Firing Up a Tandy 1000TL
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 มิ.ย. 2024
- #notseptandy #tandy #pc While working away at my SWTPC PR40 video I decided to take a break and fire up this Tandy 1000 TL I bought for $40. The TL was the first computer I ran my BBS on and this one more or less is exactly the same. Nothing groundbreaking here; just a fun little diversion.
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The SWTPC PR40 printer video is almost there.. it's been a bit of a process getting a 45 year old printer working! Thankfully it's just down to editing now. Whilst working on that I decided to fire up this cheapo Tandy 1000TL, convinced it would yield some interesting repair footage - alas, it worked perfectly! Can't win. :)
Anything Tandy makes me smile. I spent so many hours in the stores. My fondest memories.
I still have my original Tandy 1000TL that I purchased new in 1989. It's set up in my office for retro DOS games. It still works perfectly. At the time, I didn't really need VGA graphics. It wasn't until 2 years later when KQ5 and SQ4 came out that VGA really became almost necessary. I did play along with 16 color versions of Sierra titles until I finally had to upgrade in 1993. The empty ram slots are to upgrade to 768K of memory.
I had one of these and used it from 1990 to 1994!
5th!
Seriously, though, I have fond memories of this series. I received a Tandy 1000 SL for Christmas in 1988. I continued to use it until 1993 or so when I upgraded to a 486. Sadly, Tandy cut corners on the SL by not shipping with a full 640K of RAM, and then using main memory for the video system. A hard drive an "optional extra". At the same time, Deskmate was very easy to use; it was my first ever encounter with a GUI. Having DOS in ROM made it very fast to boot. I was also able to use my Coco joystick in lieu of a mouse. Tandy graphics were amazing, but not widely supported.
Yeah the SL is seriously cut rate. I mean, I get it.. thats what they were going for, and given how expensive hardware was in general I guess you had limited options for paring back.
I found mine in a electronics rcycaler we all went to in the US. I was over there visiting some friends with my partner. Grabbed a load of other goodies to. Getting it all back was interesting. But mine survived going in a suit case with not much padding other than a blanket & a few other heavy goods all the way to the UK. Hooked it up to a step down transformer & my IBM 5150 monitor & keyboard & it worked. Was a good find as they don't exist in the UK.
The freakin' 1000 TL. One of the prizes of my collection. The first PC I had was an old Packard Bell PB500 turbo XT clone, with CGA. The 1000 TL is the XT class machine I wish I had back then because of course the 3-voice chip for sq. wave sound, the 8-bit Tandy DAC for digitized sound, and the TGA II graphics. It came with CM-5 monitor. Took me awhile to find a good CM-11 monitor, this monitor I found came with a 1000 SL. Or was it the other way around?
Upgraded with the 128k video RAM expansion and 80287 math co-processor. Too bad nobody has figured out a way to use it for anything other than video, the motherboard architecture doesn't seem to allow for any other use. Has of course the XT-IDE and CF card solution.
I've had it for about 6 years, have been using it semi-frequently. At least once a month. Playing around with TASM and Turbo C or playing some games.
Only troubles I've had was the floppy disk drive took a dump shortly after obtaining the machine. Can't believe i managed to find an actual replacement floppy disk drive, but I did. Still going strong. If this drive ever dies, I know how to make a legit new floppy cable for a standard 1.44 mb drive, and I know how to edit Sergey's FDC BIOS to disable the 1000 TL's onboard FDC, and use the fantastic Sergey FDC card. Already did it with the 1000 SL. The FDC enable/disable in the Tandy 1000 SL/TL setup programs do absolutely jack shit.
For shits and giggles, I ripped some CD music to 8-bit WAV files, copied them to the CF card, and used the 1000 TL as jukebox. About 30mb on average per song. On a period correct HDD, just one of the WAV files would have been the entire HDD.
Yes. Another Tech Time Traveller video. For me the appeal of the Tandy 1000 series is the fact that they are the only PC clones that weren't just generic interchangeable PCs. You tell me you have an NCR or Dell or whatever 286, I can't tell you anything about it aside from the processor. Tell me you have a Tandy TL/2, and I know what your computer is, what the case looks like, what the base specs would be...they were like the (80s) Apple of the PC clone world back then in some ways. These later 1000 models have the exact same appeal to me as like, an IBM PS/2 machine or something of that sort. Specific models with specific, sometimes unique features, consistent design language etc. They're just special. I've often considered purging my XT clone machines and not once have any of the Tandys been on the chopping block. The Radio Shack nostalgia aspect certainly doesn't hurt, either.
