39-Year-Old Radio Shack Laptop Gets New CPU, Keeps Original Screen

Faced with a broken RadioShack laptop since 1983, Stephen Cass hasn’t gotten over the IEEE Spectrum editor. Instead, he pulled out the logic board and replaced it with a modern microcontroller so he could control the old monitor. cup He wrote about his adventure Detailed about Spectrum last week.

Cass had his operation on Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100—One of the first laptops ever produced — featuring a one-piece “slate” shape designed by Kyocera and released as the NEC PC-8201 in Japan. Its claim to fame wasn’t its small portable size (2 inches thick and 3.9 pounds), but its impressive keyboard paired with its ability to run for up to 20 hours on four AA batteries.

The Model 100 featured a 2.4MHz Intel processor 80C85 CPU, 8 to 32KB of RAM, 8-line, 40-character monochrome LCD without backlight. It doesn’t look like much compared to today’s portable monsters, but journalists lovable Model 100 because they can comfortably write stories on the go with the built-in text editor. It also included Microsoft BASIC, a terminal program, and an address book in ROM.

While some people upgrade the 100 model with New LCD screens and CPUs (keeping only the case and keyboard), Cass decided to experiment with an interface with a vintage, 240 x 64 pixel portable screen. He found it particularly difficult because the computer handles screen driving in an unconventional way compared to current LCD panels.

Cass writes: “The LCD of the M100 is 10 separate monitors, each controlled by its own HD44102 driver chip.” “All driver chips are responsible for a 50 x 32 pixel area of ​​the screen, except for two chips on the right side that only control 40 x 32 pixels.” Cass says its designers chose this method because it speeds up text rendering with limited memory.

After working on the screen protocol, Cass built an interface between screen and modern Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller. Since the project is now in place, it can display and pass bitmap graphics on the LCD of the Model 100. Its next step would be to try the monitor and keyboard interface (using a file Teensy 4.1.1 Update A development board to handle keyboard connections) to the Raspberry Pi 4 compute module, which would make for a powerful portable machine with a vintage feel.

You can read more about the technical details of his project On the IEEE Spectrum website. Good luck, Stephen!