What on Earth Is This Thing?

[@ctrlaltrees]

Update: Not only did I manage to get this working after I finished recording, but I've also managed to acquire the original software packs - so we're full steam ahead for part 2!

[@maltronik]

Great!!! I'll be back...

[@geezerdiamond]

Oh fab! I’ll be interested to see how! I was going to suggest leaving it powered for a while to reform the caps on the power board, in case it wasn’t managing to jump-start the rest of the electronics.

[@briankleinschmidt3664]

It doesn't work while recording? Maybe it's bashful.

[@wisteela]

Awesome!

[@pdahandyman]

Was it the lack of battery not completing a circuit, like a chain of fairy lights?

[@drewnewby]

That undeniably early 80s Japanese aesthetic is in it's fully glory here. Thankfully the Varta gods were kind, and it's in working order.

[@lucasrem]

What on Earth Is This Thing?

[@herborty8658]

​@@lucasrem Some kind of language laboratory based on proprietary tape technology.

[@cruftist]

1780s? It's a modern, computerized version of an ancient Japanese kamishibai.

[@drewnewby]

@cruftist Well done, ha!

[@TheOnlyDamien]

The aesthetic of this thing is just perfect, everything about it is amazing. I coulda generally guessed the year and place it came from just from the visuals lol.

[@pigpenpete]

A cassette format Techmoan hasn't featured yet

[@witness1013]

S-ay / L-ook / A-sk / P-ut - SLAP - The SLAP strategy is designed to assist students with deciphering the meanings of words found throughout informational texts by utilizing context clues. SLAP is an acronym for steps of the strategy which equips the students to determine a word’s meaning by looking at the clues within the text itself. After being taught each step explicitly, it is the goal for each student to independently use SLAP while reading to increase understanding of both the text and individual vocabulary words.

[@Wok_Agenda]

There's another thing called SLAP strategy, is when big companies drag individuals in exhaustion through endless legal battles often when they expose their dirty laundry.

[@davegreenlaw5654]

@@Wok_Agenda If I recall, that acronym actually has two Ps.

[@ssokolow]

@@davegreenlaw5654 Yeah. "Strategic Lawsuits/Litigation Against Public Participation"

[@Ice_Karma]

Interesting. My guess was going to be "Second Language Acquisition Program", but I think "Say/Look/Ask/Put" is an even better expansion.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Thanks so much for this, it sounds spot on. I'm not sure why it didn't come up in any of my searches.

[@cascadesouthernmodeltrains7547]

1000Bit is actually pronounced 8Bit. The 1000 is a binary 8.

[@-Jakob-]

We love nibbles.

[@semibiotic]

There are 10 types of people in the world… those that understand binary and those that don’t ?

[@ctrlaltrees]

Ha! So should have spotted that. Clever name 😁

[@uploadJ]

Missing the base 2 suffix indicating so?

[@axle.student]

@@uploadJ Yeah, I was looking for the second nibble. 8 Bit written in 4 bit notation :/. Probable a 7-bit machine.

[@thepirategamerboy12]

Damn, looks like you got a hold of Techmoan's time machine with it being in the box and all that.

[@Santor-]

Love Techoman!

[@thepirategamerboy12]

@@Santor- lol

[@jtelliso]

Techmoan or Adrian's Digital Basement would love one of these.

[@No_True_Scotsman]

That time machine is called money

[@stevethepocket]

This just screams "replace my not-a-screen with an OLED panel and repurpose me as a sci-fi movie prop."

[@orthicon9]

Exactly. Something set in the early '70s, in an ICBM missile silo.

[@adriankoch964]

Yeah this could be an epic custom pc build, with custom mech keyboad reusing those retro keycaps&layout. Also with the sliders & mini buttons usable to launch apps or do other stuff with them.

[@ctrlaltrees]

The ultimate Kerbal Space Program machine 😅

[@SilverSpoon_]

But how will you learn English? Steven and Margaret goes to the zoo. What a fine afternoon it is!

[@Rammspieler]

It does give off serious cyberpunk/cassette futuristic vibes

[@JennyEverywhere]

