Extra Special Vintage

Finally …

I have acquired a Tatung Einstein TC-01. 🙂

I have bought one with dodgy/faulty video output off eBay for, more than I wanted to pay but still, a cheap price.

It has corrupted video output, but does power on without smoking!

It won’t be received here until second week of the new year, so I am preparing all the tools I need to get it up and running again.

There will be a teardown and refurbish/retrobrite video on my YouTube Channel very soon so you can all see what steps I took to get it up and running again.

These machines deserve to be rescued and saved for the future. They are old, rareish and excellent machines.

As you can see from the images below, the machine itself is in fairly good nick. Other than the video not working, it appears to be 90% working. I should be able to fix this very easily and at very little expense. I have also purchased a 6 pin din plug so I can make up a vga/rgb monitor cable to hopefully connect to a 15khz compatible vga screen that I have.

I have a spreadsheet to log serial numbers as I would like to compile a history of this amazing machine, as there is no indication anywhere of how many are still alive and kicking around.

If any of you have a real Tatung Einstein, please leave me a comment on this site with the following information (Serial number, condition and what extras you have [twin drive, external drives, hardware etc]) and I will update the Spreadsheet on a regular basis and may even post the results here;

4 thoughts on “Extra Special Vintage

  1. Hi, I have a Tatung Einstein with the same issue (video output displays exactly what you posted here). Did you able to repair it? Do you have an idea of what chip is broken? Thanks!

    • Hi, I am still researching the cause and a possible fix. – I will post here, and on my Youtube channel once I have it repaired.

      Thanks for looking at this site and leaving a comment.

      Regards

      Mike.

    • I have now been able to fix the faulty Einstein.

      Replacing the 2 x 4416-15NL video dram chips now gives a stable MOS screen. Check out my YouTube Channel where I will be uploading a full refurbishment video.

      It took a while to diagnose, but with the help of the online Facebook community for 8-Bit machines, I was pointed in the right direction.

      Thanks

    • The repair video for the Einstein is up on my Youtube channel now. Hope it helps you fix yours!

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