I pulled apart this Tandy 1000SL late last night and took a look at the feasibility of repurposing the case for my home-built xi8088 board/backplane. Xi 8088 by Segey Kiselev for more information on that.

I don't intend on destroying the perfectly functional 1000SL, just temporarily repurposing the case to house something other than the original 1000SL motherboard/drives. Motherboard and other removed parts are carefully tucked away and kept nice and safe!

It's a pretty roomy case, so it's no surprise that the motherboard actually fits well internally, none of the 8 slots will be blocked completed, and only a few are blocks length-wise by the built-in speaker. Right now the only thing holding the backplane in place are the two expansion cards. I've got an 80 watt DC to DC power supply with external AC/DC power source that's extremely small, and will use a small metal cover over what was originally the standard power cable opening to provide a mounting point for the circular power connector and a mount point for a small momentary contact switch for ATX power.

The mounting holes for the Tandy motherboard are (unsurprisingly) completely wrong for the micro-atx backplane. The three along the back of the case are not in any danger of causing a short circuit but the three staggered along the middle of the case are of great concern to me. I'm currently planning on using some smallish plastic push clips to provide an insulating "cap" over the studs and keep the backplane from shorting without having to pound them flat or otherwise alter the 1000SL case. It will leave a very slight tilt to the motherboard but the ISA cards still seem to line up adequately. I am considering a SMALL mechanical adjustment (e.g. bending a metal bracket) to the card-edge printer connector hole in the rear plate; an additional two or three millimeters of clearance would allow me to install and use the atx backplane serial port.

The two cards above and to the left of the motherboard are the audio interface card and the joystick/keyboard interface card. I've left them in there mostly to avoid losing them in my giant stack of parts. However, when I looked more closely at the audio interface card, it occurred to me that possibly I could use that as an interface to a Soundblaster card.