Wow. I'm having a nostalgia moment here. I never had a Cefucom-21, but I did have a different Japanese computer, the NEC PC-8001. It was another Z80-based machine, the DOS was CP/M, a special version built for NEC that had 62K TPA, and they managed to cram the CP/M Kernel into the remaining 2K. I used to work with the engineer who modified CP/M for the NEC PC line, Dave Schmidt (I'm pretty sure that was his last name...it HAS been nearly 40 years), and he made sure I had all of the appropriate system software and even some hardware. I had picked up the machine for $50, the company having gathered a large roomful of various computers, that they used to test compatibility with their software. At that time, in the latter half of the 80's, they had no use for a lot of the machines, so they offered them for sale for barely a pittance. I could have gotten a Commodore PET, or one of those CBM computers you have in your background, but the NEC looked the most complete, and I had Dave to help me with it, so I got the NEC PC-8001. It was a fairly typical CP/M machine, the only real departure being that incredibly small kernel and very large working RAM size. 60K or even 59K was far more common. I got it with two 5 1/4" diskette drives, with around 100K of storage on each. The drives were the type that only had one read/write head, and a common "feature" was that you could punch a matching index hole near the hub of the diskette, but on the opposite side, and essentially turn it into a double-sided disk. But it wasn't treated that way in software, and there was no read/write head for the opposite side, so it was just an increase in the amount of data an individual diskette could hold, as you had to flip the diskette over and soft-boot the change of disk just as if it were a totally different diskette. But given the price of diskettes, this was a useful way to cut that expense roughly in half. I wrote my first shareware programs on that machine, one being a program that would print 4 pages of text onto a single side of a single sheet of computer paper on an Epson dot-matrix printer. It did this by putting the printer into elite compressed superscript mode, then indexing the printer so it printed 4 pages in a Z-shaped arrangement on the single sheet. Another of my shareware offerings was a program that printed a series of lines onto a sheet of paper, and the catalog (disk directory) onto a portion of the paper. You then folded the paper along those printed lines, and with some very simple origami-like planning, it created a simple paper diskette envelope, with the directory printed right on the front for easy reference. Other programs simply printed a slip of paper you trimmed with scissors or a paper cutter and stuffed into the envelope the diskette came with. The benefit was that, if you bought diskettes in bulk as I did, the envelopes were not included -- you had to buy the envelopes separately. The "foldir" program I made allowed you to create an envelope at any time for the bulk diskettes. I remember getting a shareware registration for it from Australia, quite the thing when you live in the Chicago area. Now, my only work with CP/M is from a tiny Z180-based computer that runs a version of CP/M, providing multiple "drives" in the RAM of the machine. Software can be uploaded to it very easily. I have a version of Turbo Pascal on it that is code-compatible with a copy of Free Pascal, Turbo Pascal, and Lazarus on my PC. It's fun to play with. It's an SC131 Z180 Pocket Computer I got on Tindie, and supported on Small Computer Central. It came as a kit which I built myself in an evening. From what I can tell, they're still available.

[@kilosierraalpha]

Wow! What a beautiful machine! Can't wait to see it working in Part 2!

[@VincentGroenewold]

Oh that is amazing, having paper photo's roll through because the system couldn't really display them otherwise. What an example of early work-arounds to the technology. :)

[@alexanderstohr4198]

the drive system around has much of similarity with compact cassette and/or video tape recorders (except for the missing magnetic drum indeed).

[@alexanderstohr4198]

(beta max was a single drive pin system - with no need for rewind. but there the spool also seem to have something like that. i even remember to see tape alike systems with just a "rubbish" looking storage space for some metal/optical media similar to a cassette tape, but yes it was an endless one. and believe me or at least i think... it had a turn around point like a moebius ribbon so it had a doubled effective length - also some Star brands of needle matrix printers had this for their black ribbon.)

[@KallePihlajasaari]

Provided a great deal of copy protection that the compact cassettes would not be able to offer for the anticipated profits of the language courses.

[@Graytail]

I **love** the style of this thing, I'd love to get hold of one, even if its totally dead, to use as a modern PC case

[@iainlee]

Love Here Be Dragons. Very kindly fixed mine up for me.

[@ctrlaltrees]

He is a real credit to the retro community, lovely bloke.

[@MM.]

Fascinating. I first expected the screen to use some kind of rear projection. Come to think of it, they could've probably put those slides on 8mm film and shrunk down the cartridge considerably.

[@gcewing]

Yeah, when I first saw it I was thinking something like microfiche reader... turns out it was stranger than that!

[@darthquigley]

You just reminded me of a piece of retro-tech that I used in school: the Dukane A-V Matic. That was a tape deck synchronized to a rear projection slide viewer. It wasn't a computer, so all it could do was slide shows with narration, but the strips of 35mm film it used were indeed much smaller than the Cefucom's paper cartridges.

[@melkiorwiseman5234]

@@darthquigley They called that an "audio-visual" back in my day. You would just set up a slide projector along with a cassette tape which used a stereophonic recording, but one track was mono audio and the other track contained a beep every time the slide needed to be changed to the next one. With an audio sound level triggered switch and a projector with a remote slide changer, you could set the tape running and the slides would change at the right time automatically. All you had to do was keep on changing the slide cartridges at the right time to keep the show going. Of course, a lot of people would just play the tape on a mono player and manually change the slide whenever the beep on the tape played. Usually, the makers of the presentation would cater for this by deliberately timing the beeps to be between sections of dialogue instead of playing at the same time and possibly drowning out the dialogue.

