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39-year-old Radio Shack laptop gets new CPU, keeps original screen - Ars Technica
Sep 23, 2022 1 min, 4 secs
Instead, he pulled out the logic board and replaced it with a modern microcontroller so he could control the vintage screen.

While some people upgrade Model 100s using new LCD screens and CPUs (keeping only the case and keyboard), Cass decided to attempt an interface with the portable's vintage 240×64 pixel display.

"The driver chips are each responsible for a 50-by-32-pixel region of the screen, except for two chips at the right-hand side that control only 40 by 32 pixels." Its designers chose this method, Cass says, because it speeds up text display with limited available memory.

Okay, here’s my demo: first it fills and clears the screen by writing to all chips at once, then loads a full screen bitmap as fast as the display can go, then uses hadware bank switching and partial refresh to fast scroll.

After working out the protocol for the screen, Cass built an interface between the screen and a modern Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller!

As the project stands now, he can display and scroll bitmapped graphics onto the Model 100's LCD.

His next step will be to try to interface the screen and keyboard (with a Teensy 4.1 development board to handle keyboard communications) to a Raspberry Pi 4 compute module, which would make for a powerful portable machine with a vintage feel.

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