Oh, those Dell Precision workstation CPU trays are a disaster. The square blocks of pins in the connectors onto the motherboard just stop working after a while. The next generation (7600 series) did away with all that thankfully.

Hmmmm... <self-interest-mode>What about a MegaSTE/TT keyboard remake instead?</self-interest-mode>

Hehe

rubber_jonnie wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 12, 2019 10:55 am

I expect the combination of colourant, plasticiser and flame retardant also affects the rate and depth of browning too.

Indeed. The more opaque the colour the less penetration.

You're probably correct that it's any UV exposure and it depends very much on the chemical composition of the additives to the plastic. "Leech out", however, isn't the correct idea though. Basically the bromine is part of a molecule (colourless) which gets broken down releasing molecular bromine (br...

At least with the plastic formula Atari used there seems to be a particular temperature above which the reaction progresses far faster, however.

Also, it's highly photo-sensitive. Other plastic formulations bleach in the sun, not Atari's.

I've found that you need to be careful retro-brightening the TT case as after a while in the sunlight the brightening stops and it starts to yellow again.

I've just brought my TT back down from the loft and it's very much more yellow than it was when it went up there a few weeks ago. The previously retrobrightened parts have almost returned to their previous colour. I've seen reports that heat accelerates or "develops" the yellowing of plastic and I t...

The TT/MSTE keyboards are extremely rare.

An Eiffel unit plus PS/2 keyboard may be easier to get hold of.

You could try "Sell My Retro"

https://www.sellmyretro.com/

That's run by Rich Mellor who used to be a Sinclair stuff vendor back in the day.

EDIT: Just for the hell of it, I wrote the .ST file back to floppy.. now the PC can read it.. but desktop.inf isn't there... but it shows on the ST :stars: EDIT2: Now its showing up on the PC :WTF: It's because the floppy serial number isn't unique probably and the PC is using a cached directory co...