just a plain ribbon, extended the BBC keyboard. The old PSU was more than enough to handle the BBC. Fun, but it didn’t help much with reliability and it died one week that I lugged it up to London to see a friend. Wish I had pictures of it back then, but I didn’t have a camera….
I had a TRS-80 in the late 1970's. Got a photo of me on it. I thought it was fantastic. It had a built in tape deck, 8Kb, machine sold by Dick Smith Electronics which was an Australian company like and in competition with Tandy. Dad sold it and we got a BBC Micro in 1979.
Ohh Tim linder, Great colleague who has done a lot for the coco community in which I include myself, it's good to hear news from him, he has great articles written by him and much saved from the history of the color computer, my nick is luiscoco for this very reason
My school had TRS-80 model 3s and Apple IIc’s. The computers weren’t replaced until 1992. I learned how to program them my Freshman year of high school.
Interesting Video.. Going back to the 70s, I used a TRS 80 computer with floppy drives. In its day it was a decent home computer. RCA connector is normally base band video and not RF. RF normally uses F51 or F series connectors! I know some manufactures including Radio Shack were using RCA connectors with RF. Looks like this computer is what I would call a Dog's Dinner!
What a time to be alive - to find these archeological artifacts our ancestors built, see them come back to life, and that we’re all crazy enough to see it restored
Before watching, I'm gonna guess rat turds and nesting material. That was certainly what I found in my Trash 80 Model III some years back when I dug it out of the barn at my dad's place. Opened it up, took a step back, got some gloves and carried it to the dumpster.
I've got a couple old Commodore PET computers in storage. No floppy drives...just the old all-metal cabinet with a ?10lb linear transformer from the days of old. $30/ea if you want to pick them up in Canby, OR. Also a couple TRS-80 CoCo's, floppy drives, documentation, and box or two of old Byte magazines and Rainbow magazines if you have an interest--price TBD. All working on last power-up but the PETs have been in a barn for 25 years.
I remember when these machines were brand new and I wanted one so bad in the late 70s through the 80s but couldn't afford one. It breaks my heart to see these machines, that I once dreamed of owning, being neglected and filthy dirty. That is probably why I enjoy watching you and others restore these pieces of history.
RadioShack's TRS-80 Model 1 was one of the first home computers, along with the Apple II and the Commodore PET 2001, to be produced in significant numbers as finished units.
I still got my (pimped out) Model III, 'though it stopped working (no boot-up) a bunch of years ago. Beige case from a DT1, amber CRT from Langley-StClaire, double-sided disks, "air mover" (220V fan running on 120V) under the disks to just move enough air to keep them cool, hi-res graphics card in back, etc. I was totally gangstah back then.
Another commenter suggests that this may actually be the Extended Color BASIC ROM. If this has an Extended BASIC ROM, but not the Color BASIC ROM, it could be that at one point the original ROM was swapped out for a custom EPROM that booted directly into OS-9. OS-9 wasn't quite as useful on the CoCo 1 & 2 due to the limited memory, but it was definitely a thing. Yes, repacking CoCos was pretty common back then. I put a CoCo 3 in a PC/AT mini tower case. Restoring that to working condition is a project waiting to happen. The reason most people would repack CoCos was that all the peripherals you'd need to make a really useful system out of it (above just playing ROM Pak games) had to be connected externally, and many of them required their own ribbon cables and power cords. This was more prevalent in the later CoCo 3 days, when it was not at all uncommon to have a dual floppy drive system and a SCSI hard drive, as well as an RS-232 pack and maybe some other device like a Speech & Sound cartridge, an Orchestra 90, or a DS-69 video digitizer all plugged into a Multi-Pak Interface. It could get unwieldy and take up a lot of space on the desktop, not to mention suffering from something like the ZX-81/TS-1000's dreaded RAM pack wobble. If the MPI got bumped, it could ruin your day. But a 200W PC power supply could power all the drives, and the CoCo. And if the floppy drives and hard drive didn't have to have their own separate power supplies, maybe they didn't have to have their own separate cases either, if you just shove it all in a PC case. These repacks were especially popular among users of the multitasking OS-9 operating system, since it required floppy drives and made good use of hard drives. I didn't wedge a Multi-Pak in my repack, but instead used a Disto Super Controller II, which was a no-halt floppy controller that made for better multitasking in OS-9 LII and didn't make the clock lose time while waiting for sectors to come around. It also had its own mini expansion bus. I put a Disto 4-in-1 board in it, that had a SCSI interface, a serial port, a parallel printer port, and a real-time clock chip, all of which came with OS-9 drivers. Even though this was a tidier solution than a bunch of separate adapters plugged into a Multi-Pak, it still added a lot of external ribbon cables and required extra power from a wall-wart. All of this could easily be powered and enclosed in the mini-tower case. With the addition of an XT keyboard interface, the CoCo looked like a (then)modern PC and performed very well into the early '90s. I still used the repacked CoCo 3 as my daily driver even after building a '286 passive backplane PC and buying a used Amiga 1000, since it already had a 40M hard drive, and lots of great software that would have cost hundreds more to add to the PC and Amiga.
I notice that there is a lifted leg on the one big chip next to the 6809 and some bodge wire going from it. It could just be to get around a bad trace but it might be worth looking at. Looking forward to the next part of this restoration!
@@adriansdigitalbasement yes this was a common mod back in the day to do with a switch along with a power LED and reset button on the front.. I would check either the PLA or the ram .... model 1 cocos are pretty much battleships.... also I believe you need the ECB in order for the disk controller to work correctly.... though there is a eprom on the disk controller which may have ECB and a third party dos installed...