[@uploadJ]

@@melkiorwiseman5234 AKA as "film strips" back when.

[@melkiorwiseman5234]

@@uploadJ Sometimes film strips, and sometimes slides. Almost the same thing. Just depends on whether they're individually mounted into frames (slides) or cut into strips with around 4 pictures per strip. I'm old enough to remember both.

[@gcewing]

In Iain M. Banks' "Culture" universe there's a concept called a "slap drone", which is an AI drone assigned to someone to act as a kind of guardian or chaperone to stop them getting up to mischief. Given that, the idea of a "SLAP Computer" is rather amusing.

[@ChipGuy]

10:20: Those 6116 chips are 32 Kbit, total. Not KByte. So that's 4KByte of RAM.

[@alexanderstohr4198]

guessed similar due to the fact these documentation web page used a lower case "b" as it would normally stand for bits. (and even if the Z80 is sort of 8 bit, you can never be sure what real bit widths are used on busses and for various storage units, including how their interleave works.)

[@ChipGuy]

@@alexanderstohr4198 On the memory chips they usually encode the size in bits, kilobits or megabits. Sometimes they incorporate the bus with in it as well. So a 2 Megabyte SDRAM can be named xx1608 for 16 BMit 8 Bit wide, ot xx0816 or even xx0432. The xx can be any number by the vendor and usually they start with some letter as well.

[@terrytipper2141]

Correction: 3 x 16kb(it) static RAM Chips = 3 x 2kB(yte) RAM = 6KB(yte) RAM. The 6847 was also used in a Graphics add-on card for the UK101, mine also had 3 x 6116 Static RAMs (6kB) and it displayed 192 x 256 resolution in B&W.

[@edherdman9973]

The apex of the old-timey moving background on a paper loop - like old kid's driving games.

[@pauljcampbell2997]

I fully support and appreciate the KZbin channels like yours, that document and preserve vintage computers and peripherals. Thank you very much! Also, your presentation and voice is excellent at narrating the video. 10/10 mate!

[@datassetteuser356]

What a beast of a machine, looks retro-futuristic af! Never saw something like this before and I hope you'll eventually get it to work. Cheers!

[@ctrlaltrees]

Agreed, I think it looks like something out of Ghost In The Shell 😅

[@iaincowell9747]

@@ctrlaltrees It would be cool to mod one of these into a working pc.

[@RichieReportsUK_UKCNews]

Looks a bit like a prop from a 1970s episode of Dr Who or Star treck!

[@faenethlorhalien]

I've seen weird old JP computers but this takes the cake

[@Nookdashiddole]

Your mum takes the cake😅

[@Mujaki]

Of course, the most fitting project would be to make a program (and slides cart) that would help the user to learn Japanese.

[@timothyp8947]

I have a vague memory of when I was a kid, the first time - at least with me in tow - my Dad used a Cash Machine/ATM… that had a motorised menu system that I imagine is like this rather than a CRT. I’m guessing this would be very late 1970s or early ‘80s… like a motorised version of the intro to Camberwick Green. Guess it was deemed a cheaper or more robust solution back then.

[@wrongmouse1658]

Docutel 300 had a rotating drum for its display. 70’s A retired ATM technician here.

[@gavin9038]

I remember my Mum using an ATM that had the keyboard behind a glass screen that would slide down when it wasn't being used by a bank customer. Also the display was only viewable by looking into a soft of long rectangular funnel.

[@gfdggdfgdgf]

No screaming and shouting, clear voice and well presented, that's a new subscriber earned!

[@QuinnEvans-m2s]

loved the subtle horror movie sound effect at the shred of belt 😂

[@pweddy1]

This thing had to be a fortune compared to most Z80 based home computers!

[@recurvestickerdragon]

I doubt this was for home use. feels very much like the sort of console you'd see in a school computer lab or job course

[@stuartcastle2814]

I think it's the colouring, but this reminds me a little of the TRS-80 model 1. It's as if someone melted the case slightly and pushed the front back so it leans back.

[@KallePihlajasaari]

The shape also has echoes of the SHARP MZ-80 series machines.

[@michaeldibb]

The cartoon drawing in the manual at 15:46 looks exactly like those in the Sharp MZ80K's manual. That was a Z80 based computer from around 1978. I still have mine and it still works.

[@haweater1555]

My first assumption at any mystery weird Japanese electronics device is that it is some kind of karaoke machine.

