Tele-term!

[greg221b]

Hello.

I picked up a Tele-term at a local auction - looks beautiful. 

I've opened it up and noticed a sightly crusty Varta battery - the board and surrounding joints looks fine. I'm wondering if I should replace the battery with another Varta, or could someone recommend a more nifty solution (eg I've seen youtubers putting in CR2032s)?

I'm assuming I should sort the battery before powering the unit on? 

Thanks,
Greg

[ChickenMan]

I recently donated my Tele-Term to Ewan as it was a model missing from his collection.

As for the battery, I would not replace or short it, its only needed to remember the date.

[greg221b]

Thanks CM. I'll snip the battery out and clean up the crust around it. :|

[MbeeTech]

Hey Greg.
I wondered if I would see who got the Teleterm.
I was alerted to it by another interested bidder.

I did wonder whether it would actually be a Teleterm or not. Pretty rare in the wild.
All the 256TC / TeleTerm / Matilda cases I have here (Around 1200 units) are all 'Tele-Term' labelled boxes
even though they were being used (initially) for the Matilda.
It'll be interesting to see what versions of the software are in it.
Of course, you can't really do anything with a TeleTerm and there is no way to connect disk drives.

[greg221b]

Hi Ewan,

I've powered it up and connected it to the VGA Video converter unit - it beeps on startup but I don't get any video. I'll try it with a b&w monitor in the next few days.

Re: the software, I can see two ROMs labelled 1.07 next to each other and one labelled 1.08(or 9?) next to those two. The unit's serial number is 50192.

I see it has an internal modem and no Serial port connector. I had a naive hope of connecting it to my PiDP-8 - I'm guessing there's no easy way of putting a serial port in it?

Also, you wouldn't happen to have any spare TeleTerm cardboard boxes would you?

Greg

[MbeeTech]

Hi Ewan,

I've powered it up and connected it to the VGA Video converter unit - it beeps on startup but I don't get any video. I'll try it with a b&w monitor in the next few days.

Re: the software, I can see two ROMs labelled 1.07 next to each other and one labelled 1.08(or 9?) next to those two. The unit's serial number is 50192.

I see it has an internal modem and no Serial port connector. I had a naive hope of connecting it to my PiDP-8 - I'm guessing there's no easy way of putting a serial port in it?

Also, you wouldn't happen to have any spare TeleTerm cardboard boxes would you?

Greg

>I've powered it up and connected it to the VGA Video converter unit - it beeps on startup but I don't get any video.
You should get video out with the VGA video converter set up the same way as for the Premium+ etc., so something is amiss there.

>Re: the software, I can see two ROMs labelled 1.07 next to each other and one labelled 1.08(or 9?) next to those two.
It sounds like you have the final release of the roms.

>I see it has an internal modem and no Serial port connector. I had a naive hope of connecting it to my PiDP-8 - I'm guessing there's no easy way of putting a serial port in it?
You can disconnect the internal modem which is connected to the standard serial port internally and bring out the connector.

I'm sure I can generate a spare box for you.  That one did look pretty shabby.

[greg221b]

Hi Ewan, 

>>I've powered it up and connected it to the VGA Video converter unit - it beeps on startup but I don't get any video.
>You should get video out with the VGA video converter set up the same way as for the Premium+ etc., so something is amiss there.

I do actually get video out on the rgb port - not sure why I didn't last night. I tried it on an amber monitor also.
It looked fine (showed a menu with a square border) on the amber monitor for about a minute, then the video flickered a few times, then went into a horizontal band of a slanted, flickering mess. 
The same pattern looks to be displaying through vga.

These are shots of the amber and vga screens:

   

   

Does this issue look familiar to you (or anyone else)?

>I'm sure I can generate a spare box for you.  That one did look pretty shabby.
That would be fabulous, thanks!

Greg

[MbeeTech]

Looks like a sync problem to me. There are some internal links for the RGB port from further across the main board that may have come adrift, although, if it works to start with then dies, that points to something else. Perhaps the 6545 (where HSYNC & VSync originate) is flaky.
Happy to look at it if you need.