Hello fellow kaypro owners.
I just scored a kaypro 2x on craigslist for free. It seems like the kaypro versioning is kind of confusing - the bios rom number doesn't match the ones I've seen for 2xs online. This one's eprom is labeled 81-478. It also has a modem. I'm hoping to get this thing up and running, but we'll see. I read in the bios rom and I can see a string saying Kaypro CP/M version 2.2 in there.
The crt seems to have a problem - I was curious if others have seen this or know a fix. The background is green and way too bright. I can see the text as brighter green on the green background, but I'd love to be able to fix the screen to have the normal nice contrast because I think the screen is one of the coolest things about these machines and I was hoping to write some ascii demos. Any ideas? I tried the trimpots (carefully, after discharging the flyback transformer) but that didn't help. I'll inspect the board for cracked traces when I get a chance, but I'd love to know if anyone has seen this problem with crts and found a fix, or if replacing the screen with a black and white tv screen or something like that might be possible.
It also doesn't have disks with it - the guy I got it from said he would contact me if he finds them, he thinks he had them at one point. I took one of the drives out and hooked it up to my linux box - I loaded the floppy module and it seemed to recognize it. The light went on and dmesg reported finding a floppy disk, so we'll see if I can write some disks when I get some 5 1/4" disks I bought on ebay.
Anyway, glad to see others who appreciate old stuff like this on here. Hopefully I can fully revive this beast and get the screen looking good again. I got rid of my previous tiny vintage computer collection (a tandy t1100, a mac SE/30 and an apple ][e) a while back, but I miss it, so I'm going to keep an eye out for free cool vintage systems which come my way.
Thanks!
I just scored a kaypro 2x on craigslist for free. It seems like the kaypro versioning is kind of confusing - the bios rom number doesn't match the ones I've seen for 2xs online. This one's eprom is labeled 81-478. It also has a modem. I'm hoping to get this thing up and running, but we'll see. I read in the bios rom and I can see a string saying Kaypro CP/M version 2.2 in there.
The crt seems to have a problem - I was curious if others have seen this or know a fix. The background is green and way too bright. I can see the text as brighter green on the green background, but I'd love to be able to fix the screen to have the normal nice contrast because I think the screen is one of the coolest things about these machines and I was hoping to write some ascii demos. Any ideas? I tried the trimpots (carefully, after discharging the flyback transformer) but that didn't help. I'll inspect the board for cracked traces when I get a chance, but I'd love to know if anyone has seen this problem with crts and found a fix, or if replacing the screen with a black and white tv screen or something like that might be possible.
It also doesn't have disks with it - the guy I got it from said he would contact me if he finds them, he thinks he had them at one point. I took one of the drives out and hooked it up to my linux box - I loaded the floppy module and it seemed to recognize it. The light went on and dmesg reported finding a floppy disk, so we'll see if I can write some disks when I get some 5 1/4" disks I bought on ebay.
Anyway, glad to see others who appreciate old stuff like this on here. Hopefully I can fully revive this beast and get the screen looking good again. I got rid of my previous tiny vintage computer collection (a tandy t1100, a mac SE/30 and an apple ][e) a while back, but I miss it, so I'm going to keep an eye out for free cool vintage systems which come my way.
Thanks!