[@ChristianPinnock-r4s]

You ever see one with a computer keyboard

[@haweater1555]

​@@ChristianPinnock-r4sPerhaps for creating one's own custom lyrics.

[@SproutyPottedPlant]

Whew! Caught the VARTA just in time! It looks like the type of machine that REALLY needs a MIDI port 😀👍

[@RichieReportsUK_UKCNews]

Wouldn't been so lucky if it had been a Duracell!

[@richardbaker974]

I'm 20 seconds in and this is the coolest looking device ever made. I need one in every room. It SLAPs.

[@brandontylerburt]

Once you get it fixed up, it would be fun to create your own custom cartridges to use in that machine, perhaps in collaboration with artists. The mechanism looks tricky, and the simplest thing would be to disassemble and repurpose some old cartridges for the project, but it might be possible (and would be better) to create a 3-D printed version.

[@alexanderstohr4198]

the bold ones would say: put a shrunk down version of leisure suite larry onto it.

[@recurvestickerdragon]

​@@alexanderstohr4198 inb4 they get Doom to run on a paper loop

[@lostcarpark]

Fascinating machine. Look forward to part 2!

[@sonidojamon]

Looks like a real life version of LEGO space series computer pieces from the 80s!!

[@mc10guru]

Ahoy, Great video. I looked at the video modes and thought "Hmmm, Motorola VDP, MC6845/47 as in my MC10 computer". I waited breathlessly for confirmation and there it was. The GI AY sound chips are great to program too. Glad to hear its working and subscribed to see part 2. Have fun! Cheers, daveyb

[@2thinkcritically]

Likewise, the moment I saw 32x16 text and 256x192 graphics I just knew it would be the 6847.

[@alexanderstohr4198]

@@2thinkcritically - i liked 320x200 - i had a C64... ;-)

[@ctrlaltrees]

Thanks for the sub!

[@Curt_Sampson]

• Board 1: 09:55 The CTC is a counter/timer chip, but it's nothing to do with keeping the other parts of the system in sync; that's done by the system clock. The CTC lets you more easily do "real time" counters and timers, such as when you want to trigger an event every 15 milliseconds or second or something like that, or use a counter to time how long it takes for an event to happen. (This can be done entirely in software if you're very careful with your programming, but that's a lot more work.) 10:20 As @ChipGuy pointed out in another comment, the 6116 is a 16 kilobit 2K×8 static RAM chip, so that's 4K of memory there. The 4116 chips are 16K of dynamic RAM. It seems slightly mysterious having both static and dynamic RAM on that board; the typical case where you'd see that is where there's a relatively small amount of static RAM for the video memory and the larger DRAM is main memory, but there's no video chip on that board. Possibly the static RAM is wired as shared memory for communication between this board and the second one? The ROM chips 2764 8K×8 devices, so that's 32K of ROM. I'd be willing to help disassemble them if you want to contact me on Discord (@0cjs). • Board 2: 12:23 The TMM2016 static RAM chips are, again, 16 kilobit 2K×8 devices, so 6K of RAM there. The ROM on that board is no doubt the BIOS and OS and the like; given that that board has more memory and the graphics and sound devices, it's probably the "main" computer, and the other is a second computer used to control various other I/O devices. (This is not that uncommon in higher end Japanese machines; the FM-8/7 series used a separate CPU for the graphics subsystem, and the NEC PC-8001/8801 series used a separate CPU for the disk subsystem.) Perhaps board 1 runs the alarm clock and things like that?

[@ctrlaltrees]

Yes, it's certainly a very strange architecture indeed. Thanks so much for the info, I might include some of this (with full credit of course) in future instalments.

[@KallePihlajasaari]

There may a MODEM circuit hiding in there as well if the coupler is a passive device. The sound chip 'might' be used to generate early modem tones but a standard modem IC might also be hidden in the mess of the analogue board (or the last unexplored board). Tracing the couplers wires would point the way. Had a look and nope, It looks like the DIN connector has RS-232C TX and RX ICs adjacent so the DIN Port is likely a standard serial port with some probably custom pinout UNLESS the acoustic coupler was a commodity item from another vendor and they kept the serial connector pinout from that vendor which may have been some other custom layout)

[@uploadJ]

I have used the CTC to drive external circuitry as well, developing desired clock rates for other devices/perhperals, like drive the SIO for developing a baud rate and also drive a switched capacitor filter needed in a commercial 2-way radio to do low-pass filtering on analog GMSK 'data' then directed to a center-slicer, when then fed an input pin on a PIO Z80 chip for sampling ... so, CTC's can be quite versatile in their use! Coincidentally, an every 10 ms interrupt was genned by the CTC for key-panel scanning, to do a de-bounce algorithm in software (mechanical pushbuttons and keypads are noisy and intermittent on the sub-millisecond scale until they settle).

