Thread: Tatung Einstein TC-01 for Sir_Beaker

Afternoon Chums

Yesterday I took delivery of a very nice condition Einstein TC-01 destined for our member sir_beaker...

The ole girl sadly had developed a fault probably due to sitting idle for so many years..

The fault was traced to a defective Ram Multiplexor 74LS157 and a 4164 DRAM, I removed and tested the remaining 3 DRAMS from the affected bank to be sure of their reliability...
Various joints on the motherboard were also reflowed with fresh solder and finally the motherboard was fully cleaned with IPA.

The system was then fully stripped down and refurbished, All Plastics were thoroughly washed and dried then polished and I took some pictures during the rebuild process to share with you all.

The Einstein is probably the nicest Z80 Architecture implementation, using True Z80 support chips for Interrupt control as well as Parallel and User port functions.
It's Video Subsystem is based on the Classic Texas Instruments TMS9929 Video processor as used in the Memotech MTX and MSX machines which has it's own 16K Video RAM.
Unusually but thankfully Tatung also provided a true RGB Matrix convertor on the motherboard which allows this component video based processor to feed an RGB input with great results.
I have modded the system slightly to make it fully Pin compatible with the std Acorn BBC RGB spec so the same cables can be used.

The Power supply is also still going strong after all these years and I tweaked it slightly to raise the +5V output to spec.

The Internal 3" Drive is a true shugart compatible TEAC build of very high quality, no belts being direct drive and it even has a dual colour LED to indicate which side of the disc is active.
No cheap nasty Amstrad 3" nightmares here

All in all a very nice stable and well looked after system which now looks as new as the day it was built....

sir_beaker, Enjoy your Einstein my friend, You are one lucky guy

TC

More pr0n
And the obligatory pussy shot....

Good work yet again TC you ol' show off.

Looks great fella

Very nice indeed

Originally Posted by TheCorfiot

More pr0n
And the obligatory pussy shot....

Gotta say mate the cat looks less than impressed

Another piece of computing history saved for future generations! Nice work, Bas!