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I have been looking over diagrams and pictures of older legacy railsounds 5.5 and the newer railsounds lite boards and noticed that the designs are similar to tmcc railsounds. The older legacy 5.5 is almost identical to Lionel railsounds 5.0 and the newer legacy railsounds lite boards are identical to the electric railroad railsounds boards. So with this observation, I was wonder if it is possible to connect the newer legacy sound boards (both 5.5 and lite) to tmcc boards and have the sounds operate the same except without the legacy features. Is this possible?

 

 

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In a word, sometimes.

The new RS-Lite boards for Legacy have different firmware and recognize different commands.  Specifically, stuff like crew-talk and bell don't work when driven even by a Legacy R4LC.  This is due to the different structure of the commands coming from the newer RCMC Legacy electronics, they made the RCMC smarter, and the RS-Lite Legacy boards dumber.  This was done so that there was one "brain" controlling the sounds, this allows more precise control of the sounds and also avoids the possibility of things like the bell getting out of sync with the state the RCMC thinks it should be in.  Given that fact, the RS-Lite Legacy stuff really only works properly with the RCMC or BEMF Legacy boards.

RS 5.5 Legacy boards and RS5 boards for TMCC use the same hardware, the only difference is what is in the socketed chips.  As a rule, you can drive the RS 5.5 boards from a TMCC serial data stream.  I haven't exhaustively tested this, but I have run an RS6 equipped tender from a TMCC data stream without issue.  The only issue I had was I had to invert the sense of the serial data to get it working properly.

Last edited by gunrunnerjohn

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