[@ziggurat29]

fascinating machine; thanks so much for sharing the board photos and especially the rom dumps! I find that when deep diving into antiquated systems like this you can connect with the minds of the engineers that created it, in the context that they did so. I did a cursory survey of the roms. The first board ('board 1', with the bad battery, it doesn't seem to have a marking on the silkscreen) seems to be I/O, and peripheral to the other board. It has 4 KiB RAM, and 32 KiB ROM, but much of that is data. The admixture of 8255 and Z80PIO is striking. 8255 were cheaper and simpler, so it seems if they used a PIO then they might have done that for a reason. But since 'board 1' seemed to be peripheral, and because I do not have schematics, I dug a little deeper into into 'board 2'. 'Board 2' ("MCU02") seems to have a 24 KiB rom system in roms marked 1-3. These are mapped at 0000h-5fffh. 8000h-ffffh is the DRAM. 6000h-77ffh is, I suspect, the static ram in chips marked IC130,137,143. That region is init'ed in two chunks -- one of zeros and the other of spaces. Interestingly, there seem to be parallel chunks in system RAM at e000 and e800. This is striking since the sram should otherwise have read/write access. IC129 is surely the character generator rom, but as it's soldered in I suspect a dump is not forthcoming. No matter, it's not required, but may be useful eventually understand how the Japanese characters are depicted. There is a 2 KiB hole at 7800h-7fffh. And there is an invocation to 7800h. I'm not yet sure if this is for the ROM cartridge, or for 'rom 4'. 'rom 4' is interesting in that it is 4 KiB, but half is unused. It /could/ fit there. But it also seems to be a boot rom. In the photo, it's close to connector CN109. Maybe it's a 'default' cartridge? (and maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.) The MCU02 does not seem to use NMI, but *does* seem to use INT, and in the Z80 IM1. This is striking, because I do not (yet) see an explicit switch to IM1 in the code of roms 1-3. So maybe rom 4 does that before paging out. Perhaps I should have a word with rom 4... EDIT: Rom4 does seem to be at 7800h, and only the first half is used. It sets up IM2 for the PIO, which I guess was not present on the Sanyo system. It's interesting because rst38 is still an ISR, and the PIO port A interrupt jumps into it. So I suspect the Sanyo firmware was IM1 and Cefucom hacked that out and jumped to the added Rom4. There are some nop'ed spots and some other code that does nothing useful, so there has been some patching. As to why the board has a 4 KiB eprom when only 2 KiB is used, I can only guess that the 4 KiB's might have been cheaper at the time of manufacture. It has the same pinout as the 2716, so they probably wire A11 low (which is vpp on the '16 and would have been low anyway). You plug in a '16 or a '32. The system seems to use port I/O; so far 40h seems to be some control lines and 00h seems to be a latch of some sort. 40h:3 strobes some data presented via 00h. The photos show the printer port close to some 74373's, which are unidirectional, but perhaps the pair makes it bidirectional. I see some port I/O done through the C register, and I have not analyzed that. I did find the code for displaying BASIC error codes (e.g. 'syntax error', etc.). This will lead me to the display code. It's been a while since I saw a MC684x, so there will be nostalgia. The BASIC does not so far seem to be of microsoft origin. It does support peeks and pokes and usr() functions. There are a bunch of 5-byte structures passed around. I am guessing those are variable 'descriptors'. I'm not going to spend time on those until I have more systems stuff worked out, especially display and keyboard. Then rest will fall into place.

[@ericwazhung]

ROM Sleuthery at its finest

[@PlaywithJunk]

L1 (a small inductor) seems to be burned up too. You can replace that with a simple wire.

[@alexanderstohr4198]

inductors typically will have a filter effect. so ripples and spikes on voltages will be damped down a lot. sure for a test you can try with a wire. but dont under-estimate the wisdom of the people that designed it - sometimes such parts come from real world trouble fixing and sometimes its just the device running to close on the edge of part specs so that any sort of impact including temperature and aging could kill their functionality temporarily or permanently.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Interesting, I didn't spot that. Thanks!

[@coordinatezero]

The clearly busticated belt on the cassette mechanism is pretty obvious, so, yeah.. welcome to Techmoan Land. ("Buht, luhkily, I have a bag of spares...")

[@RonJohn63]

4:50 That reminds me of the slideshow style of language tutorials we had in the 1970s.

[@SomePeopleCallMeWulfman]

Interesting. Just by looking at it I had assumed it to be some sort of TV/video graphics generator

[@Saavik256]

Japanese machines are such a unique collection of beasts, this one looks amazing, I am glad you got it to work!

[@jamesslick4790]

That's a seriously cool looking machine! Can't wait to see it running!

