Muzz73

What will you call it? My suggestion: FrankenSTEin

So... flippin'... JEALOUS!!! Seriously, though... this is great! That is just too cool that you took a machine that looked halfway out of hope and brought the awesome back! Thanks for posting pics!

If you choose the TI and want to use it (not just look at it), I might recommend the beige one. It's the cost-reduced model, runs a bit cooler than the black & silver model (which is the really cool-looking one) and there's a guy on ebay with NOS keyboards.

If it works, you can just replace the casing a la B&C Computervison or Best Electronics.

Exactly why the CoCo2 is a great one to start with as well. Everybody wants the CoCo1 for the collectible value and the CoCo3 for modding. I grabbed a CoCo2 in good cosmetic condition for $25 last year. It has Extended BASIC and had 16K of RAM. A few RAM chips, a wire and one of Zippster's handy composite boards and voila! Great machine for tinkering with. If you don't get the RAM or Extended BASIC, you can always install it later...

Instead of building a joystick adapter, I read that you can just rewire the stick internally, making it a TI stick until you wire it back. Can anyone confirm this?

I have a CoCo2 (and a TANO Dragon) and several TI-99/4a machines and love them all. I voted for the TI in the poll just on general principle, but you won't be disappointed either way.

Yeah! I'd LOVE to have it, but it's worth more than I've got!

Oh, man... that is wrong on so many levels. I've only ever seen an STE once and after almost 30 years, I have never gotten my hands on one. To see something like that makes my heart sink a bit. :^(

Nice! Keep us posted.

You could just sell me the A600 and I'll put a Gotek drive in it...

@Zippster: I bought one from you for my KoKo2 and it's awesome! I have a friend who needs one for the other style CoCo2 (with the upright RF box). Can you set one aside for him when they are ready (he already e-mailed, but you were out)?

Very cool! I totally need one of those for the old A2000! Yes! Post a review... please!

Nice! Congrats! Yeah, 1.3 is usually best for most of the classic games, especially if booted from floppy disk. Sweet system!

Yikes... I had no idea! My friends always thought that the Apple ][ was easy to program for and since I don't know anything about it, I just took them at their word. I've always thought that Karateka, Choplifter and a few others were smoothest and least quirky on the Apple ][ (as compared to other 8-bit platforms). I guess it's just genius programmers, then!

Back in the day, my complaints were the obvious ones you might expect from a teenager... things that every other computer on the market had that we didn't, such as an actual graphics chip (w/animated hardware sprites & MOBs, collision detection, hardware scrolling, etc.), a sound chip... ...but... In retrospect, I think we did fine without those things. Just having CPU-driven graphics and simple, piezoelectric sound made the Apple ][ easier for people to develop for, the software tended to be less buggy and if the software tweaks were done right, other platforms had trouble keeping up (look at Karateka, so example).

You can always set it up as a dual-booting system, if you'd like to. OS X is more useful for web stuff, but OS 9.xx is better for running older software. If you did the OS X thing, you might have to do a firmware update (no big deal). Either way, that's a fun machine!

That is awful. My condolences to all.

Yeah, I remember spotting it and thinking that it would have been neat if they had turned it on.

I was pretty fond of my AE RAMworks II back in the day. It gave my IIe an extra 256K RAM and lived happily in my aux. slot. The RAM came in handy for ProTerm and Appleworks!

I don't know the exact setup, but the Temple of Zuul (BBS in my local calling area when I was a teenager) ran on an A8 of some sort with two 8" floppy drives, if memory serves me... and that's a big "if"!

OK... I have results! The numbers I rolled were 11 & 6, so congratulations to Bikerbob and JoSch! I will contact you both via private message shortly. I'm sorry to all who didn't get picked and I wish I had enough boards for everyone. Don't give up hope! I fell into these boards by asking around, so you never know what might happen. Thanks to all for your interest!

I'm sorry for the delay, but I am having trouble finding my dice. I will have something posted soon (hopefully tonight). Thanks to all for your patience!

OK, here is the list of all who have officially declared interest: 1 - tep392 2 - davidcalgary29 3 - eebuckeye 4 - Defender II 5 - rgrocha 6 - JoSch 7 - danwinslow 8 - Tigerduck 9 - manopac 10 - Frankie 11 - Bikerbob I will roll two 12-sided dice tomorrow (re-rolling any 12's) and post the results. I will then contact the indiviiduals via PM. Thanks to all who have expressed interest and best of luck.

The original PSU (18w) is a safe bet, or you could use the 50w PSU from an Atari floppy drive as a heavy duty unit.