Hi All,
I thought I’d post a quick Hello, here as I just got on this mailing list. It’s
great to see that there’s more people still actively doing stuff with the
m100/102 and similar. I’ve picked my 102 up a few months ago from eBay. It
worked when I got it, the mainboard looked very clean (almost as new), no
leaking caps, battery looked great. After a month or so it stopped working
though (garbled mess on the display). So first I replaced the old battery with
a new Chinese ordered from Ali. That didn’t seem to work. So after a while of
seeing if longer trickle charging would change things (it didn’t) I ordered a
capacity kit.
After fixing my initial (seemingly not so great) soldering I got the 102 to
start again. However, the clock wasn’t working properly (it lost track of time
when I turned off the 102). So I opened up the machine again and saw that the
battery was looking really bad (lots of corrosion on the sides), as I’d kept
the original battery I put that back, but still the clock would stop while the
102 was turned off. So I figured I’d wait a while until it got a chance to
charge the battery.. and lo and behold… after a few days the clock worked just
fine!
So now I’ve got a fully operational and great looking 102 (I had retro-brighted
it earlier). I might have to get a new (this time quality) battery as since
1986 its probably not holding all that much charge anymore, though seemingly
enough to allow changing batteries without loosing memory content).
I had also early gotten a null modem hooked up to my Mac over USB and using
DosBox even gotten file transfers working through Desklink. Anyway, I’m having
a whole lot of fun with this great little machine. So far I’ve been using it
for writing (nice distraction free working on a pretty nice keyboard).
Next I’m planning to update my Rex (which I had also gotten earlier just before
my 102 broke down) to the latest build and do the hardware mod so I can play
with custom roms. I’m planning to use that to do some OS development (something
I’ve been wanting to do for over a decade, since I’ve played with modifying
Minix in the early 90’s). Virtual T under a VM running Windows 10 seems to work
pretty well as a development environment, though it would be great to have
integration with Visual Studio Code :).
Anyway, I’ll post updates on the custom rom OS dev when I”ve got anything to
show…
Looking forward to lots of play on this not-so-new toy :)
Cheers,
Erik