70's computers nerds were on another level. Boys you make me feel small with a few rasbperry pi's I struggle with. You guys built and rebuilt stuff like mad men and you have my respect.
I don't like to use the term "trash 80" but looking at that one before you've had a chance to clean it up, I'm tempted. Glad to see more TRS-80 content, especially such a unique Frankenstein home-brew fest.
naaa... sorry, everyone else called them Trash80 for a reason. While Radio Shack sold a lot of them, there were not exactly reliable and there were many strange wonky versions. While compared to something like the C=64, it didn't really change for the 10+ years they kept building them - other than cost-cutting and changing the shape. The Trash 80s were still neat computers from back then.
This reminds me of those "barn find, will she run" car videos that I like to watch. Kinda fun to see you work on someone's vintage computer "rat rod." Yo, Adrian.. will she run?
This is so cool. Tim told me he was donating to your channel. Since you swapped processors I would check the memory next. Good luck I hope you get it running
The moment you cleaned the 64K RAM badge, I knew there was some CoCo1 goodness going on as the one I had back in the day had 64K RAM though not all of it was accessable as the CoCo1 had only 64K of address space, so the ROM shared it.
I can't say I've heard about CoCo repacks before, but over here in the UK I do recall in the early 80's people taking early single board computers like the Ohio Scientific or the UK101 and stripping out an old minicomputer terminal, putting the computer in the case and in some cases hooking up the cassette drives etc that the terminal had, or fitting floppy drives where they were. In the early 80's there were a lot of strange terminal types being unloaded from Banks and companies getting rid of older mainframes, and these were a rich source of parts for hobbiests whom in the UK were often Ham Radio or electronics people more used to putting together disparate parts than in the US where people had more computer clubs that focussed more directly "proper" microcomputer hardware (or at least, thats how it seemed from the magazines we were able to get over here). My father and I actually bought a bank terminal that had a great keyboard, a pair of data cassettes, monitor and a load of electronics we struggled to get any information about, we had planned to hook it up to our Commodore Pet but never managed to get it working - I suspect the terminal relied on some kind of signals from the mainframe to get it to start up. I hope you manage to get this machine up and running, its kind of a fascinating relic of a somewhat lost part of the hobby.
I saw a video of that same concept but with a BBC Micro in a terminal, stuffed to the brim with extension cables to the back of the motherboard! I think the video was by the Computer History Museum in Cambridge but I don’t recall exactly who uploaded it. Apparently a company sold at least a few hundred of them!
I owned a model 1 and at work, was in charge of some model IIIs, and then later went to work at a Radio Shack Computer Center where we were selling Model 4 and 4P at the time. THIS thing you have is a FRANKENPUTER. Wow! I liked the Coco. It had a pretty advanced 8-bit CPU, the 6809, and ran OS9. Interesting video! All good wishes.
The second the knobs on top appeared, before the case even opened, thought to myself "someone crammed a TV and gaming console inside this TRS case, totally 80's style!" I'd forgotten all about those kinds of grafts, I can still remember when TRS-80 cases were cheap and plentiful, like Honda Civics.. no shortage at all and they were fantastic to scrap out for other things since the cases were so cool. Retro even by 80's standards
You can usually shine a UV LED on the glass to find out the phosphor colour even if it won’t power on! 😃 (Edit: and if it doesn’t glow with that or a blacklight, it’s probably colour!)
@@andygozzo72 that’s really interesting! The video I saw on it a decade ago had almost all colour TVs not reacting, so just lit up like a regular light was shining on them. Amber was bright orange and green monochrome phosphor looked like a highlighter yellow-green. Which manufacturer was your colour TV? I know they didn’t all use the same colour phosphors all the time. Is it actually glowing, or just highlighting the greeny-grey tint they tended to have?
@@kaitlyn__L i've never tried it on any monochrome phosphor crts, i dont have any anymore , i have a colour crt toshiba thing in my bedroom i tried it on, and it glowed a slight greenish tint, maybe the green phosphor is more 'efficient'/more sensitive to UV??
That was my original, the TRS-80 model 4/ I learned to program in model 4 basic on this. It was my office computer. my memory was of a more rounded machine.
This reminds me of the Kaypro I stuffed with an Emerson Electric V20 motherboard that had DOS in ROM and a 40mb hard drive. I used it for data transfer from a BBS to friend's machines. I miss the Emerson: I think it had a 10mhz V20 - really fast for a PC at the time. I never found another, and since I got it from a Computer Shopper ad for $299 it was probably a sell-off of a failed product. And I still regret trashing the still-working Kaypro all these years later.
The TRS-80 was the first computer I started playing around until my dad came home with the first IBM PC. We still have it in the basement (still pretty good condition) Man, it must be 45 years since that thing was powered on !! :-)
That is a super cool bit of early computing history. The computers I’m familiar with from that era were much more primitive that the Coco or TRS-80’s. I was playing with Cosmac ELF’s and that sort of thing. This nice thing about these things is the simplicity of the electronics. First thing I’d check is the clock and reset circuits. I’ll bet that’s where the issue is.
Right. There's a _lot_ of information you can get by simply putting a 'scope on various lines to see what's going on. (After checking for good DC power levels at the power around ground pins of various chips, of course.) Clock would be the first, followed by confirming that /RESET goes low for a few (or few dozen) cycles and then comes back up. Once those are confirmed you can look at what's going on on the address pins and get a sense of where in the address space code is executing. If it quickly settles down into something that looks like an input loop (mostly executing from a few areas in ROM) then you know that the CPU and ROM are probably good.
