Ohio Scientific Superboard II to Portable Conversion

[@benbaijan8507]

I too did the 48 character mod with new monitor rom for the wider display. I must have been 15 when I bought it. I saved for so long to buy it! Good fun and I learned a lot both in computers, software and electronics which I do to this day

[@sideburn]

@@benbaijan8507 yes luckily someone on the OSI forum burned me a new custom rom to get it working again with the character mod. The one on it was bad. Yeah when I was a kid a neighbor had a “computer” and I wrote my first “Hello World” program on it and had to have one. Funny looking back how mind blowing it was to have a machine do what you tell it to.

[@clangerbasher]

Exquisite. Absolutely exquisite.

[@sideburn]

@@clangerbasher wow thanks! I keep mucking with it. It now has an Atari logo on the lid. Some more photos and stuff I keep updating in the link in the description.

[@clangerbasher]

@@sideburn I admire your talent. I wondered about the tape at first think an MP3 would be better. Then I watched and heard it load and was mesmerised. Imagine similar but with Forth not BASIC. You need to get an get hold of RC2014 and build a CPM laptop..........

[@sideburn]

@@clangerbasher oh just noticed this is the superboard one not the Atari one. Ok yeah I used a microcassette tape just to be “period correct” since a cassette tape deck is what would have been used back in the 70’s when this computer came out. Really just a gimmick. The best way to save and load programs onto this is to use the audio in/out jacks on the back and connect it to a modern computer and use a sound editing program like audacity. It’s much more reliable and you can save all your programs as wav/mp3 files on your hard drive.
The rc2014 looks interesting. I’ve mostly been interested in repair, restore and repurposing of original old hardware. But that could also be a fun project do do something with these new modern pieces of hardware thus use older tech like z80 and 6502

[@clangerbasher]

@@sideburn Bless.

[@benbaijan8507]

This was my first computer. I did a lot of mods on it, unfortunately I got rid of it when PC's came out. I was young and stupid, I wish I still had it.

[@sideburn]

@@benbaijan8507 wow awsome. Yes my friend Grant brought it here one day and I had no idea what it was. He got it new as his first computer when he was 13 or so. It sat here for a while and then I set out to repair it. He had done so many mods to it that made it harder to sort out. Now that I know after undoing some of what he did he had changed the baud rate of the rs232 so it could probably read and wrote to a floppy drive. He also did a 48 character mod to it that it still has so it has twice the characters across the screen. I learned a lot about them throughout the whole process. I still have the wooden case for it his dad made for him.
By the time I was old enough to want a computer it was 1980 or so and my first one was the TRS-80 Color Computer.