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Project: TRS-80

P

Psycho_Bob_

n00b
Joined
Jul 23, 2005
Messages
16
This was a case that I had actually modded poorly before, and felt that I needed to redeem myself by fixing it's shortfalls. Heres a picture of its previously modded state.
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It wasn't my finest hour, but I did win the case mod competition at that particular lan party. I stripped it down to the bare case and drive bays to see what I could fit in there.

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There is a decieving amount of room inside the case, but arranging the motherboard inside the bottom of the case where I could maintain the ability to upgrade the motherboard was not possible.
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I decided to attatch the motherboard to the top of the case, where the flat surface was a little more forgiving. I cut a hole in the back of the case for a card holder and motherboard back plate holder that was graciously donated from an old tower case. After about 15 cutting discs, the hole was complete and the panel was mounted.
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After this was done, the motherboard was fitted to the cut down tray from the same tower and set in. Due to the angle of the top of the case not being 90 degrees to the back, the back of the motherboard tray had to be hung from a leftover screw boss for the old monitor to keep it still and supported.

I purchased an LCD panel off of ebay that fit this case rather well. The bezel still shows a little bit around the edges, but is acceptable until I can get some black lexan to make a proper one. Heres a shot of it mounted and being tested.
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I am still up in the air about power supply mounting location, but it will probably be completely hidden. I will lose the ability to use the top two 5.25 slots due to having to cut the drive bracketry to clear the motherboard when the case is put back together. I will probably put a black cover panel on it and use it for HD lights and LCD controls.

BTW, the specs on this rig are:
Athalon 2200+ OC'ed to 2400+
640 mb pc2100 el cheapo ram
Radeon 9600 Pro 256mb
200gb hard drive

I will probably work on some more when the UPS man arrives with an 84 key keyboard.

More pics to come,
Bob
 
Right on! I've wanted to mod an old TRS-80 for years now but never managed to snag a frame from eBay at the right time. Good luck!
 
Do you still have the orginal drives? Stealthing a slot load drive behind the old drive bezels would be awesome. Make it look as stock as possible, have an emulator running on it, and then task switch to Windows or Linux.

You also need to have this running on it:
http://trs80hack.ytmnd.com/
 
I think my official goal for the project is to have the only TRS-80 capable of playing BF2. Well, that and the wierd stares when I go hauling that piece of history to a lan party.
 
Hehe, this is a cool mod. :)

I havent seen a TRS-80 in the flesh in about 20 years.
 
I have finished cutting out the drive mounts and mounting the power supply in the bottom of the case. I used a micro atx power supply and spliced in the 4 pin connector for the cpu power on the motherboard. Once I got the case with all the goodies put together and powered up, I noticed that there was a major cooling problem with the motherboard in the inverted position. It was running about 160 degrees at idle. I pulled it apart and flipped the cpu fan around to draw cool air up into it, but that only gained me about 5 degrees.
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It looks like I will be cutting a blow hole in the case to alleviate the problem. I will probably put it in the space underneath the motherboard header panel. That should blow air directly onto the processor. I might also put the cooling fan back onto the power supply to help. I added some wires onto the dual floppy drives so that the 5 1/4 disk light serves as my HDD led.

I will probably try to work on the controls for the LCD next, as the auto config on it sucks really badly.
 
Have you tried re-seating the CPU heatsink onto the CPU? If not, it would be worth trying.

I would definitely recommend having a fan of some sort blowing over the PSU if it's possible, it will work for a while, even if it doesn't go into thermal shutdown, but it will severely shorten it's life if it's running really hot. The same with the CPU.
 
Psycho Bob, this is a brilliant case mod idea idea you have come up with. I will be watching this closely to see how it develops.
 
Awesome man... you pwnd up the lan party for sure... this'll churn out another winner.
 
Thats actually off of IMBNES on my modded PS2. I have finished it with the exception of the keyboard and LCD front panel controls. I added several fans to the case, including one sucking up through the bottom of the case, and two side by side in the top drive hole with some modders mesh covering them. I also swapped out the old beige CD-ROM with my dual layer DVD burner, and flipped the drives so that all the buttons cleared the edge of the front cover.
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Also during the course of testing, I managed to roach that smaller power supply, so I ended up putting in a cooler master 350 watt full size one. I am going to guess that it was related to all that heat from earlier. I am now running much cooler, and XP and battlefield both installed and run stable.
 
Wow, cool mod. I had a TRS80 and it was the shit. Seeing this really brings back some memories.

So Bob, what version of XP are you installing there?
 
XP Professional - Most Wanted Edition, its a hacked version I got off of bittorrent that has some stuff installed with it, like antivirus and instant messenger programs. A lot of it I uninstalled, but some of it was pretty cool.
 
Side note, I used to use one of those installations and just re-did the authorization number and registered Windows but now I just make my own installation CD. I found too many deep-seeded problems over time. Just be careful. I used it mainly to save time as I install Windows a lot but it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.
 
Its just temporary anyway, I will probably just put Ubuntu on it in the next week or so and run wine on my games.
 
Psycho Bob, can you post some specifics (brand/model, etc.) on that LCD you are using?
 
I didn't get to see it still in the case, as I bought it stripped, but it is an NEC 12.1 inch TFT. If I had the opportunity, I wish I could have grabbed the front panel daughterboard and connector, as the connector is a wierd type, with small pin spacing. It does also have S-Video and RCA video inputs on it, which, i will probably mod into the side of the case, when the opportunity arises.
 
Wow, based on my (outdated) recollection of the TRS-80, I had assumed the screen was around 9 inches. The screen you have seems to fit the monitor opening in the case quite nicely.

Please keep the pictures coming. This mod has my attention.
 
The first picture of the old mod is actually a 9" CRT inside the old bezel, it actually had a modified picture tube out of a RCA XL-100 tv set. It measured out to about 11 or 12 inches with the bezel in, but all modern CRT's are 13" or bigger and way longer than the back of the case would allow. The electronics on the 9" monitor I had, actually rubbed on the back of the case.
 
Just an update, I have went through and did some cleaning of the wiring, so the new power supply uses the original power cord instead of hanging out the keyboard hole. Found out that the BIOS does not support a B:\, so the 3.5 inch portion of the drive is officially for looks, unless I swap jumpers on it if the need comes up.
 
Major problems today, I had to pull the amd motherboard out of the case, as I think either it or the CPU is dying. I still cant keep it below 160 degrees at idle, even with underclocking it to 1500 mhz. I am swapping it with an old emachines board with a 1.6 ghz celeron. It has always been faithful, but with no agp slot it wont be a gaming machine until the cash fairy smiles on me around tax time. I sliped on a thermalright xp-90 heat sink to help with my heat issues, and from my testing, I am getting about 35 degrees at idle without my two secondary fans running. I will try to slip an OS on it tomorrow and see how it acts.
 
I finally got around to finding and ordering a miniature keyboard that fits my requirements a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, it only arrived yesterday and I had intended on showing it off at a LAN party today, so I had to make a few changes to my plan. I decided that since this was ultimately going to be my gaming machine some day, I would probably just use a full size keyboard in front of it, instead of trying to use the mini one for long periods of time. With this in mind, I decided to just build a blank to fill in the hole for now, and mod the mini in later. I took a piece of cardboard and covered it with a white piece of plastic.

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The finished effect wasnt too bad, and a whole lot easier than getting plexiglass at 4:30 in the morning.

It seemed to make a good steady platform to set my keyboard and touchpad on.

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I am going to call it good for now, but will set that keyboard in when i get a good piece of plexi.
 
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