14:16 Maybe the disk controller plugged in via that that little shorty extension cable seen back at 8:08 ? Also, look at the center of the COCO board, there's a bit of SIMILARLY colored wire wrap wire attached to a pin of a dip chip...
I helped a friend do a CoCo repack once into a model 3 case. I don't remember too many details on that one. For myself, I modded a Model 3 keyboard and used it as an external keyboard (in a Hammond case) for my CoCo. The mod is fairly easy as I think you only have to move one row of keys. Back then you could buy parts direct from Radio Shack National Parts as all the part numbers were in the service manuals (which were also available from RS) You will need the Level II ROM for the disk controller to work.
This is the computer I played my first computer game on (not counting arcade games). Taipan! We had them at the electronics trade school I attended in the early 80s. Learned to program in basic on that thing and later bought a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 for myself. And As an interesting side note, that very same Radio Shack, where I bought it at, finally closed just a couple of years ago. Had been in that same shopping center in that same store front since the 70s.
People used to also put coco's in PC cases as well... but mostly they placed them in mod 3 or 4 cases ... I saw one back in the day which was in a wooden case and had both disks and a multipack inside with several of the add on packs installed (Modem / RS232, orch 90, sound and speech pack and the disks with a hard drive controller...)
You can find out the phosphor color without turning the CRT on by shining a UV light onto it. The UV light causes the coating to floress, thus showing you what it is. Seen it done. This is also how you can see if the screen has burn-in, or more worn areas.
White enter keys weren't native on the Model 3 even though it is a M III keyboard. And the "mini disc" label might be from the Model 100's 3.5 inch disk drive accessory? And I'm envious. For years I wanted to have a Model 3 chassis to do a full blown casemod. (And I gave away mine around 1991. Sigh....)
One word .... wow !! This is going to be one "fun" project to see to completion, that's for sure. DEfinitely going to wait it out for part 2. Great Job ! :)
In the day, I had a TSR80 w/ monitor and when the Model 4 came out, I bought the M4 case & keyboard. The TSR80 monitor fitted perfectly buy mounting it upside down and turning the yoke 180 degrees. Then I built a 2 chip dotter board to convert the keyboard mapping to match the TSR80's input, and the CPU board fit nicely in the case.
This reminds me of my shop computer it started life as a MRI machine that had an old Pentium 2 board I removed that board and replaced it with a more modern laptop board. This has a adjustable base that contains a battery backup so I can move it around without shutting it down. With a the auto manuals online now this works great and is less likely to get broke like the previous laptop I had.
Looks like a teenager's adventure in computing. I've done similar frankencomputing with a 386 laptop and other stuff like portable stereo amplifiers and speaker boxes. My dad did the same with the Commodore PET (making it a CBM)
I'd double check that ROM... they may have put the extended Basic ROM in the normal socket, and the ROM is actually missing. The Chiptester pro seems to say 'Colour Computer (Exte' - maybe short for Extended?
As far as the dirty big crack in the case is concerned I've had really good luck lately with Methyl Ethyl Ketone (aka PVC pipe primer) fixing up similar cracks on old computer enclosures. Fantastic video as always, really interested in where you end up going with this historical freak.
This looks interesting. I would love to see this all working again inside that case. Looks like someone did a lot of work to get it working the first time.
Aww, I would’ve installed an RF splitter so I could watch TV while it was loading programs or processing stuff 😆 This reminds me of a “computer company” in the UK which sold a BBC Micro shoehorned into a terminal case with a custom back.
This was really great. I used to play a lot of Penetrator back in the day on a TRS80, and that machine was what I learned to code on. Watching this, what I wanted more than anything was for this machine to be opened up only to find some ancient alien tech or something completely inexplicable ala the Tommyknockers.
Fun Fact: You can tell the phosphor color of a monochrome CRT -- and check for screen burn -- without needing to power it up aiming a blacklight at it, as I demonstrated in my video "Blacklight vs. CRTs".
This will be so cool to see operational again what a cool hack from back in the day, I love modding things so this is totally something I would’ve done also
Trs-80 model 3 was my first computer. Traded 3 nes games for it. It was this system that I learned what format did by formatting all my disks including the OS. Only could use the built-in basic after that. If you ever need a hand with anything, just let me know as I am in the Saint Johns area of Portland.
I pulled my Apple IIe out of storage to discover it still worked. It has a mod that I'm sure I did, I recognize my work, but for the life of me I don't know what it does. It might be related to the aftermarket 80 column card which required some trace cutting and soldering but I remember that one and I still have the docs. Installing this mystery switch, I just don't remember. Next time I'm at the storage place I'm gonna try to figure that one out again.
It's actually pretty cool to see that people would stuff a completely different computer in there, it's kind of similar in my slow project of sticking a C64 DTV stick's guts inside a portable TV, but far more inventive in that they stuck a whole television into a computer, which is the opposite of what I'm doing... :D
Looks like it’s missing the Color Basic ROM. The chip that was there is the Extended Color Basic. I think in CoCo 1 you’re going to need both chips, or at least the Color Basic. Looking foward tonsee how this turns out.
I'm not really sure about that. I've calculated the CRCs and 6270955a matches file "Color Basic v1.1 (1980) (Tandy).rom" which is supposedly a normal non-extended color BASIC despite what the Retrotester is telling, so I think Adrian is probably right - it does not need the other chip to function.
This is a computer that I built when I was 21 or 22. Used to manage RS stores in the early ‘80s. Please forgive my hackery.