[@ShibaFan99]

That acoustic coupler gives off major Wargames vibes.

[@jbrou123]

"Shall we play a game?"

[@tdub8719]

It's a beauty Rees. Hopefully you can bring it back to life.

[@CompComp]

That thing looks super cool. It would be super cool to convert that left side with an LCD screen and make it a sweet all in one system.

[@ctrlaltrees]

I was thinking about that, but I think I'd get a lot of complaints... 😁

[@Terigena]

You could make it a screen cartridge.

[@lassikinnunen]

Well could just mount a tablet there on top and make some non destructive thing to use the machine as a bluetooth kb for it.

[@rickgreer7203]

@@ctrlaltrees Yeah, seconding the make a screen cartridge you can just slide in...

[@cujoedaman]

I love that it's so "80's" looking that it just looks like an old VCR with a keyboard :D

[@TheMillyBays]

Anyone know what the purpose is for the zipper design for what I'm guessing are power/ground traces? You can see them at 12:00.

[@ctrlaltrees]

I think it's to try to protect from RF noise from the modulator. Strange that they didn't just stick it in a metal case like most modulators of the time.

[@KallePihlajasaari]

I think it was to make the alignment of the in line ceramic filter capacitors easier. At 12:11 you can see solder pads and next to the ROMs some capacitors.

[@wardenclyfferadio]

Very glad this video popped up in my feed! Loved that if you pause when you open the chassis, it was today’s date! Nov 14th! Happy Birthday Motor or whatever component that was 🤙🏻 turns 41 today 😝

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

What a fantastic bit of kit... and looking forward to part 2!

[@ctrlaltrees]

Thanks Snorkers!

[@binarydinosaurs]

I was going to say 'noooo' after being present at both of Tony's unveilings when we all sat around going 'wtf', but now I see you've got it working so you'll be bringing it to Retrofest in November? :D I HAVE to see this thing doing its stuff.

[@ctrlaltrees]

If the software arrives in time I may just do that 😁

[@binarydinosaurs]

@@ctrlaltrees Splendid. Fingers crossed for Japan Post! (Or however else it's arriving)

[@Mariuszgamer]

Does this need a cmos battery to power on? One of my old laptops when removed the cmos battery wont power on

[@DrxSlump]

I like how it looks, excellent time period design

[@volvo09]

Can't wait to see part 2! Glad you got a hold of a cartridge. I was thinking that thing was a word processor of some sort (what a terrible keyboard for one!) but the real answer is much more fitting.

[@alexanderstohr4198]

top to bottom board stack is marked: * HD-1015A (...more...?) - Hardware driving? * MCU 02 - micro computer unit #2? * - micro computer unit #1? i guess the #2 is more like the central controller for the programs including video and sounde whilst #1 is sort of the controller for load intense duties such as modem, tape and more. good luck with the upcoming steps for bringing the whole system to life again. capacitors aren bad from that far i could see - but might have run quite dry over the decades now. having them on power might either re-vitalize them, or blow a few up (as i had to happen it on some 30+ year old oscilloscope). I think you are fit in tracking down basics, like the rear end power switch is really closing (instead of having oxidized or a spring load is to low). you got me subscribing - i want to know why MCU #1 has supposed video ram as well, or what other purpose that will have. also the subject of the EPROMs is a good hope point - including the attempt to decode their functional contents within e.g. some emulator or disassembler. and finally... 9-color graphics for the video encoding... thats puzzling me for sure now. Answers please. ;-)

[@ctrlaltrees]

I plan to get proper photos of the boards and document it all on my website. I've already uploaded the manual scans and EPROM dumps. It's just finding the time!

[@AIInsightsNClassics]

This kind of machines where used by language learning schools, in my HS we had an English/French/Portuguese learning lab that had about 20 of these machines, back in the 1994 on a elite school in Brazil. Took me a while to remember....

[@romanhein9661]

Removed RTC Battery ... "Maybe the time was not set" 😆

[@jerrydurand4127]

Reminds me of the IBM 5500 (I think that was the number). I only got to use one for short while, it was a sales demo. It had a toggle switch for APL or BASIC (again, if I remember right). It's amazing how much we got done with these old machines.

[@highpath4776]

Sounds like Asianometry and Usagi Electric might be a little interested in this

[@gcewing]

Also Davie504. "Slap that computer!"

[@belstar1128]

yea i haven't watched this video yet but it should be made by a bilingual person because most retro youtubers from the us or uk really make horrible videos when it comes to things like this. it doesn't even have to be someone that knows Japanese just a person that knows what its like to learn a language .

