pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



pendell
@pendell

I recently got this G3 Lombard on the cheap and it's a pretty neat machine. Unfortunately many keys on the keyboard are totally unresponsive. Specifically, the entire number row, the return/enter, apostrophe/quote, and the up and right keys. This makes the machine, understandably, a little difficult to use.

And I have yet to find any reasonably priced listing for the keyboards for this machine. In fact, the only listing I've found so far is from DV Warehouse, who I have no idea the reputability of, for $99! Ninety-nine whole ass dollars for a laptop keyboard from the 90s... It supposedly comes with a nice warranty, but again, I don't know if this is even a legit company.

Now, there are plenty of keyboards available for the later Wall Street and Pismo variants of the PowerBoom G3, but from what I've read, these use a different connector that makes them incompatible with the Lombard. So I'm up shit creek without a paddle.

Does anyone know of a solution here? Is it wrong that the Pismo keyboards are incompatible? If they are actually incompatible, is there some way of adapting them to work on the Lombard? Do you, reading this right now, have a working Lombard keyboard you no longer need? I'll buy it! Please, anything but this insane BS. I'd like to actually use this machine someday.


pendell
@pendell

rechosting because I would like to know if I have any recourse for fixing this keyboard other than paying DV Warehouse $99+shipping and hoping they send me what I paid for and honor their warranty.

Is it possible to repair the keyboard traces with soldered bodge wires? Is it possible to use a Pismo or Wallstreet keyboard with some sort of pin adapter to make it work? Is there any other alternative than spending half the value of this machine on a replacement keyboard?


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in reply to @pendell's post:

lombard and pismo used a (mostly) similar case, and the keyboards on the two look the same, but as far as i know they use different connectors :(

at that price, i'd wonder if it's worth finding a dead/as-is/for-parts lombard and rolling the dice on the keyboard working on it, tbh

Supposedly the Lombard keyboards are famously fragile, so I worry that a beat up machine I could get for a good price wouldn't have a working keyboard. In fact keyboards are usually the determining factor of whether people decide to sell their broken old crap for a decent price or a stupid one. You can usually only find good deals on for-parts machines if it's missing half the keys on the keyboard, but the same dead machine with a fully intact keyboard gives the immediate visual first impression of being "mostly good" so eBay sellers and the like still want $100 out of you for them even if they won't boot.

I found a parts machine that boots with a seemingly intact keyboard for $85... Still a bit of a risk, but if the keyboard is bad, I can salvage other parts. It has a 400MHz CPU card so I could at least swap that over since mine has the base 333MHz chip lol