It is a green screen. Used a b/w tuner. Worked great.
Used to play the cc version of Donkey Kong on this one. I don’t think this is the one I piggy-backed the memory chips. Used to do a lot of that back then.
Parts were leftovers from repairs at the computer center. Model 3 this, model 4 that. I think I did hot-glue most of the parts inside.
Don’t recall why I pulled it apart. Had several ccs so maybe I robbed parts from pond to the other.
The keyboard wiring was the funnest part to figure out. Most keys were grouped the same, just had to do those wires to fix it. Chicklet keyboards weren’t as cool as these.
Glad you are taking the time to fix it. I recently moved and Tim seemed like a good steward.
Waiting to see what becomes of this.
oh i thought this was a prank
@adriansdigitalbasement This is your pinned comment 😀
6809 respect!
How similar were the TRS-80 and Dragon computers to each other?
@@GeoNeilUK Wasn't the dragon a clone of the cc?
This is a master class on why you ALWAYS investigate something before plugging it in to test it. Well done sir!
One of my childhood friends Dad's worked for Tandy and the TRS-80 "Trash 80" was my first hands-on keyboard exposure to PC's. We were in the FW area. He then gave me an Adam Computer and I don't remember the specs but I hooked it up to our vacuum tube cabinet TV and it had two cassette drives. My first and only ever store-bought system was the Tandy 1000SX in '86 for about $3,500. I built a 8086 clone the same year with another elementary school friend. I've been in IT since. It's awesome to watch your vid's that help to preserve our tech history.
My first computer was a TRS 80 with a cassette tape drive. I eventually added a floppy drive. They were singled sided. I would cut out the other side and was able to flip it over and double the capacity. Brings back a lot of memories.
In 1980 I got a job at a Radio Shack and worked overtime to be able to afford a TRS-80 model I with 4K of RAM and Level I BASIC. Over the years I added 16K RAM and LEVEL II BASIC ROM (and upper lower case letters) upgrade, a krazy-glued piece of green plexiglas to the RCA, an expansion interface, eventually 5 1/4” disk drives, an Omikron CP/M adapter to dual boot into CP/M, and ultimately started using BBSes through a 110 baud modem, and finally an Epson MX-80 printer. Digitized my first audio through the cassette interface using a machine code program I keyed in hex from an 80 MICRO magazine. Learned a lot from it.
Very interesting! 👍👍👍
What a Classic Vintage TRs-80 computer shame some working parts were missing Adrian when you open it up
I bet it worked fantastic back in the day
I am always fascinated to see classic vintage computers whether they working or not
Thanks for sharing the above TRS-80 Computer with us all Adrian's Digital Basement, its greatly appreciated by me so thank you
best regards
Tony
Used trs in early to mid 80’s and eventually bought what they called a transportable. Prior to laptops, it was early one portable enough to carry on a plane. The keyboard was the lid on its end cover a 9” mono screen and the disc drives. No harddrive, just two 128k floppies. Boot drive and data drive. Even had to take an incomplete for a paper in grad school, because the floppy became corrupted. Had to retype the whole 50 page project to graduate. Lol. I never forgot about backing up files after that. Loved the video.
I started with a TRS-80 model 1 with 16k memory, just the keyboard and monitor. I had three external 5.25 floppy drives. Only keyboard input at the dos level. I upgraded to 32k expansion and got a 1500 baud modem. At that time you could connect to many different bulletin boards systems, some had 800 numbers for toll free calls. Good memories. Thanks for the video.
I still have my original trash 80 which I bought in 1980 or so. It was 4K when I bought it and I remember buying an upgrade (memory chips that we soldered in parallel over the existing chips) and a plastic glue on 16k emblem (?) to replace the 4k one. Cassette load and save (CLOAD CSAVE) before hard drives were cheap enough for the general public, and "special" cassettes that in the audio trade we called leaderless. Later I bought a machine code converter module. What a difference that made. Still have them and the player recorder too. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Yup, my mind jumped to the CoCo as soon as you mentioned the 64K badge
What a unique piece of history! I can't wait to see it restored to it's original wacky glory.
Yeah, as a member of the Coco community, I know of, as well as know Tim Linder. Very cool guy who's one of the biggest contributors to the CoCo community. Very cool guy!
I did a CoCo3 repack in a full AT tower back in the day, but this repack is just... brilliant... Aside from the sketchy gauges of wires used and the fact that it appears that very few of the components were actually mounted.
Yeah, I did something similar with a CoCo 2 back in the day. I made a computerized board game from an old CoCo 2 for my nephew, even with the disk controller and a disk drive. The board game was 3 dimensions and also moved around when the game told you to move certain sliders to alter the gameboard paths. You could also use it as a regular CoCo 2 if you wanted. I used an old, tiny, PC power supply and modded it to work with the CoCo 2 as well. I made my own case from wood and the 3D board game sat on top of it. You hooked it up to your TV and I wrote a complete program to interact with the board game portion for a full playable game.
A TRS-80 model 1 selfbuild kit by the name LNW-80 was my first computer… and my second an Apple ][ (also self-assembled) that first resided in a self-built housing, later moved to a PC minitower that just perfectly held all the necessary components, even the add-on boards (clock, floppy, memory, 80-column, Z80) fitted well, with a little rebuilding of course. Memories, memories!
