[jazzy Apple-flavored tunes] [computer buzzes, beeps] - Greetings and welcome to LGR Oddware where we're taking a look at hardware and software that is odd, forgotten and obsolete! And this time around we're taking a look at the
Diamond Trackstar range from the mid to late 80s. And these purport to take
your IBM compatible PC and turn it into an Apple II,
just straight-up, using a bunch of awesome
stuff on an ISA card. Let's take a look! All right, let's get right to the star of the show for this episode, the Diamond Trackstar!
Really a whole bunch of them ranging from 1984 to 1989 in release date. And what these are is a
computer on an ISA card, in this case an Apple II with the original one having
CP/M capability as well. And it cost $695 US dollars on launch
at the tail end of 1984, or around $2,000 accounting
for inflation in 2023. Still less than a brand
new Apple II on its own, but not cheap either, especially since you needed
a DOS PC alongside it. But still, what an exciting
product nonetheless, ever since it was first exhibited at the ninth West Coast Computer Faire in March of 1984. Where it
was known as the Diamond 3, so named for its three on-board processors. In the press and on the
box and the marketing, you'll often see this
referred to as emulation, which could imply a software
based solution going on here. But nope, all the Trackstars are straight-up Apple II computers on a card using the same or cloned
versions of its chips. In the same kind of vein as the 3DO Blaster and the PCFX-GA that I've covered before. It's not emulating the core
hardware through software, though there is of course
a software component. And it was not at all the
first type of device like this. I mean, tons of Apple II clone systems and systems with Apple II support existed, and so did cards. Actually the 1983 QuadRAM Quadlink was the biggest one up to this point. And it's the same idea, really, just an Apple II on an
ISA card that goes in a PC. And it cost a similar $680 back then. However, it did feature a reverse-engineered Apple II ROM,
whereas Diamond I believe licensed their Apple
II ROM from Apple outright. And yeah, in case you're wondering, that is the same Diamond as you might be familiar with for their 1990s video and sound cards, and also their MP3 players
like the Diamond Rio. I have covered some of these
things before on LGR. I just, I've always liked the company and yeah, they were around since 1982 where they began as Diamond
Computer Systems incorporated in Santa Clara, California. They were later renamed
Diamond Multimedia, I believe when they
merged with S3 in 1999. And the others still
technically around too as a subsidiary of the
TUL Corporation in Taiwan. And they just make generic
computer-related tat with Diamond branding. I mean, it's still cool to
see the old logo on stuff but you know, it is what it is. But back in 1984 the Trackstar was their first product and jeez have these things become rarities. I own a couple of them
but not this original one. So a huge thanks to Brandon Cobb for not only loaning me the original and most of the other items that you'll be seeing in this video, but also for his Diskman website chronicling the Trackstar saga. It is an invaluable resource
I used a bunch of this video, link's in the description. But yeah, the original Trackstar, let's just start with that one. In 1984, it's effectively an Apple II Plus clone on a card with dual 6502 CPUs, one being used for your normal
kind of Apple II operations and the other used as a
video controller chip. And then on this one only, the third
chip comes in with the Z80, which supports Apple CP/M software. Effectively a Z80 Softcard, which was one of the
most popular add-on cards for the Apple II in the early 80s. The original Trackstar also
has 64 kilobytes of RAM, same as the Apple II Plus and supports low and high
resolution graphics modes but no support for double hires mode. It also has a floppy header which connects to a PCs five and a quarter inch 360K floppy drive to read and write Apple II floppies. And you can also connect
an Apple II disk drive, which is very much
recommended for compatibility and it outputs video either through composite or direct to the PC's RGB monitor through a proprietary passthrough cable, and also uses the internal
PC speaker for sound. It even has a built-in 15 pin gameport for plugging in PC joysticks and passes through the serial
and parallel ports of your PC to the Apple II side so you can plug in stuff there as well. And this was followed up with
the Trackstar version two from January of 1986, effectively it's the same card
just without the Z80 on board. And it also uses a daughterboard for the floppy controller, offloading that from the main card itself and making the whole thing a bit shorter. And it was done so at the
behest of Tandy Radio Shack. They were getting very real
about education back then and Tandy specifically
was targeting the card towards US schools where the Apple II absolutely
dominated at the time. Though the Trackstar line
really started to take off over the next couple years with the $395 Trackstar 128 and $445 Trackstar E. Now the 128 doubled the RAM, as you'd expect, to 128 kilobytes. Bringing it in line with the Apple IIc and also added double
high res mode support. And it was available not only in ISA but also MCA, making it a thing you
could plop into an IBM PS/2 with their Microchannel silliness. A nice set of upgrades,
but annoyingly the disk for the software to run the
128 card is copy protected and it's not something I have.
