8-bit acorn hardware • Re: Viglen BBC B - first impressions

I've just acquired a beeb with one of these keyboards. It is truly awful. The plastic is so thin an flexible. The black surround is paper thin. The mounting arrangement for the keyboard is dreadful, and the previous owner tried to address this with washers and bits of thin card to act as spacer. Fortunately I am able to return the keyboard to it's original place in the host beeb, and the top half of the beeb is still there to finish it off. The only thing missing is the short ribbon cable, but I have a spare one of those. No idea if this thing powers up yet, though!

Edit: Oh, and I've got a spare Viglen keyboard case for the price of shipping, if anyone's interested. I'll even throw in a ribbon cable that goes between the keyboard and host beeb for free . It's not going to be hanging around my house for very long, before it ends up in the skip!

Edit2: I had to removed a couple of spacer sockets from an APTL ROM expansion board so the keyboard would fit back in the properly, but having done that and after plugging in the new keyboard ribbon, it powered up to a friendly boo-bip. The LEDs also toggled correctly. I'll hook up a monitor at some future point. I decided to power it off again because I didn't want to stink the house up with magic smoke.

Statistics: Posted by KenLowe — Sat Mar 23, 2024 7:36 pm

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