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The VTech Socratic Method
Initial technical exploration of the VTech Socrates line of Z80-based educational home computers. A composite video modification board is developed.
I suspect that, like most “educational” computers, they made way too many of these, selling them very cheaply in anticipation of big sales of cartridges to make a constant influx of cash over time. To make contact with the PCB, the “signal” part of those connectors are connected to the rest of the system by a length of wire soldered onto a surface-mount pad in probably the most strain-prone (and RFI-prone) fashion imaginable. So we’ve managed to pick up an arbitrary educational computer off the side of the road, figure out its ROM pinout, make a composite mod for it, and draw pixels to the screen.
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