• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

PC jr item

Might be a Tandy joystick for the jr - no label on it, except made in china, or whatever...ya - I have a few: Coco, IBM PC, Apple II


Tony
 
Sharkonwheels said:
What's that switch do on the Racore sidecore? says PC<-->jr ?
What was involved in the 128KB ->512KB sidecar mod? Couldn;t be simply replacing chips, could it?

T
Click to expand...

This thread sure brings back memories :) Back around 1986 or so...
I bought a Tecmar JR Captain which had 128K. Used a desoldering
device we had in the electronics lab at work, removed the (16) 64K
chips, soldered in sockets, and replaced with the 256K per bank
chips for a total of 640K. I also remember doing a 'Tandy modification'
to the JR motherboard, which would allow a lot of Tandy games
with 16 colors to run on there.
 
Thanks for the well-wishes - we shall see...

Now a little OT - I went to send ya a PM about the other jr's, saw a link to your homepage.

Holy Shmoly!

Dude - that treehouse is the SHIZNIT!!

Nice skillz there, Mikey! That is SWEEEEET!


Tony
 
Tony is stepping back in time to yesterday...

mbbrutman said:
Some of us Jr heads have had strange competitions where we see how many sidecars and expansion decks we can cram onto a system. I've seen machines with 3 levels and 8 sidecars before.
Click to expand...

Dang - probably a 10A draw on the power, huh?
Now, exactly how many wal-warts would that require??? :confused:


Tony
 
Going a little off topic here ...

The tree house was quite the project. About $1600 in materials, including 30 year architectural shingles to match the house, cedar decking and porch rails, etc. I don't have a recent picture posted but it has plexiglass windows, cedar trim around the corners, windows, doors, paint, a bucket on a pulley, etc. The kids love it, and even recently I've gone up there with my laptop and a cellular modem and have worked from up there.

Back to on topic:

Of course the main thing to look at on my home page is the PCjr site ... anything anybody would ever need to know about PCjrs. (Well, almost everything - there is some stuff I can't publicly post.)

http://www.brutman.com/PCjr

The Racores are nice because they provide power. But if you get an excessive number of sidecars you have to have the power sidecar.

If you ever see a cluster adapter, do not attach it without a power sidecar in series ahead of it. The cluster adapters draw a tremendous amount of power, and I know somebody who inadvertenly melted two internal power cards because of the power draw. IBM spec'ed the JR to use a cluster sidecar *only* if there was no floppy controller or floppy drive in the system, and even then I bet it would have been close.

(And in that configuration it would be a diskless machine, require booting over the PC Cluster network.)

PC Enterprises had a nice expansion unit that did away with the bricks and put a real 150 watt power supply adapted from an XT type machine into the expansion deck. With 150 watts you could power anything you could attach to a Jr ...
 
Nice PC Jr site, Mike.

I never had a PC Jr, although I did have a Tandy 1000 (which was supposed to have a lot of the same capabilities). I did acquire a PC Jr a couple of years ago, but haven't found the time to try and boot it up.
 
I haven't ever used a Tandy 1000, but I understand from reading that Tandy almost 'did it right'. At least as far as the memory hole goes. You can boot a Tandy and have it recognize all of the system memory without a device driver, unlike a Jr ...

I heard that Tandy 1000s have other design problems though. :)

Being a PCjr fan is more of a philosophical thing. Most of us were stymied by the limitations put on the machine, and are hell bent on proving the machine can be made useful. It is unreasonable, but unreasonable people drive a lot of innovation because reasonable people would just get a better machine.
 
mbbrutman said:
Being a PCjr fan is more of a philosophical thing. Most of us were stymied by the limitations put on the machine, and are hell bent on proving the machine can be made useful. It is unreasonable, but unreasonable people drive a lot of innovation because reasonable people would just get a better machine.
Click to expand...

I'm a PCjr fan because I love what it represented (better graphics and sound for the IBM PC). I never had high hopes for it :) but I love playing PCjr-only titles on it.
 
I'm suprised that machine didn't fetch more.

There is another one on eBay at the moment, but it is not assembled which is kind of a shame. There is a good possibility that it does not work, and even if the parts are good assembly is non-trivial. This machine does have the Racore keyboard adapter, which allows a normal PC or XT keyboard to run on the Jr.

Too bad the auctioneer doesn't know how to spell Racore. ;-0
 
The last Jr I sold on e-bay (roughly a year ago), excellent condition, working IR keyboard, and some cartridge which I don't recall now, shown set up and working, went for the mind-numbing price of $7.16US.

The shipping to Finland was 5 times that.
 
And some vanilla machines have sold for $80 or more. I remember seeing a $202 recently.

Anecdotal evidence is fun, but is not evidence ..
 
Not only that, it's going to Europe.
That's OK - at least it wasn;t $1, like the 3 coco1 lot I sold...
That doesn;t even pay the gas in my Tundra to get it shipped!


T
 
PcJr stuff

PcJr stuff

Is there anyone near Michigan that is interested in a bunch of PcJr equipment? I would rather not mail it all.
 
I have monitors, a couple pcs, a quadram that doesn't work, printer or two, software.....I would have to make a list again..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top