Which is really annoying because the 128 is
actually the first model that I came across some years back inside of this well worn Tandy 1000 SX. Yeah, it's a bit of a dirty beast. I haven't cleaned it up or anything, but one of those things that I purchased for a pretty good price from a surplus auction actually from the Los Angeles
Unified School District, or LAUSD. Specifically,
Loma Vista Elementary School in Maywood, California. Which makes sense when you look into it, which I had to do, I didn't know what it was
about when I first got it, but turns out to be pretty interesting because Loma Vista was
one of the first schools chosen to take part in the MTS Project or Model Technology Schools, of which the Tandy
Corporation was a partner. MTS was a program that kicked off in 1987 and aimed to provide technology rich student
learning environments for educational research, product development and teacher training. Yeah, it is a forward thinking
investment for schools deemed to be falling short of the needs of students and staff alike. And they tried to address it through technology like
Tandys and Trackstars. Diamond did not stop there though. They followed this up
with the Trackstar E, which is more or less a clone
of the Apple enhanced IIe with the same upgrades as the 128 along with support for TrackStore disks and ProDOS virtual hard drives. Yeah, this lets you copy floppies from the Apple II to IBM format disks or to image files and run software that way, or even store everything on up to 10 megabyte hard disk images. We'll have to show this off
towards the end of the video. And finally there is
the 1989 Trackstar Plus, which is also $445 on launch. Essentially it's a
longer length Trackstar E with even more enhancements. So it still supports those
disk images and ProDOS images, but also two megahertz accelerated mode is available here, giving you double the speed, making it ideal for more graphical
games and productivity software. As well as a port for
19 pin Unidisk drives in addition to the regular
old Disk II drives. Now, the original Trackstar
from '84 and the 1989 Plus are the ones we'll be
looking at in this video, the first and the last models. I just found that appropriate with the former also
supporting CP/M and the latter having that faster two megahertz mode and disk images and all that stuff. But you know what, that's enough of this! We gotta get these things
installed and set up, starting with the original Trackstar. And since we're lucky enough to have one complete in its packaging, let's unbox it and get that authentic mid 80s experience packed within this lovely
debossed foam enclosure. You get the Trackstar itself a well populated full
length 8-bit ISA card with an unusually shaped
rear bracket situation. We'll come back to that here soon. Next is the passthrough wiring with cables and adapters for the PC speaker, composite video, CGA monitor, and your floppy drive. And last is the Trackstar documentation, A three ring binder
full of docs and disks like these two five and
a quarter inch floppies, one with DOS software and the other for file
transfers on the Apple II. There are also two hand-signed papers from the Diamond VP of Engineering and a technician going
over some addendums. And of course there's the manual itself with hundreds of pages of notes, instructions, illustrations, troubleshooting, and all the nonsense you need to cover when running a computer inside
of a computer like this. Enough of that, let's get this thing installed! And initially I was gonna
go with an IBM PC AT, which seemed fitting for 1984, but due to the design of the card's PCB, it won't fit into the
16-bit ISA slots it uses as it's physically blocked. And I'm using the only
8-bit slot in here already, so we're going with a PC XT
5160 from 1982 instead. It only has 8-bit ISA slots so we're free to stick
the thing anywhere we like and ideally it should have some free space to the left for passthroughs.
And yeah, the Trackstar is all
about the passthroughs, PC speaker, five and a four
inch floppy disk drive, 9-pin RGB cable for your CGA display, and composite video if you desire. It's really just pumping the entire IBM PC through the card here, and then switching things over to Apple II mode as needed. We still have that
weirdly wide rear bracket to contend with though. And the only way it fits is leaving out the nearby blank and not screwing it in as the hole doesn't line up. I don't know exactly
why it's made like this, but my best guess is it's a Kaypro thing. One of those papers from earlier mentions this being a "Kaypro-Trackstar," though I don't know what
model of DOS-compatible Kaypro this was meant to go into. It's just a weird bracket.
