TRS-80 2000 Monitor Conundrum

Performa

Member
The WCC is fortunate enough to have a Tandy Radio Shack Model 2000 PC in our fold, and it does run... usually. But I regret to say we don't have an appropriate monitor for it. At the time, Tandy used an unusual 9-pin DIN connector for it's video signals, and used a signal that's rather out of spec for most other monitors. They offered a somewhat more conventional color monitor, but that requires an expansion card that I do not have to run. Likewise, Tandy branded monitors command quite high prices online, even for broken examples.

So, that leaves me in another quandary not unlike the NeXT Station from back in April. While the TRS-80 2000 is cool, the only way I can get a video signal is by jamming a bunch of wires into the DIN socket and feeding those into an RGB monitor that "kinda" works with the signals. Then, even if the picture does come in at an "acceptable" quality, the unit itself doesn't always want to boot into DOS. Maybe it's a simple problem, but with the monitor issue it's hard to do any work on it.

So the question arises, should the club keep the TRS-80 2000 and hope we can find a suitable monitor arrangement for it, or should we sell/trade the unit for something else that we can more easily work on and/or incorporate into shows? No rush on the decision, the unit is fine here in the shop for the time being, but that'll be something we'll want to address before summer is out I think.

Thanks all for your feedback on this one! I appreciate it!
 
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