Good afternoon, Until this past weekend, I've never given serious thought about the TRS-80 project I have on my project list, but after attending the Tandy Assembly, I am now the proud owner of 1 Model 100, 3 Model 200 project machines and a CoCo 2! I'm trying to get the 200s up and running...they boot to a screen with lines, I've taken one of them apart, and cleaned up the ribbon connector with Deoxit, which didn't seem to help. It almost seems like the panel is "on" but not initializing properly, so I did the cold boot and the "arctic boot" procedures, to no avail.
Something caught my eye on a VCF forum post, where someone had mentioned that if the NiCD battery isn't fully charged, the machine's RAM could be 'somewhat preserved' in an unconsistant state and recommended removal, and that the NiCD battery's presence was only intended to persist RAM contents long enough to change batteries. Is that true (NiCD battery isn't needed)? And as a follow-up, although capacitors "appear" okay, would a re-cap be needed for this? Traditionally (i'm a Macintosh/Amiga collector -- until now), recapping was mostly needed for SMD components, and through-hole passives typically are considered reliable, is this true here too? If NiCD battery isn't needed, I plan on snipping them from the 200s and the 100 I have too, since I could easily just offload (via serial) to a PC or something. Thank you, Britt