[@gregfaris6959]

Thanks for a really entertaining teardown! It's a brilliant bit of industrial design. Very skillful and detail-oriented designer. The scrolling paper display is something I have never seen - hopefully it is backlit? Or a sort of opaque-projector that magnifies the smaller cassette paper to fill the screen area? A bit surprised to see the solder mask technology depolyed on the CPU boards for that era. Never see the one-sided solder mask on the power supply board - Is that board hand-drawn????

[@potrzebieneuman4702]

14:15 back in the day when capacitors were capacitors. My partner and I ran our own PC business for over a decade and one popular and usually well made motherboard manufacturer used capacitors that had a tendency to bulge and lose their values rendering the board useless, and this was within the warranty period. These little beauties on your board are probably still viable.

[@vladimus9749]

How is varta still around considering the amounts of hardware they've destroyed?

[@ctrlaltrees]

I actually recently bought a Varta battery for my car 🤣

[@gmosc]

Seeing bits from the color computer and the atari st brings me back to my first computers. And also having taught english in Japan for 4 years 31 years ago also puts more of this puzzle together. The tech they were using in public schools was basically cassette tapes of dialogs. My job was sort of to replace those conversational tapes with a human. There was no tech anything like this in the schools.

[@KallePihlajasaari]

This was probably targeted for the busy CEOs who were expected to converse with foreign business partners and had to study language in free moments at the office in their later years instead of using simpler systems as children..

[@gmosc]

@@KallePihlajasaari that makes sense. It was a little shocking how little tech was used in the public schools compared to what we were trying in the States. And considering where lots of electronics were made (at that time).

[@fetus2280]

Holy Moses this this looks bloody cool. How have I never been introduced to your channel before!!!??? Mate, cant wait to see this running, you got me curious. Subbed to you. Looking fwd to Pt 2. Cheers.

[@rager1969]

That musical phrase at 15:16 (you played earlier, too) brought a smile to my face, as I remember hearing it as a kid on some TV show, though I cannot remember which one. I'm thinking it may be from The Brady Bunch when they went to Hawaii and found the Tiki God statuette?

[@ctrlaltrees]

It's a bit of a meme, it comes from a game called "Among Us". Very similar to the sound from Civilization V too (which I thought it was when I first started hearing it in videos).

[@syragrippa8769]

What a great looking machine. I want one!

[@RetroSegaDev]

Oh wow what an absolute bizarre piece of kit! I'm intrigued to seeing how the graphics look given its a pretty high resolution for the time with 9 colours!

[@Dr.W.Krueger]

Interesting. The design language is unmistakably early 1980s Japan. Same thing for A/V equipment from that era.

[@Nick9drs]

Love to see you do a feature on the TRS-80 family of computers, software and peripherals that were available.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Great suggestion!

[@petebeatminister]

Holy smokes, this must have cost a fortune in the early 80s! Who used them back then? Language schools or so? I can't imagine a private person would have bought one just to learn a language at home.

[@rot_studios]

looking forward to seeing it in action in the second vid. It has quite a lot of hardware in there, so I'm curious what it's actually capable of!

[@W6EL]

That inductor to our right of the leaky battery looked a bit suspicious. L1, at 9:05. Great video and good luck getting it to boot!

[@GarthBeagle]

What a cool quirky system, hopefully you can get it working!

[@Renville80]

This really reminds me of some hardware from the mid 70s that was at a school I attended (I can't remember the brand or anything - this was back when I was in kindergarten / 1st grade). It used filmstrips and had four buttons along the front of the display unit, and pressing the correct button advanced the strip.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Interesting, thanks for the info!

[@RedeyzMinecraft]

thank you for your help, encouragement and support. would love to get our old hp laserjet 4L back in business :D

[@alexandermirdzveli3200]

What a peculiar gadget! And beautiful.

[@isettech]

The printer port is not Centronics. It uses the same connector as the Hewitt Packard General Input Output Bus HPGIB.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Thanks! Yes, I was just reading from that 1000bit site. Looks similar but seems to be physically smaller.

[@JohnJones-oy3md]

What an absolutely pleasant looking bit of kit.

[@Michael.Werker]

Are you planning the space for the paper loop display for a small screen?

[@ctrlaltrees]

I did consider this. Depends whether I can get it all working, I suppose. It seems a shame to modify such a rare machine if that's the case.

[@Michael.Werker]

Make it removeable. Recreate one of these boxes with a 3D-printer (or Lego) and find a suitable display. Connecting power and video using long cables should be possible without damaging the computer.

[@zadtheinhaler]

NGL, if I couldn't get the OG hardware to work, I'd be hella tempted to restomod it with modern hardware to turn it into a Linux fileserver or somesuch.