My youngest uncle had two TRS-80's. One was a standard and the other was a color. He had Muscular Dystrophy so he couldn't do sports or anything like that, so grandma and grandpa got him the computers to fiddle with. I remember them being set up in the livingroom and thinking they were so cool. While in school, he fell asleep during class and didn't wake up, I was told he had a heart attack, he was 16. They got rid of those computers, it was 1987 and I suppose they were long in the tooth by then but I really just wanted to play a few games on them as a 3-4 year old. I might have been young but I remember having a great time watching him play games with me.
The fact that the tuner was tossed in to make the TV work just kills me. I mean, it probably works great but... just... wow. I'll just imagine that they're massive picture adjustment pots instead.
I'd say bypass all that modulation!
The tuner buried inside is what makes this mod so crazy.
That looks so modern. Like modern computers are basically a hodgepod of adapters for old interfaces, worse than that is software.
I still want a TRS-80 like that particular model. I can remember visiting the library in school, and playing Oregon Trail, etc…
Great video Adrian. What an amazing find - looking forward to the follow-up and potentially getting the full repack back to a working state.
Indeed, I'm about to start to try to fix the Coco1 main board, and see how it works with that keyboard.
When I worked at Motorola I worked on the development of the Color Computer for Tandy. I have an old Color Computer in my attic that I have not looked at since I put it in the attic in 1992. When it first came out I worked with a co-worker and we sold an eprom programmer and a static ram board that plugged into the game port. I have been thinking of digging it out just to play with it but I currently don't have space to set it up. Watching your video brought back some old memories of the fun I had working on that project.
Oh man, I love custom builds like this!! Can't wait to see this resurrected.
I did something similar with an Amiga 500, putting it into a case for some CP/M machine with was very flat and deep and featured 2 floppy drives on the front. it worked very well and was the perfect size for the A500 main board. pity I never took any pictures of it.
That’s rad! Was the screen still black and white?
Back in the mid 80s I repacked my BBC B, 6502 second processor, 1MHz bus to SASI interface and SASI to MFM controller into an ICL desktop computer case - essentially, a Rair black box, but rebadged by ICL in beige. It had two 5.25” full height bays, so I had one actual ST506 in there and, as I remember, a half-height 80 track DSDD floppy. The serial came out to DB25s on the back, and the keyboard cable, which was just a plain ribbon, extended the BBC keyboard. The old PSU was more than enough to handle the BBC.
Fun, but it didn’t help much with reliability and it died one week that I lugged it up to London to see a friend. Wish I had pictures of it back then, but I didn’t have a camera….
I had a TRS-80 in the late 1970's. Got a photo of me on it. I thought it was fantastic. It had a built in tape deck, 8Kb, machine sold by Dick Smith Electronics which was an Australian company like and in competition with Tandy. Dad sold it and we got a BBC Micro in 1979.
This is like the great grandpappy of the people cutting up Wii's and making them portable. Amazing.
Ohh Tim linder, Great colleague who has done a lot for the coco community in which I include myself, it's good to hear news from him, he has great articles written by him and much saved from the history of the color computer, my nick is luiscoco for this very reason
My school had TRS-80 model 3s and Apple IIc’s. The computers weren’t replaced until 1992. I learned how to program them my Freshman year of high school.
Interesting Video.. Going back to the 70s, I used a TRS 80 computer with floppy drives. In its day it was a decent home computer.
RCA connector is normally base band video and not RF. RF normally uses F51 or F series connectors! I know some manufactures including Radio Shack were using RCA connectors with RF.
Looks like this computer is what I would call a Dog's Dinner!
You certainly left this episode on a cliffhanger! looking forward to part 2!
Man I felt like I was getting a dust allergic reaction just watching this video. This old TRS-80 is so dusty!!
What a time to be alive - to find these archeological artifacts our ancestors built, see them come back to life, and that we’re all crazy enough to see it restored
Before watching, I'm gonna guess rat turds and nesting material.
That was certainly what I found in my Trash 80 Model III some years back when I dug it out of the barn at my dad's place. Opened it up, took a step back, got some gloves and carried it to the dumpster.
I've got a couple old Commodore PET computers in storage. No floppy drives...just the old all-metal cabinet with a ?10lb linear transformer from the days of old. $30/ea if you want to pick them up in Canby, OR. Also a couple TRS-80 CoCo's, floppy drives, documentation, and box or two of old Byte magazines and Rainbow magazines if you have an interest--price TBD. All working on last power-up but the PETs have been in a barn for 25 years.
I remember when these machines were brand new and I wanted one so bad in the late 70s through the 80s but couldn't afford one. It breaks my heart to see these machines, that I once dreamed of owning, being neglected and filthy dirty. That is probably why I enjoy watching you and others restore these pieces of history.
I know how you feel. 😢
RadioShack's TRS-80 Model 1 was one of the first home computers, along with the Apple II and the Commodore PET 2001, to be produced in significant numbers as finished units.
I still got my (pimped out) Model III, 'though it stopped working (no boot-up) a bunch of years ago.
Beige case from a DT1, amber CRT from Langley-StClaire, double-sided disks, "air mover" (220V fan running on 120V) under the disks to just move enough air to keep them cool, hi-res graphics card in back, etc.
I was totally gangstah back then.
I love how Portland the inside of this machine is.
Another commenter suggests that this may actually be the Extended Color BASIC ROM. If this has an Extended BASIC ROM, but not the Color BASIC ROM, it could be that at one point the original ROM was swapped out for a custom EPROM that booted directly into OS-9. OS-9 wasn't quite as useful on the CoCo 1 & 2 due to the limited memory, but it was definitely a thing.
