I have one such machine too and I would love to see that memory expansion up close, since ideally I would like to make my memory own expansion.

The HDD you essentially cannot replace, the machine uses a custom controller and interface which is specific to it. If the HDD dies in some way the machine essentially bricks but it can sort of be worked around by removing the controller board. The BIOS will then complain that it cannot communicate to it but will let you boot, and something like XTIDE + sound card with IDE will let you use CF cards etc. I plan to do that sort of stuff in my T3200 and hack the BIOS so it wouldn't complain, and while at it, perhaps install batteries where the HDD used to be and make this an actual portable 🤣

For battery you'll want to have a double AA holder there instead, it'll last way longer.

When I get the system on the bench again I'll get a shot of the memory expansion!

I have been looking at the 8bit-ISA to CF card from TexElec as a possible HD replacement.
https://texelec.com/product/lo-tech-xt-cf-lite-rev-2/
Not sure if that will work though and I don't have a clue how to hack the BIOS.

How exactly did you do the battery to make it last longer?

That would be great ~

That controller should work. The BIOS hack I mentioned is so far theoretical, one day when I get off my rear I'll do the IDE HDD/CF mod and will find the place in the BIOS that tries to deal with the existing HDD and do something about it. When will that happen I don't know.

Since the battery is not rechargeable and isn't being recharged you can simply attach a random 2x AA battery holder with two heavy duty AA in it on the connector wires instead of a 3V lithium. There'senough space to hide the battery pack in the machine, it'll last way longer though potential fallout from a bad AA is much worse than what a lithium battery is capable of...

Tiido wrote on 2020-08-13, 11:14:

[..] There'senough space to hide the battery pack in the machine, it'll last way longer though potential fallout from a bad AA is much worse than what a lithium battery is capable of...

Beware of carbon-zinc based AA batteries, though. They are lightweight, uncomplicated etc. but do leak quickly. It's part of their nature, in fact - they go "poof" (they dissolve) after just 1-2 years in some cases.
Lithium AAs can't handle overload or shorts, so they usually come with some internal protective circuits.
Alkaline AA batteries are properly the best compromise.

Edit: Please also be caredul with AA/AAA holders. The batteries often fall off the holder and roll all over the mainboards, destroying components.
Especially, if shipped from one place to another. I've seen that with several old computers and other devices (Pakratt PK-232 TNCs).
So I think that some piece of electrical tape or cable ties can help to prevent this.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-08-13, 11:29:

Beware of carbon-zinc based AA batteries, though. They are lightweight, uncomplicated etc. but do leak quickly. It's part of the […]
Show full quote

Tiido wrote on 2020-08-13, 11:14:

[..] There'senough space to hide the battery pack in the machine, it'll last way longer though potential fallout from a bad AA is much worse than what a lithium battery is capable of...

Beware of carbon-zinc based AA batteries, though. They are lightweight, uncomplicated etc. but do leak quickly. It's part of their nature, in fact - they go "poof" (they dissolve) after just 1-2 years in some cases.
Lithium AAs can't handle overload or shorts, so they usually come with some internal protective circuits.
Alkaline AA batteries are properly the best compromise.

Edit: Please also be caredul with AA/AAA holders. The batteries often fall off the holder and roll all over the mainboards, destroying components.
Especially, if shipped from one place to another. I've seen that with several old computers and other devices (Pakratt PK-232 TNCs).
So I think that some piece of electrical tape or cable ties can help to prevent this.

Good advice! Thank you.

I hope to be diving back into this project this year after I complete fixing my old Pentium system.

Hi all,
I too have a T3200 that I'm trying to get to run properly, currently waiting for a new lithium battery to continue the process.

I wanted to share a great article I found on the T3200, it covers a lot on the BIOS hack as well. You might have read it before, but here it is anyway;

https://medium.com/geekculture/the-luggable-l … 89-6d15ce56eadd

Best Regards,
Tom

Thanks for then link/article!

By the way, since it says "This is the Toshiba T3200SX from 1989 — a ‘luggable’ computer with 1MB of RAM,
40 MB HDD and a gorgeous 640x480 16-grey-shade gas plasma screen [..]" :

The picture viewer WinGIF has a special mode in which it chooses colors of the 16c VGA palette by their brightness levels in order to display grayscale pictures.

That only works with monochrome monitors, of course, or if the VGA card is in monochrome mode (remember the issue with the DDC pin on modern LCD monitors?).

