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Newly aquired Tandy 6000HD! Lots of questions to follow...

pski said:
Not to disappoint you but the 12/16B/6000 keyboards are extremely difficult to find by themselves. I have never seen one for sale standalone.
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I guess I bought both of them on eBay! :)

Anyway, it's excellent news that the seller apparently has a 16B keyboard for you.
 
If it's not working, I'd get it anyway. Rebuilding one isn't that horrible of a job, assuming you either can procure a stock of replacement pads, or are able to make your own. I still plan to try making my own when I get around to it.

And even if it tests out ok, I'd still take it for granted that a rebuild would be in store in the near future. So I'd consider its workingness to not be much of an issue, unless you can use non-workingness as a bargaining chip to get the price down.
 
Ok still waiting on the seller he did send me an email saying that 99% of the 16B keyboards have the bad keys due to the foam deteriorating. I kind of guessed that but he said he will test some 16 keyboards and get me good one. I requested he send a good 16 and a 16B keyboard as well. I am pretty sure they have the same layout.
 
Re. keyboards for these computers, I would buy solely based upon cosmetic condition, yellowness (or lack thereof) and whether it matched my system... eg. M12 keyboard for a M12, T6K keyboard for a T6K etc. (I'm a bit of a neatness freak when it comes to matching the right parts with the original computer.)

Assume all foams in all keyboards have deteriorated or are about to, and just do the re-foam job outlined in my video.

ALL 8in series keyboards which appear for sale should be snapped up and set aside for re-foaming even if you don't need the keyboard, as there will be a time in the future when these keyboards become unobtainium. Uneducated eBay sellers may even throw away keyboards if they find one or two keys don't work preferring to sell a system without a keyboard rather than with one which isn't fully functional - true story!

Another true keyboard story, I picked up a consignment of Model 4 keyboards all marked as "dead keys" and indeed each keyboard had between 1 and 10 bad keys, which I was able to fix each keyboard in between 5min and 1hr each and had 12 perfectly good keyboards at the end of it.

Ian.
 
Ok can a half height 20 MB MFM hard drive be used in the 6000HD? I would think so just want opinions.

@Ian yeah I would guess that all those Model II line keyboards would need new foam pads like shown in your video. So I asked the seller what he wants for a 16B keyboard.
He is not answering questions right now. I did ask if he had any 6000 KBD's and waiting an answer.

Would like to see this thing fully operational
 
Mark why does my memory board look different to yours? Mine has 4 rows of 9 chips each and yours had 4 rows of 8 chips each. Also mine has 4 empty chip sockets near the middle. Usually isn't 9 chips for parity?
 
Chromedome45 said:
Mark why does my memory board look different to yours? Mine has 4 rows of 9 chips each and yours had 4 rows of 8 chips each. Also mine has 4 empty chip sockets near the middle. Usually isn't 9 chips for parity?
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I don't have an answer to your question yet, as I haven't studied the circuitry of either of our memory boards yet. 9 bits per byte generally implies parity detection support in my experience, but I don't know yet whether parity checking is implemented in the 16 series 68000 subsystem. I just haven't looked into the internals that carefully yet.
 
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