Category: Announcements

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Retropalooza VI

We attended and even had a booth at the very first Retropalooza six years ago!  Back then we were selling old carts, consoles and other fun retro goodies.  Our kids were much younger then but still had fun helping us work the booth.  😄  We also met one of the Game Chasers and even had him sign an Atari 2600 E.T. cartridge, which we still have.

This year we didn’t get a booth, however, we will be attending just for fun and to meet some more people in this great community!  This year Retropalooza VI has a great line up of guests and it looks like it will be a ton of fun for everyone.  We are very excited!

So if you are planning on attending, hopefully we’ll see you there and maybe you’ll find a sweet business card with a sweet coupon code.  😉  We hope to get some photos, if we do we’ll post them along with a sweet coupon for all of our Internet friends as well! 💗

Retropalooza on Facebook
Retropalooza on Twitter

 

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KeyTronic Keyboard “Foam and Foil” Replacement Pads are Back!

After a couple of SOL users were having issues with the pads working consistently and some experimentation along with lots of input from the vintage computer community we decided the closed cell foam I was using was just a tad too short for the SOL.  Since I was going to be changing the foam anyway, and had requests for foam more like the original KeyTronic pads, I thought meeting customer demand was the way to go! I went ahead and moved away from the closed cell foam and opted for more resilient and taller open cell foam that is just like the OEM foam.  Now the keys feel more like they did when they were new from KeyTronic.  You can find the new pads here:

These new pads have officially been successfully tested on the following computers: Compaq Portable, Apple Lisa and the Franklin Ace 1000.

We would love to add your computer to the official tested list after installation. Please don’t hesitate to write a review here on the product listing or you are welcome to just send an email letting us know about your experience using these pads!

Our goal is to provide fully assembled pads that require no deconstruction, cleaning, cutting, punching or gluing for all KeyTronic keyboard restorations. All feedback is welcome and appreciated!

To see the saga of the pad revisions you can visit this older blog post.  It includes links to the vcfed.org forum where the vintage computer community gathered to help me get this all figured out.  It also contains photos of the machine Kevin built to help me make these pads more efficiently!

Here is a short video of a very nice customer installing these new pads in his Apple Lisa:

 

He used a nifty tool from a wax/pottery/clay carving and spatula set on Amazon or eBay. Here are just two examples to help get you started looking for these tools if you don’t already have a tool you can use:

 

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Three New PCBs and One Long Overdue Restock

You may have already seen the “new” Lo-tech PCBs we just listed in the store.  They are new as in we are now offering them due to popular demand. 😀 At this time we only have the PCB available for each item, however we are including the compact flash connector/socket for the cards that use them.  We have had the connectors in stock for a while, just by chance, and since they are a bit pricey to buy individually we thought we would include these.  We may decide later to sell some of these cards assembled or even in kit form.  But for now we have had requests from some of you to stock these particular Lo-tech cards, so here they are!  We have previously offered one of these and since we had requests to bring it back here we decided to stock more of those as well!

If there is anything you see on Lo-tech’s site, let us know!  We have a contract with James and are the only Official Lo-tech Partners and can stock any of his boards you may need.  We just need to make sure there is demand before stocking them so don’t hesitate to let us know!

The Lo-tech ISA ROM (PCB Only) has been restocked for good:

Here are the “new” cards we are offering; Lo-tech 8-bit IDE Adapter (PCB Only), Lo-tech XT-CF Adapter for Tandy 1400 Laptops (PCB Only) with Socket, and Lo-tech XT-CF-lite rev.2 (PCB Only) with Socket:

You may have noticed I mentioned that we will possibly be offering some of these in kit form.  Well, we have decided, also due to popular demand, to offer another item we currently sell in kit form.  That is coming soon and I won’t tell you, just yet, which card that will be.  You will just have to wait and see. 😉

Our next card, which is not Lo-tech related but is still totally sweet and RAD, will be another one that many have requested.  If you have been reading our blog posts lately you likely already have a good idea of what it may be. I don’t think you will be disappointed so hold tight for the next sweet sweet surprise…

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Our First IBM PCjr Boards, Extended Shipping Area, the Future of Resound and More

You may have already noticed that we added two new products to our store last night.  We are so excited to break into the IBM PCjr world with our breakout boards!  We recently found an IBM PCjr and loved playing with it so we just couldn’t help ourselves.  We were mostly inspired when we started looking for a keyboard and monitor for the PCjr as ours did not come with either of these.  Both of these items are a bit hard to come by and we needed both!  The keyboard we did find was not tested and had issues when we it arrived.  Not to mention the reliability of the wireless/infrared design to begin with, we all know how reliable that was back in the day!

First we have the IBM PCjr Joystick and Keyboard Breakout Board which allows you to connect either a PS/2 keyboard or an IBM PCjr keyboard via a standard RJ-12 phone cable.  It also has two joystick ports to allow you to use standard PC analog joysticks.  There is much more detail on the product description about how it all works so be sure to check it out.

Second we have the IBM PCjr CGA and Serial Breakout Board.  This card will allow you to connect a standard CGA monitor and a standard serial device. Again, there is more detail in the product description so check it out if you’re interested.

Don’t miss our YouTube video all about both of these PCjr cards along with a teaser about a future board at the end! 😉

We are also happy to now be offering shipping to South America!  Honestly, we have had some bad experiences shipping to some parts of South America but had totally dismissed Brazil!

We have shipped there via eBay on numerous occasions and should have been offering this all along.  We finally had someone bring this to our attention and so here we are, shipping to South America via our store.  If you are in South America please feel free to order here via our website.  If you have an issue, just let us know so we can work it out.  We now have a new customer with a video using our Resound card because he contacted us.  So if you speak Portuguese you may find this video very helpful:

Speaking of the Resound, we will be restocking more of those very soon!  Hopefully you saw our last video asking for some feedback about the playback on some games.  We heard about some games having an issue with the gain so we were entertaining the notion of installing a gain knob.  After posting a video for feedback and installing a gain knob we don’t really see too much benefit in that.  It simply just didn’t make that much difference according to our followers and our tests. So our plan is to reduce the gain to avoid it peaking.  This way you may just need to raise the volume on some games, and that’s it.  No pesky gain knob on the back of the machine to deal with.  We should have those back in stock within the next few weeks.

We have also had some requests for other Lo-tech boards we don’t currently offer.  We were finally able to reach James and hopefully we will have the following boards in stock very soon, we are just waiting on some files; Tandy 1400 XT-CF PCB, 8-bit IDE Adapter PCB and the XT-CF-lite rev.2 PCB.

There may be an Adlib OPL2 clone in our very near future.  Kevin could be in there ordering parts right now and I probably shouldn’t be saying this. 😉