So, I back at this one. Working on several things at once.

1) Getting a new battery installed. I'm going to put the new one in a spring holder so I don't have to keep de-soldering the leads every time I replace it. I'm not sure if this is a regular thing with this or if there is something wrong with the computer but these batteries will only last a few years even if the computer is used. It's as if it still drains the battery while it's turned on. And these are hefty 2500mAh batteries too. Compare that with the typical CR2025 button battery at 200mAh that you would normally put in a computer.

2) I'm also trying to get the XIDE CF-lite card to work in it. So far when I put the card in, it will recognize it and even mount the 4 GB CF card (partitioned into three drives). But I can't get it to boot from it. The firmware in the XIDE is an older universal bios for XT computers. I tried to get a more up to date one designed for the 286 AT but the issue I run into is that I'm not able to run the BIOS flashing tools that I'm suppose to run to flash the new BIOS. Their instructions say to boot from a floppy disk. The only working floppy disk I have is on this computer but I actually don't have any floppy disks. So I'm a bit stuck there. I have an EEPROM programmer that I can use but the raw BIOS images they provide are not setup or configured or something. I could edit the binary image by had in the EEPROM programef if I new what bytes to place where, and that's just for the XIDE. After that I still don't know for sure how to handle the computer's BIOS itself to allow me to remove the HD and put in a CF drive or SD drive and still allow it to work.

Hey guys, just ordered one of these beasts and been doing some research while I wait for it to arrive.

RAM
Hoping my rig will have the 3MB expansion board, will find out soon. I've been adding info to my github page, incl 3 pics of different RAM modules I've found online:

https://github.com/SpitFire-666/Toshiba-T3200

XT-IDE
- I have an XT-IDE CF ISA card that works in my T3200SX and T5200. I'll test it in the T3200 and let you know if it works.

CMOS Battery
- I wonder if you could use an 18650 (3.7v rechargeable battery)? If so, you could add a USB charging PCB (tiny and readily available ) then you could recharge it easily via microUSB (and mount a USB socket or cable)

Thanks for posting your GitHub resource! That's going to be a great place to capture all of the diverse issues with these systems.

My current battery solution was to get the wires, resister, connector, and a removable battery holder in one peace, and it will actually fit just fine under the keyboard. This will make battery replacement easier as I don't have to disassemble the computer and solder wires together like it was originally built. The resister is hidden in the yellow shrink wrap.

I managed to get my BIOS files on a floppy disk from a different computer and was getting ready to try to update the XTIDE card BIOS when I found out my floppy drive was bad. I had read about this being common and sure enough, it appears to have been a bad cap. But the corrosion is bad enough it might not be an easy fix.

In fact if you looked closely( had a microscope 😀), you can see how the corrosion worked under the green coating and exited under the IC chip which wicked it on to all of the IC pins. While it was hard to photograph, it was clear to see in the microscope that all of the pins on the IC they were coated in bluish green oily residue.
That glue holding the big green box down might have helped minimize the damage elsewhere, it did partially dissolve the glue so the large green part is now free to move around. I'm worried about metal fatigue on the leads to the green part.

Because of the corrosion, I'm worried the capacitor replacement might not work, there might be too much other damage. Besides, I'm not really equipped to deal with SMT soldering as I don't have steady hands. The other option is to replace it with a new drive (new old stock I found on ebay) and build a custom cable for it from this thread: IanB's cable mod. Someone on reddit mentioned that cable working on the T3200 for the floppy. And then I found this: FlexiDrive Cable Adapter Which looks promising.
Not really sure if it will fit precisely as the board might be intended for the FlexiDrive floppy disk drive emulator and there is go guarantee that a standard floppy drive is going to place the connector is the exact right location. But since they did specifically mention the Toshiba computers in the description there is hope.

Because the facade for the floppy drive is actually part of the computer shell on the T3200, I would rather just have a working internal floppy drive than have to cut into the plastic to make an emulator fit no matter what the emulator is. FlexiDrives are too expensive anyway. I can always make the Gotek drive an external drive plugged in the parallel port in the back.