Yes, repacking CoCos was pretty common back then. I put a CoCo 3 in a PC/AT mini tower case. Restoring that to working condition is a project waiting to happen. The reason most people would repack CoCos was that all the peripherals you'd need to make a really useful system out of it (above just playing ROM Pak games) had to be connected externally, and many of them required their own ribbon cables and power cords. This was more prevalent in the later CoCo 3 days, when it was not at all uncommon to have a dual floppy drive system and a SCSI hard drive, as well as an RS-232 pack and maybe some other device like a Speech & Sound cartridge, an Orchestra 90, or a DS-69 video digitizer all plugged into a Multi-Pak Interface. It could get unwieldy and take up a lot of space on the desktop, not to mention suffering from something like the ZX-81/TS-1000's dreaded RAM pack wobble. If the MPI got bumped, it could ruin your day.
But a 200W PC power supply could power all the drives, and the CoCo. And if the floppy drives and hard drive didn't have to have their own separate power supplies, maybe they didn't have to have their own separate cases either, if you just shove it all in a PC case. These repacks were especially popular among users of the multitasking OS-9 operating system, since it required floppy drives and made good use of hard drives.
I didn't wedge a Multi-Pak in my repack, but instead used a Disto Super Controller II, which was a no-halt floppy controller that made for better multitasking in OS-9 LII and didn't make the clock lose time while waiting for sectors to come around. It also had its own mini expansion bus. I put a Disto 4-in-1 board in it, that had a SCSI interface, a serial port, a parallel printer port, and a real-time clock chip, all of which came with OS-9 drivers. Even though this was a tidier solution than a bunch of separate adapters plugged into a Multi-Pak, it still added a lot of external ribbon cables and required extra power from a wall-wart. All of this could easily be powered and enclosed in the mini-tower case. With the addition of an XT keyboard interface, the CoCo looked like a (then)modern PC and performed very well into the early '90s. I still used the repacked CoCo 3 as my daily driver even after building a '286 passive backplane PC and buying a used Amiga 1000, since it already had a 40M hard drive, and lots of great software that would have cost hundreds more to add to the PC and Amiga.
I notice that there is a lifted leg on the one big chip next to the 6809 and some bodge wire going from it. It could just be to get around a bad trace but it might be worth looking at. Looking forward to the next part of this restoration!
Turns out this is to invert the screen, likely to make it more readable.
@@adriansdigitalbasement yes this was a common mod back in the day to do with a switch along with a power LED and reset button on the front.. I would check either the PLA or the ram .... model 1 cocos are pretty much battleships.... also I believe you need the ECB in order for the disk controller to work correctly.... though there is a eprom on the disk controller which may have ECB and a third party dos installed...
16:17 you made a black keyboard great again, because black keyboards matter. 😁
Used this machine in the early 80s. Needed to load 5-1/4 inch floppys to run VisiCalc spreadsheets and word processing programs.
70's computers nerds were on another level. Boys you make me feel small with a few rasbperry pi's I struggle with. You guys built and rebuilt stuff like mad men and you have my respect.
6:27 is the reason why you don't plug it in first, you have to open it up to see what is going on inside. Great video!
12° F today. Outdoor wrenching done for today. Need to find indoor hobby like this.
That's a nice looking Phillips TV in the back.
THE CPU is the 6809E which means that the MUL instruction can be used to cut down on the assembly language required for the OS.
I don't like to use the term "trash 80" but looking at that one before you've had a chance to clean it up, I'm tempted. Glad to see more TRS-80 content, especially such a unique Frankenstein home-brew fest.
TRaSh-80 was always my least favorite term, but, in some cases, if the hacked board fits…
Honestly, I have never heard the term but on first glance of that computer 'trashed-80' looked like it could be a good fit.
naaa... sorry, everyone else called them Trash80 for a reason. While Radio Shack sold a lot of them, there were not exactly reliable and there were many strange wonky versions. While compared to something like the C=64, it didn't really change for the 10+ years they kept building them - other than cost-cutting and changing the shape.
The Trash 80s were still neat computers from back then.
This reminds me of those "barn find, will she run" car videos that I like to watch. Kinda fun to see you work on someone's vintage computer "rat rod." Yo, Adrian.. will she run?
This is so cool. Tim told me he was donating to your channel. Since you swapped processors I would check the memory next. Good luck I hope you get it running
The moment you cleaned the 64K RAM badge, I knew there was some CoCo1 goodness going on as the one I had back in the day had 64K RAM though not all of it was accessable as the CoCo1 had only 64K of address space, so the ROM shared it.
That tv is amazingly clear for RF.
If you're going to restore this frankenputer, I would recommend installing a color TV to replace the black and white. All good wishes.
I can't say I've heard about CoCo repacks before, but over here in the UK I do recall in the early 80's people taking early single board computers like the Ohio Scientific or the UK101 and stripping out an old minicomputer terminal, putting the computer in the case and in some cases hooking up the cassette drives etc that the terminal had, or fitting floppy drives where they were. In the early 80's there were a lot of strange terminal types being unloaded from Banks and companies getting rid of older mainframes, and these were a rich source of parts for hobbiests whom in the UK were often Ham Radio or electronics people more used to putting together disparate parts than in the US where people had more computer clubs that focussed more directly "proper" microcomputer hardware (or at least, thats how it seemed from the magazines we were able to get over here). My father and I actually bought a bank terminal that had a great keyboard, a pair of data cassettes, monitor and a load of electronics we struggled to get any information about, we had planned to hook it up to our Commodore Pet but never managed to get it working - I suspect the terminal relied on some kind of signals from the mainframe to get it to start up.
I hope you manage to get this machine up and running, its kind of a fascinating relic of a somewhat lost part of the hobby.