It doesn't matter. The manual recommends leaving slots open to pass things through anyway, so it's fine. It's kind of a mess, but it works. [goofy chuckle]
Imagine paying the equivalent of two grand for a Trackstar in '84 and this is the result. Yeah just tuck it all underneath the lid. Nothing to see here. That's pretty much it. But one last thing though, just mostly just for fun. The paperwork specifically mentions using a sheet of aluminum foil to avoid RF interference. And hey, who am I to argue with the VP of Engineering? Now this is a setup worthy of Oddware. [jazz music fades] Alright, so everything is all hooked up. The aluminum foil is in place as requested by the
documentation for... reasons. And yeah, at this point it really is
just an IBM PC XT as usual, nothing different at all. It's running PC-DOS 3.3 in this case. And yeah, really,
the first thing to do is to get the utility program going or installed onto something, really just copy it over
to something and running. And in this case I have
put it onto the C: drive, lovely little Seagate ST-225 right there. And you can start up this right here to get the Apple II side of things going. So normal initialization just kind of starts it
up and I don't know, it seems to be fine, but I'm gonna do this high
compatibility initialization, which requires an Apple
DOS 3.3 master disk so it can boot right off of that for quite the authentic experience. Do not need an 80 column
screen in this case. So...
[floppy drive seeking [chuckles] it's surreal hearing the
Disk II drive over there doing its thing from an IBM PC. Yeah, there we go. Apple II DOS, 3.3 Master
Disk, Integer Basic loading. And there you go. It's an Apple II, it's fantastically easy. Once everything is all connected inside, really, that was the hardest part. Just load in this program and then there it is. That's all you gotta do. So if you want to, you can actually just treat this as a BASIC prompt, y'know? Type in whatever you want to and run it. It's an Apple II. If you press F1 and Escape, it goes back to the control menu here. And so we have a few different options. We're gonna reset the Apple II system, boot a disk directly, PR#6 is what that defaults to. You can do that from the
BASIC prompt as well. Of course display and
modify function keys, that is some Apple II stuff. So if you want to have those mapped to different things on the PC keyboard, ya can. And then exiting to MS-DOS, we'll do that in a sec 'cause that's kind of interesting too. Oddly enough did something
that I didn't realize I did. But yeah, let's go ahead and just reset and so that'll bring us
back to the prompt there and stop our farts. So at this point, what we can do is run a program. So let's, I mean it's an Apple II, it's educational stuff, The Oregon Trail is kind of a no-brainer. [floppy drive seeking over soft jazz tunes] And just like that we're
running Apple II software. [chuckles] This is the most *PC* of
PCs from back in the day when this came out. Oh my goodness. It's so surreal. I love seeing this. And it looks great too
on the CGA display here. Ends up sounding just
like an Apple II as well when we get to some sounds. So you know, it's June right now. So let's do that. All right, we need some oxen, let's get a few of those and that's it. [chuckles] Let's just leave, get on our way and hear
some Apple II music through the PC speaker. ["Yankee Doodle" PC speaker music plays] Yeah, it's the same kind of square waves coming out of there, so. Sounds great! And uh, yeah, it's just an Apple II in color through RGB so you don't get any, well, not really much
composite artifacting kind of weirdness going on. Yeah, there's a little
bit of that color shifting but I mean it just looks really like an Apple II through RGB, which is what it is. Now as far as I know, there is no way to actually
make this go over to, like say, emulate monochrome
or anything like that. You can output through
composite as well. There is the passthrough
for that in the back there. Here's what that looks like if you'd like to see an example of it. I know I did. So there you go. You can plug that into
a monochrome display or a color display, whatever! You can get your standard Apple II composite output. Really I'm more interested in seeing it go through this IBM 5154. So yeah, I mean it's an Apple II, that's what it is. So this is kind of cool too. All right, so if we go back to the menu, it's still playing back there and we can actually
exit straight out to DOS And let it run in the background and even run DOS programs while the Apple II was going. I didn't know that it could do this. It makes sense that it can, 'cause they're like two separate
things inside there, but... [Burgertime music plays over Oregon Trail music] [chuckles] And they're both going
through the PC speaker. This is so weird. I don't know if I have
the right color mode chosen on here. [chaotic music continues] Anyway yeah, I'm just, I was just amused that it could go for both of the PC speakers, just clashing like that. And then yeah you can
switch back at any time by pressing Alt and Escape. [keyboard clicks] And you'll notice that
when we come back to DOS, the CGA palette is like, goofy. I don't know, weird things happen. Yeah it just starts
drawing things back again as it's switched over the palette or color mode or whatever. Yeeeaah.