There is just no way to cut this down and still make it look good. 🙁

So I've got the XTIDE with a CF card install and booting. The trick to getting it to boot to the CF card is to make sure the HD is disabled in the main CMOS by using the setup program TEST3.EXE. Just select the "0" option when it prompts for the hard drive. I had already installed DOS to the CF card from another computer and it just worked. The XTIDE bios was the default that came with the card, 2.0.0ß3+ (2013-10-22). Although I'm still going to get it updated when I finally get the new floppy drive installed. I also removed the power from the HD so that it doesn't continue to put any more wear and tear on the drive but mainly to spare my hearing from the rather obnoxious wine the drive makes. (It's the normal sound of HDs but I'm really, really, annoyed by it and I often would wear head phones to try to reduce the pain to my ears.)

I did manage to copy everything off the drive earlier using a parallel link cable and the DOS 6 intersvr/interlnk, so I'm ready to let the original HD sleep indefinitely even though the drive has low hours on it. I tried using laplink but I just couldn't get it to work, but DOS 6 interlnk worked just fine. That's weird because I was using Laplink branded Radioshack link cable and my understanding is the wiring would be slightly different in that the DOS interlnk used a few less lines so interlnk would always work with laplink cable but laplink wouldn't work with an interlnk cable.
EDIT: So it wasn't Laplink branded. I made a mistake. I pinned it out and found out it is not connected the same way as a Laplink cable. I wonder what happened to my Laplink cable. 🙁

Anyway, I digress. The new floppy drives have arrived and I'm just waiting on the supplies I need to make the cables. Hopefully by this weekend.

The computer suddenly stopped working. It appears I lost the 5V rail on the power supply or something has shut it down. 12V is fine. Looks like I'm dead in the water with this one.

The PSU is full of bad RIFA capacitors and all of them will need replacing. I think there were fuses in the PSU on every rail, they are worth checking out too. My T3200 is not quite accessible so I cannot take closer looks for now.

I checked the fuses and they were all good. So far the 5V and 240205V to the plasma display are still good. And the 12V line is good. It's just the 5V line to the rest of the system board is gone.
There just doesn't seem to be any obvious visible failures to the caps.

I took two pictures because the thing is so long.

The blue wires to the main board and all of the fans are 12 V. They work fine.
The yellow wire is 240205V and red wire pared with the yellow is 5V and those are both fine. I'm assuming the Plasma display power is isolated from the rest of the system.
The red wires in the middle that go to the main board are suppose to have 5V but are dead.
I was power cycling this thing quite a lot in the last few weeks. I'm sure that wasn't good for it and what ever parts were weak eventually failed.

I'm just not really confident in my ability to deal with power supplies in general. I've never heard of RIFA caps so I don't know what to look for.

Your PSU actually has some different kind of film capacitors in it and not RIFA branded ones, so this PSU will not be subject to loud bangs and lots of awful smelling smoke like mine did years ago 🤣. (many RIFA branded film capacitors found in a lot of old equipment are failing right now and the failures are always something along the lines of catastrophic) https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/old-rifa-c … disaster-story/

Visually the PSU looks good. I will try to get access to my T3200 and its PSU to take some closer looks. There shouldn't be many things that can go wrong and especially when 12V is still present, since it comes out of the same transformer as 5V does.

Turns out I had the exact same issue in past, 5V went poof and my solution was to install polyfuses in place of the original ones, so that if I get a short etc. again I will not have to open the whole thing and replace the fuses again 🤣.
It was a pain to get it open, I had forgotten how much effort it takes to get everything open 🤣

F003 and F004 are two fuses in parallel on the 5V line, your board actually only has one and it looks like a resistor. Mine did have two green resistor looking things in the spot.

Do you still have the specs on the poly fuses you used? And would it be possible to get them as through-hole rather than SMT?

I have to admit my discrete electronics knowledge only goes up to late 70's tech. And even then I haven't really worked in electronics since the early 90s so this is all a learning experience.
I had no idea that was a fuse.

The back side looks clean enough.

Yeah, that is the fuse and it is most likely open, leading to the missing 5V.

The polyfuses I used are salvaged from dead computer motherboards, near USB ports typically. The PCB seems to call for 5A so I just stacked as many as it took to get that 5A rating. There definitely are through hole parts but I don't know any part numbers you can look for. You can also always put a normal 5A fuse in there, I just used polyfuses because they self reset so I won't have to do any replacement again if there is an oops etc.

You do know anything more about what the holding currents, trip currents, and trip times would be? I'm looking into them and I'm getting overwhelmed by all of the variables. Surly I want to make sure it trips fast enough but not too fast and what it's maximum current should be.