I saw a video of that same concept but with a BBC Micro in a terminal, stuffed to the brim with extension cables to the back of the motherboard!
I think the video was by the Computer History Museum in Cambridge but I don’t recall exactly who uploaded it. Apparently a company sold at least a few hundred of them!
I owned a model 1 and at work, was in charge of some model IIIs, and then later went to work at a Radio Shack Computer Center where we were selling Model 4 and 4P at the time. THIS thing you have is a FRANKENPUTER. Wow! I liked the Coco. It had a pretty advanced 8-bit CPU, the 6809, and ran OS9. Interesting video! All good wishes.
I loved the speaker and the tv tuner thrown in this soup of electronics. Great work and great video, can't wait for the part 2 (hopefully final).
As the Generalisimo would say, "Shielding!? We don't need no stinking shielding!"
i love the big reveal with the dusty pile of parts, bravo
The second the knobs on top appeared, before the case even opened, thought to myself "someone crammed a TV and gaming console inside this TRS case, totally 80's style!" I'd forgotten all about those kinds of grafts, I can still remember when TRS-80 cases were cheap and plentiful, like Honda Civics.. no shortage at all and they were fantastic to scrap out for other things since the cases were so cool. Retro even by 80's standards
Sidenote don't do that to genuine PET cases or turn console TV's into fish tanks anymore - that's cringe 🤣
You can usually shine a UV LED on the glass to find out the phosphor colour even if it won’t power on! 😃 (Edit: and if it doesn’t glow with that or a blacklight, it’s probably colour!)
i tried this with a colour tv, and seem to glow more greenish..
@@andygozzo72 that’s really interesting!
The video I saw on it a decade ago had almost all colour TVs not reacting, so just lit up like a regular light was shining on them. Amber was bright orange and green monochrome phosphor looked like a highlighter yellow-green.
Which manufacturer was your colour TV? I know they didn’t all use the same colour phosphors all the time. Is it actually glowing, or just highlighting the greeny-grey tint they tended to have?
@@kaitlyn__L i've never tried it on any monochrome phosphor crts, i dont have any anymore , i have a colour crt toshiba thing in my bedroom i tried it on, and it glowed a slight greenish tint, maybe the green phosphor is more 'efficient'/more sensitive to UV??
Sometimes, you don't want to shine a UV LED at stuff of questionable origin ;)
@@Psychlist1972 I see what you did there.
That was my original, the TRS-80 model 4/ I learned to program in model 4 basic on this. It was my office computer. my memory was of a more rounded machine.
This reminds me of the Kaypro I stuffed with an Emerson Electric V20 motherboard that had DOS in ROM and a 40mb hard drive. I used it for data transfer from a BBS to friend's machines. I miss the Emerson: I think it had a 10mhz V20 - really fast for a PC at the time. I never found another, and since I got it from a Computer Shopper ad for $299 it was probably a sell-off of a failed product. And I still regret trashing the still-working Kaypro all these years later.
The TRS-80 was the first computer I started playing around until my dad came home with the first IBM PC. We still have it in the basement (still pretty good condition) Man, it must be 45 years since that thing was powered on !! :-)
That is a super cool bit of early computing history. The computers I’m familiar with from that era were much more primitive that the Coco or TRS-80’s. I was playing with Cosmac ELF’s and that sort of thing. This nice thing about these things is the simplicity of the electronics. First thing I’d check is the clock and reset circuits. I’ll bet that’s where the issue is.
Right. There's a _lot_ of information you can get by simply putting a 'scope on various lines to see what's going on. (After checking for good DC power levels at the power around ground pins of various chips, of course.)
Clock would be the first, followed by confirming that /RESET goes low for a few (or few dozen) cycles and then comes back up. Once those are confirmed you can look at what's going on on the address pins and get a sense of where in the address space code is executing. If it quickly settles down into something that looks like an input loop (mostly executing from a few areas in ROM) then you know that the CPU and ROM are probably good.
14:16 Maybe the disk controller plugged in via that that little shorty extension cable seen back at 8:08 ?
Also, look at the center of the COCO board, there's a bit of SIMILARLY colored wire wrap wire attached to a pin of a dip chip...
I helped a friend do a CoCo repack once into a model 3 case. I don't remember too many details on that one. For myself, I modded a Model 3 keyboard and used it as an external keyboard (in a Hammond case) for my CoCo. The mod is fairly easy as I think you only have to move one row of keys. Back then you could buy parts direct from Radio Shack National Parts as all the part numbers were in the service manuals (which were also available from RS)
You will need the Level II ROM for the disk controller to work.
This is the computer I played my first computer game on (not counting arcade games). Taipan!
We had them at the electronics trade school I attended in the early 80s. Learned to program in basic on that thing and later bought a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 for myself.
And As an interesting side note, that very same Radio Shack, where I bought it at, finally closed just a couple of years ago. Had been in that same shopping center in that same store front since the 70s.
People used to also put coco's in PC cases as well... but mostly they placed them in mod 3 or 4 cases ... I saw one back in the day which was in a wooden case and had both disks and a multipack inside with several of the add on packs installed (Modem / RS232, orch 90, sound and speech pack and the disks with a hard drive controller...)
You can find out the phosphor color without turning the CRT on by shining a UV light onto it. The UV light causes the coating to floress, thus showing you what it is. Seen it done. This is also how you can see if the screen has burn-in, or more worn areas.
Back around 2005, I opened an Amiga 2500 with a dead kitten inside so nothing can surprise me anymore !!