[chuckles] Let me get back to the options on this. I was running through, we're trying to do
composite so this should be, yeah, that's how I was supposed to look. So yeah, straight-up CGA gaming on the PC side right here and it's totally cool doing it. Swip-- swapping... swipping [chuckles] We're swapping back over
here to the Apple II Loading things from the
disk drive over there, hard drive over here. Yaghh, computers! Multiple computers! And again, go back and it again messes with the color palette or just, I don't know, something is happening with CGA every time it goes between the two. I'm assuming because it's
like freezing the PC side from what I gather, it's just sort of halting
everything in memory 'cause like, I'm about to die right there but you didn't hear me die. Now if I go back I'm dead. So it's definitely pausing, halting, putting to a harsh stop the PC side when you switch over to the Apple. But the Apple II continues running in the background no matter what. I don't know, I just thought
that was fascinating. So yeah, that's pretty much it for the Trackstar in terms of the Apple II
and like, what it can do. It's just gonna work like an Apple II, it does exactly what it says on the tin. That being said though, we also have this File
Transfer Utility Program that it came with. This is not self-booting though, so we gotta get the system
master disk going here again and we'll be able to switch over to this. And the reason I'm loading
it from the Disk II drive and not trying it from the IBM drive is you can only do one at a
time, far as I can tell. So if this is connected it won't even try reading
Apple II stuff from PC drive. It's supposed to be able to, just haven't tried it yet. We'll do that later I guess. Yeah, this thing, it's not self-booting. So what you need to do is, uh "BRUN FILE TRANSFER." Okay. [keyboard clicking] It's not in caps, how did I turn caps is off? [keyboard clicking] There we go. Sensitivity to lowercase letters. Anyway, this program will allow you to, as it implies, transfer files between the two systems. So you can see the directory not only of whatever's on the Apple disk but the different disks on the PC side. So, I forgot Burgertime's
running in the background, you can't have stuff running or it won't be able to read the drive. [keyboard clicking] Okay, let's see if we can do that again. Directory of C. Yeah, there we go. So you can take files from here, put them over to an Apple II
disk, or vice versa, and transfer things like text documents, or... I don't know, that's about it really that it gives an example
of what you would want to maybe transfer, I don't know,
spreadsheets! Things like calculations, VisiCalc stuff you wanna go between PC and DOS. That's all that does. And you have the Apple II portion and then the CP/M portion
is on the other side. So this is a flippy floppy. That's truly what they are called. We'll come back to CP/M in a minute, but I also wanted to show
the joystick functionality because not only can you
plug in an Apple II joystick, just normally like stringing
through the ribbon cable and plugging it directly into the card. But you can also use the 15-pin gameport that's on the Trackstar
to use PC controllers. So we'll do some Moon Patrol here. I believe this one is joystick controlled. It should be. [keyboard clacks] What I think we're gonna have to do the max compatibility type of thing...
[typing away] I have run into that a couple times with certain programs. High compatibility, yeah that. So booting from
the master disk first. [keyboard clicks, floppy drive loads] Yeah, that totally works. I don't know exactly what the
difference is between the two. I mean like I said, a lot of things do work
just under normal booting, but anyway, guess that's what
the compatibility is for. So let me put it in joystick
mode and there we go. [rover shooting, soft Moon Patrol beeping] Uh oh! Well... anyway. Joystick works! And it's pretty cool that you can just plug in whatever you want in terms of PC stuff and play your games! And if anybody's curious
if the Floppy Emu works? Well, yes it does. And this gives us a a great opportunity to try out the CP/M functionality so we can load a disk image for CP/M 2.2, which is what this original
Trackstar supports officially, either the 56K or the 60K version. And now it's ready to go. I'm just gonna treat it
like it's a disk drive. So the Disk II is no
longer connected at all. Wish you could have them both hooked in but you can't. And you can't
actually have a combination of like the IBM one and
this one and this one. I wish you could. Anyway, we will be doing 80
column mode for CP/M here. Check that out. Apple II CP/M, 44K free, version 2.20 B. And yeah, now we can do
CP/M things like these. Yeah, don't exactly have a lot of Apple II compatible
CP/M software here, but you know. It is here for those that wanted it, needed it, what have you. Yay. 80 columns too is pretty
shrunken down here. I suppose we could just go back and try that again without 80 columns. [chuckling] Yeah, it is... I don't know, it's not bad. It reminds me of a Kaypro. And the final thing I want to check and just demonstrate, I suppose, is the IBM floppy drive compatibility. Supposedly it can be used
to read Apple II floppies if you don't have an
Apple II drive connected or a Floppy Emu or whatever else. I don't have either of
those connected right now it's just the A: drive here. So put in the Oregon Trail and see what happens. [amused laugh] And there you go! Wow, that is again just surreal to see the Oregon Trail Apple II disk running from an IBM
five and a quarter inch, 360K floppy drive. Now, there are some limitations to this, in particular copy protected disks,
those that use half tracks, pretty much anything that is, well, just a little wonky for an IBM floppy drive to handle. Whereas this is gonna be perfectly fine, fully compatible, which is why this is
very much recommended. But you know, in a pinch you can read Apple II disks right off your IBM floppy drive, which is, [chuckles] that's so cool. Yeah dude, that's awesome. Okay. It does not like the... I guess the version, yeah, this is the IIe version, so this would likely
work on the next card we're gonna try, the Plus version.