[@Pulverrostmannen]

I just recently revived a completely dead 286 Toshiba Lapline from the Varta death, I was not that lucky though. over 15 severed traces along with component and connector damage everywhere. It was an absolute nightmare to bodge and repair everything to make it live again but I actually did it in the end. but the RTC is not running and the screen has issues too but I can actually game on it now which was even for me probably not going to happen. it took a lot of effort to get there

[@ctrlaltrees]

Eugh, sounds like a nightmare. Great job getting it fixed! I've certainly given up on some in the past (or at least added them to the "future projects" pile)

[@Pulverrostmannen]

@@ctrlaltreesthat’s for sure. This was way more work than I normally would spend on a broken device but it is such a rare model I just could not give up on it without a serious attempt. I did not know anything about any component in this computer either. I know gas plasma displays are really prone to failure and it did not even light up when I got the computer. It was absolutely dead except the fans running so I had to repair it to know if anything was broken too. Turned out there is naturally because why would it not, The screen probably have a bad driver ic because there is a few lines in the picture but not as missing ones just wrong intensity. The EGA graphics does not work properly either. The picture is either wrong size or position on the screen, garbled or non at all depending which setting or program you use. But the picture works if I select Color80 but then windows 3.1 won’t work instead but dos programs and games just fine. But this Toshiba Lapline 3240E is just way too rare to find any documentation or possible fixes for so I have to figure everything out myself. And it is very different in hardware compared to similar Lapline models. I actually got a Lapline T3100e that works perfectly after some minor fixes but it is smaller and different in every way. All hardware inside it is way different. It actually origins from a very specific place which is very special in its own and probably very rare too.

[@Pulverrostmannen]

@ yeah. I have many projects I could do too. But health is in the way so they mostly pile up. I do the most desired projects when I can however :)

[@kippie80]

Oh! I remember using such a device in elementary. Had some health issues in gr2 and had to do some special 1on1 education one summer to catch up, that would be around ‘75 or so.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Interesting, thanks for the info!

[@jamesburke2759]

I had a toy computer that worked like that as a kid.

[@oidpolar6302]

That motorised pictures slider deserves an upgrade to the eInk display

[@jimp1646]

I find it fascinating that technology that has been manufactured as recently as this has to be researched in order to discover what its original purpose was.

[@Lilithe]

Did you try giving the battery terminals power from some other power source? Some machines seem to require it...

[@mathewbailey6718]

Those cartridges remind me of the 2 inch quadraplex Ampex video cassettes used for playing commercials.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Oh, interesting! I'll have to have a look into those, I wasn't familiar with them before.

[@EinChris75]

Good old Varta battery... that same company is currently in the stage of dissolving as well 😞

[@axle.student]

8:18 The belt is off the cassette drive. You can see it missing and was a common part failure on cassette systems :) Looks like a kool adventure lol

[@DeadDanganronpaGuy]

Pretty cool old-school learning computer

[@jameshammons2826]

What battery did you use as a replacement

[@ctrlaltrees]

I haven't replaced it yet, still not sure on the best approach.

[@Weretyu7777]

A very interesting machine! Clever cartridge design for the "screen". I will say...do you think maybe taking out that battery was part of why it didn't start up? Or was the battery powering something unimportant?

[@CyberPick]

Old, and rare, japanese computer. I think the "screen" if for the "led" display. Too bad it's not fixed and working ...

[@50shadesofbeige88]

Always nice to see a machine I don't recognize

[@Santor-]

Could imagine some cool Star Trek graphics on that side display and a trek style game.

[@christopherpardell4418]

I don’t know about Japanese, But in Chinese Sifu ( Ceefoo) means ‘teacher’. So, Cefucom- teacher computer?

[@ctrlaltrees]

This is an excellent observation. Thanks!

[@FabriceCHERRIER]

the design is awesome ! amazing machine

[@MrAlan1828]

Wish I could help, I only know of PC8801 N5200 series ,PC9801/21, MSX, FM Towns

[@jarinaumanen8447]

The last circuit board has a crack in the corner.

[@daledickey8400]

Yes it did, but no traces, so no problem. When he showed the manual there is a main power rocker switch on the back of the computer. I wonder if that was the issue? We will find out soon. This computer is so cool looking.

[@ctrlaltrees]

That wasn't the issue, but it turns out that it was indeed my fault... 🤦‍♂️

[@aqdrobert]

Fred Flintstone's SLAP computer contained a tiny dinosaur chiseling screengrabs.

[@MonkeyBoyDec1968]

I wondered if the Power is filtered through the Battery ? Removing it breaks the circuit. But i see You've got it. Well Done

[@RichieReportsUK_UKCNews]

To think, looking at those dozens of chips, most of that would all be on one or two chips nowadays! Also, how many of the caps might need replacing by now?