White enter keys weren't native on the Model 3 even though it is a M III keyboard. And the "mini disc" label might be from the Model 100's 3.5 inch disk drive accessory? And I'm envious. For years I wanted to have a Model 3 chassis to do a full blown casemod. (And I gave away mine around 1991. Sigh....)
Can't wait to see this more. Love these weird projects.
Love to see people doing extensive mods even back then. Everyone needs to have their projects. Today and then.
One word .... wow !! This is going to be one "fun" project to see to completion, that's for sure.
DEfinitely going to wait it out for part 2. Great Job ! :)
This was an awesome video! Can’t wait to see more work done to it. I’ve seen some crazy things, but this is really out there!!!
In the day, I had a TSR80 w/ monitor and when the Model 4 came out, I bought the M4 case & keyboard.
The TSR80 monitor fitted perfectly buy mounting it upside down and turning the yoke 180 degrees.
Then I built a 2 chip dotter board to convert the keyboard mapping to match the TSR80's input, and the CPU board fit nicely in the case.
I have never seen this before, so wacky. I love it. I would like to see this up and running for sure...
Nice video. Can't imagine why you wore gloves lol.
The TRS-80 CoCo (and Dragon 32) needs some more love on this channel!
That's also because those things tend to get infested by cockroaches...
This reminds me of my shop computer it started life as a MRI machine that had an old Pentium 2 board
I removed that board and replaced it with a more modern laptop board. This has a adjustable base that
contains a battery backup so I can move it around without shutting it down. With a the auto manuals
online now this works great and is less likely to get broke like the previous laptop I had.
Looks like a teenager's adventure in computing. I've done similar frankencomputing with a 386 laptop and other stuff like portable stereo amplifiers and speaker boxes. My dad did the same with the Commodore PET (making it a CBM)
Looking forward to the next video, would be great to see more of the crazy mods people did with their computers in the day.
I'd double check that ROM... they may have put the extended Basic ROM in the normal socket, and the ROM is actually missing. The Chiptester pro seems to say 'Colour Computer (Exte' - maybe short for Extended?
I saw that too, and made another comment before looking all the way down here xD
As far as the dirty big crack in the case is concerned I've had really good luck lately with Methyl Ethyl Ketone (aka PVC pipe primer) fixing up similar cracks on old computer enclosures. Fantastic video as always, really interested in where you end up going with this historical freak.
Ah, thanks for that! Sort of like model glue, where it melts the plastic together...
This looks interesting. I would love to see this all working again inside that case. Looks like someone did a lot of work to get it working the first time.
Aww, I would’ve installed an RF splitter so I could watch TV while it was loading programs or processing stuff 😆 This reminds me of a “computer company” in the UK which sold a BBC Micro shoehorned into a terminal case with a custom back.
This was really great. I used to play a lot of Penetrator back in the day on a TRS80, and that machine was what I learned to code on. Watching this, what I wanted more than anything was for this machine to be opened up only to find some ancient alien tech or something completely inexplicable ala the Tommyknockers.
Fun Fact: You can tell the phosphor color of a monochrome CRT -- and check for screen burn -- without needing to power it up aiming a blacklight at it, as I demonstrated in my video "Blacklight vs. CRTs".
Funny also is white and blue LEDs seem to have a similar effect at least for green -- make them glow like blacklights do.
Frankenputer! Made several over the years. Looks like fun.
That unit is pretty wild! I hope you can get it working properly again! Looking forward to future videos on it!
This will be so cool to see operational again what a cool hack from back in the day, I love modding things so this is totally something I would’ve done also
the long lost Tandy TV Set with double drives! take that, NABU!
Trs-80 model 3 was my first computer. Traded 3 nes games for it. It was this system that I learned what format did by formatting all my disks including the OS. Only could use the built-in basic after that. If you ever need a hand with anything, just let me know as I am in the Saint Johns area of Portland.
I pulled my Apple IIe out of storage to discover it still worked. It has a mod that I'm sure I did, I recognize my work, but for the life of me I don't know what it does. It might be related to the aftermarket 80 column card which required some trace cutting and soldering but I remember that one and I still have the docs. Installing this mystery switch, I just don't remember.
Next time I'm at the storage place I'm gonna try to figure that one out again.
It's actually pretty cool to see that people would stuff a completely different computer in there, it's kind of similar in my slow project of sticking a C64 DTV stick's guts inside a portable TV, but far more inventive in that they stuck a whole television into a computer, which is the opposite of what I'm doing... :D
What a fun system to find! I wasn't a big Coco fan, so I'm not at all familiar with this concept, but it's an interesting idea.
Neat surprise inside! Looking forward to your next video. Thanks for sharing
Very cool video, as always I look forward to your work Adrian. Thanks again for giving us something to learn from and enjoy.
It might be fun to put a color TV in in place of the black and white unit. Particularly a more modern one with less associated internals
gold plated pins extension cable ... somehow i remember buying one for my TRS-80.
I love visiting with Adrian
excited to see this ...interesting machine come together!
Ages ago prior to my moving over there I had a PET someone had done similar to with a C64.
Looks like it’s missing the Color Basic ROM. The chip that was there is the Extended Color Basic. I think in CoCo 1 you’re going to need both chips, or at least the Color Basic. Looking foward tonsee how this turns out.
I'm not really sure about that.
I've calculated the CRCs and 6270955a matches file "Color Basic v1.1 (1980) (Tandy).rom"
which is supposedly a normal non-extended color BASIC despite what the Retrotester is telling, so I think Adrian is probably right - it does not need the other chip to function.