The very end of the range. So hey, it's as good a moment as any to segue over to that. All right, so the Trackstar Plus I'm going to be installing
in an IBM PS/2 Model 30 as that was one of the machines that Diamond specifically singled out and marketed with this particular card. Although it works in anything, I mean it's a standard 8-bit ISA card, but this was the quote unquote "intent," so that's what we're doing. Although the end of it
does look a little unusual and that is by design to give it a bit of a
cleaner I/O situation. So you take the VGA passthrough and pass it through the
little hole on the bracket and that's how you get video passthrough. And for the IIe style 9-pin
joystick connector that also had its own bracket. So that would just go into
a blank slot around back or you could, you know, string it through wherever you wanted to like you could with previous cards. But this was the idea,
and that's really it. We're ready to go here. So... let's go! The Trackstar Utility Program version 1.5 that this comes with. I've already copied over to the hard disk, or hard disk alternative in this case. And yeah, it works pretty much the same, but new features of course. [computer beeps]
[keyboard clacking] I just gonna go into
the STAR directory here and I've got a lot of stuff in there, but let's just begin with the
regular old Trackstar program, which is pretty darn similar to what we were looking at before, but of course, supporting newer features. So if we want, we can boot disks from an
external Apple floppy drive, which I don't have connected, but it supports the old
Apple II style drives as well as the 19-pin Unidisk ones if you want to connect one of those. And of course the IBM drives, although it is a three and a half inch. Much more interesting than that though, is the fact that you can boot disk images straight-up off of the hard drive. So we have different options for TrackStore format disks and yeah, you have that as well as ProDOS hard disk volumes as well, which is just super cool. So let's go into the disks here. And these are the ones that I have copied over to the hard disk. The PC's hard disk, that is. So these are all floppy disk images in the TrackStore format that we can boot up and mess around with as if it was just a regular old Apple II floppy disk running. Yeah. [PC speaker noise] [chuckle of pity]
It's trying its best. So I don't have a joystick plugged in. Let me just choose a thing. I think this will work. Yeah, don't, actually don't know if I can control this. You know this was, this is a bad choice. Again, I don't have a joystick plugged in and because this computer
doesn't have a gameport and this particular Trackstar
doesn't have a gameport, I can't just plug in a PC joystick as easily as I could with
the original Trackstar. I'd have to either plug
in an Apple II joystick or get a game-- whatever. Just gonna get outta here. So you can go back to the menu in the same way as you could before, mostly the same options, but you can also swap disk images and it has two virtual
floppy drives attached. And yeah, some other nicely laid out shortcut keys for doing your typical Apple II functions, as well as some really awesome stuff here regarding faster speed. So pressing Alt+1 and 2 will go between normal and double speed, up to two megahertz. So let me get another disk. [keyboard clicks] Yeah, that'll do. Kings Quest III. [triumphant PC speaker music] So if I press Alt+2, this will double the speed. All right, let's, I think we're gonna have a disk swap. Yeah, there we go. So we turn the disk over, so to speak, and we can just swap
to side B for disk one. And there we go. I will not empty your chamber pots, sir. And yeah, this does support
a double high res mode, so that's nice. But yeah, you can see
just walking around here and if we go to single speed or just regular one
megahertz, much slower. But yeah, two megahertz accelerated is definitely quite welcome for this, especially for more complicated games and of course, productivity and just doing pretty much anything that is not reliant on the
original one megahertz speed to run correctly. But yeah, oftentimes
the faster the better, especially when it
comes to games like this and different print programs and whatnot. So... [typing] I don't know, that's not, that's more like a gate, isn't it? There we go. [keyboard clicking] Dang it, Colonel, I wanted to eat the chickens. As for how you get those disks on there, you can either just download them online, the Diskman website that Brandon has, has a lot of those links
in the description. But yeah, you can also just make your own using an Apple II floppy disk drive. And then there is this program in here that will, yeah, this'll let you convert them over and also lets you change how you want to configure this to run. So if you want to, yeah, you can set up a printer through serial or parallel, I think I haven't actually done that. And then you can configure the disk drives to either access actual
