The Pocket Repeat was the project this time, and the fault was simple enough to spot before I even opened it up. The game rattled when I handled it, and it wasn’t responding properly. This was the little Tandy Simon clone I remembered from childhood, so I went ahead and used it for a quick SepTandy repair.
Before opening it, I pulled out a second Pocket Repeat that was still in the box so I had something to compare against. The boxed one was much whiter overall, including the buttons, while the used one had clearly yellowed. I powered up the cleaner unit and confirmed how it was supposed to behave, although even that one seemed to misread a correct sequence once, which pointed toward contact issues rather than anything more complicated.
I also spent a little time looking at a few other Tandy-era handhelds. One was a Tandy-branded Cosmic 1000 Fire Away, with the instructions printed right on the back, and I showed a couple of football handhelds as well. Those were a nice reminder of how common these simple electronic games were before portable computers and other gadgets took over.
The Pocket Repeat manual turned out to be a small fold-out sheet with the basic game instructions. Game 1 had you repeat the computer’s sequence, while Game 2 had you and the computer alternate by adding steps. It also included the usual note that weak batteries were the first thing to check if the lights or sound started acting up.
the unit came apart with just one screw. The problem showed up right away: the little metal dome switches had come loose because the original tape holding them down had failed. Those domes sat over circular PCB contacts, and pressing a button flexed the dome down onto the center pad to complete the circuit.
I took a closer look at the board while I had it open. The main IC was a Texas Instruments chip marked MP1801N2L, with a 1986 date code, and the rest of the board was very simple: speaker, LEDs, and a few passive parts. I also found that one of the battery contacts had broken loose from the board, and the other one wasn’t far behind, so both of those needed attention too.
My first thought was to solder the dome switches in place, but that didn’t work out. I cleaned the old adhesive residue off the board and the domes with isopropyl alcohol, then replaced the original tape with fresh Kapton tape and carefully lined each dome back up over its contact pad. I also resoldered the loose battery terminal and reinforced the other one while I was there.
There was one more detail inside that stood out: a spring in the case contacted a pad on the PCB, and that tied into the metal front label, effectively turning it into a large ground plane. I noted it while troubleshooting, then went back over the switch contacts one more time with alcohol and scrubbed the center pads and the inside of the domes more thoroughly.
That did it. With the contacts cleaned well and the domes retaped in place, the Pocket Repeat worked properly again.
— Aaron
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Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
01:39 – Tandy Handhelds
05:03 – Comparison And Testing
07:16 – The Manual
09:02 – Disassembly And Inspection
12:44 – Clean And Repair
17:19 – Testing The Fix
17:50 – Wrap Up And Credits
19:02 – Testing My Skills 🙂