Stephen Cass upgraded his 40-year old Tandy Model 100 (previously at Boing Boing) without completely obliterating its innards: the new CPU is far faster than the original, but the old display is exactly as it was.
I'm not the first person to have thought of this, of course. A number of folks have upcycled the M100, but they typically replace the 240-by-64-pixel monochrome display with something with color and much higher resolution, or they keep the original LCD but use it as a text-only display. I wanted to keep the original display, because I like its big, chunky pixels and low power needs, but I also wanted the ability to support graphics and different fonts, as with the original M100. If I could do that, I could use any number of replacement CPUs, thanks to software like CircuitPython's displayio libraries. But I soon discovered the challenge was in the M100's deeply weird—by today's standards—LCD.
Plenty of these old boys knocking around eBay for $100 or so.