physical floppy disks if you have those going, or just go to the hard disk, which is how it's set up here. But yeah, this also lets you convert disks from five and a quarter inch Apple II disks or whatever onto regular old PC floppy disks. So if you want to, you can do that and or even just make a
floppy disk a compatible, this is an Apple II disk now and so we'll make that 40 tracks and it will format that to being an Apple II compatible three and a half inch floppy disk. And yeah, you can store your Apple II data on there and the Apple II side of things
won't know the difference. And the way that this actually works is if we go over here, you can see that it is made an .APP file, also had another file on there. But yeah, those are disk images, and so each one of these can be selected in the actual Trackstar program and lets you do all that kind of thing. It's just awesome. The fact that this can
do disk images like this makes this and the Trackstar E really the ones to go for, in my opinion. They're all cool, but these are way cooler. And it gets even cooler. So going to this right here, booting from a ProDOS volume, this is a hard disk image, so 10 megabytes of goodness also available from Brandon
on the Diskman website. It's just such good stuff
he's been doing there. So we'll just go into the
games subfolder, directory, whatever it's called. I don't know, Apple II terminology. And I just select a
letter and then your game. So we can do something
like Thexder for instance, and we'll just find the proper file to start it up, which we'll do 128K Thexder. [Thexder theme plays] Yeah man, that's awesome. This is just such a lovely setup. And again, I don't have
a joystick plugged in, so I don't know the keyboard controls and it's on two megahertz, so I think that was a little bit too fast. [brief laugh of failure] Augh pscht, I don't know what shoot is. Well I can at least sort of move around and delay death a little bit. Okay, well, anyway, you get the point. I think it's just a
wonderful piece of hardware. It's a shame that there are not many more
of them still out there. They rarely come up for sale, and when you do find them, they're often missing like disks or adapters and cables
and various components. So it's expensive and hard to find in all
of those annoying things. But man, for such a wonderful
piece of oddware like this, that's just a treat to be able to use and show it on video. Trackstar, Trackstar,
Trackstar, Trackstar, Trackstar, I love these 80s logos, and I love this device! This card and series of cards. The fact that it works as well as it does, doing exactly what it promises that it's gonna do is wonderful. Especially on Oddware where those kind of results aren't always the most common. Yeah, I don't know I'm just a sucker for any of these kind of things. Expansion cards that take your computer and turn it into another system entirely. It just always gets me
going for whatever reason. And when it works this well, this seamlessly just passing
through one to the other, it's just awesome. And I wish they were more
common than they were or than they are because yeah, it's hard to find these things and when you do, they're often missing software or passthrough cables or other components and they get really expensive and yeah, just extra grateful for being able to take a
look at these for a bit and send them back to
Brandon when I'm done. At the same time, yeah, I am really looking forward to some reverse engineering
things happening, it sounds like. So maybe there will be some clones available of the Trackstars. There already is of the QuadRAM Quadlink,
so yeah, check that out. But in terms of the Trackstar, seemingly it was mostly schools and... well, mostly schools that had them. And if my experience dealing
with school surplus stuff is anything to go on, then either most of them got either thrown away, or they're still packed away in some far off closet or forgotten basement somewhere. Just some weird in-between limbo of the state, or whoever is
in charge, won't let it go. And if you did then it'd have to be under this thing and then you know, whatever. So anytime they do
get out there for an auction, like the one that I got in my Tandy 1000, it's pretty special. And yeah, anyway, if you ever
used one of those things back in the day, whether it was at school
or somewhere else, I don't know how many people actually had Trackstar at home, but if you did and let me know, I'd be interested to hear about it. And if you were interested
enough in this video to make it this far? Well thanks! I think you'll enjoy
other Oddware episodes that I've done in the past and there are always other episodes, oddware and otherwise,
in the works here on LGR. So stay tuned for those. And as always, thank you very much for watching.