I have an RL that I Love , I got Leisure suet Larry , I got the Geo 3 and Breadbox GUI . Great computer .
I had a Tandy 1000 TL/2 growing up and I miss that computer so much. I often think about picking up that computer again. Would love to get the Tandy 1000 TL/3 since it has the faster CPU.
In 1988 we had Tandy 1000 SX computers to do homework on. Two 5.25 floppy drives, 512 megs of ram. 20 meg hard drive on a card. Ran Lotus 1-2-3 and I think Word Perfect. I don't remember the video, maybe CGA or VGA. We connected to BITNET, not regular Internet. The computer was an XT compatible.
You mean “512 kb” of RAM… 😉
I sold lots of the Tandy PC's back in the day as an employee or Radio Shack. Fun machines.
They really do have kind of a unique personality to them.
I actually had one of these with a 20MB Western Digital hard disk...and I received it infected with AntiEXE. It had a matching Tandy CGA monitor and a Microswitch keyboard.
I had a Tandy 1000EX back in the day. Loved that computer. I upgraded it from 256k to 384k RAM, and from a 640k 5 1/4" floppy to a 1.44m 3 1/2" floppy.
2:50 I had one of these when I was a kid! it was one of the first IBM Xt clones that was 350$ or so new. I loved it. I had a 10mb MFM drive that I could not put in the case, wires went out the back
Also, it looks like that Future Classics game is using a custom EGA palette, something you don't see very often!
way cool you got a working tandy system I have a 2500 sx I had a he!! of a time getting to work, but i did. I just got a vary nice 1000 TL with a Hdd card and drive I plan to do a video on soon. Thanks for posting this video.
Cool! This was my first computer. But I didn’t like that the standard 5 1/4” floppy drive did not work. It needed a piece of tape on the plug to prevent a short circuit.
Re: the "missing" bank of memory: TLs shipped with 640k, of which 128k is actually "owned" by the video chip and shared with the CPU to backfill on top of whatever memory it "owns". (Which in this case is the two banks of 256k under the row that has the four filled slots and four empty sockets.) Because at minimum the system has to use 16K of that RAM to emulate CGA graphics (more for the Tandy-specific modes) a "640k" Tandy 1000 doesn't have 640k for DOS, at best it has 624K. (I think TLs actually may reserve even more than that by default, their behavior is a little different than the "X"-series 1000s I'm more familiar with.)
If you fill those empty sockets with 4x 41464 RAM chips (64kx4 bit) so it has "768k" (that's what the BIOS will say) the RAM owned by the video chip will no longer be shared with DOS and you'll have a real 640k machine. It'll also *slightly* speed the machine up in the rare circumstance you fill RAM up enough you're running code in the shared memory because that's slower than the CPU-owned RAM.
That said I'm not sure what the deal is with the video corruption you're seeing, it should work "fine" without the upgrade.
Very nice. I have a TL/3. I’m missing that little steel tray for the empty 3.5” drive bay slot that should be inside. I’ll probably never find one.
Tried to comment earlier, but I guess it didn't save. Great video - especially for someone like me here in Fort Worth where the Tandy name gets lots of love.
TH-cam has been assassinating comments left and right lately. Before it was just links.. now it's pretty much entirely random. So frustrating! Thanks for trying again!
"Arctic Fox" was a game i enjoyed on the 1000EX in Tandy 16 color mode. I only won the game ONCE in all the times I played, then couldn't do it a second time.
Thexder 2 makes great use of Tandy 3 voice plus dac (three voice for music and dac for effects).
16:00 Ahhh vintage electronics detonation, even makes me jump as someone who has been an electronics nerd for life (especially with high voltages and very high voltages [100kV+]) and is used to things blowing up. Those tantalum bastard caps in older electronics are...well, bastards, or if it's not that it's some other device that has turned into a resistor that isn't supposed to be a resistor, or a venting filter cap and 3 hours airing the room out trying to get rid of the smell :D
kingdom for a game!
are those 2.5d ish views pre-rendered, not many possible floor configurations to render then display, from bitmaps/compressed
You should check from 5 volts to ground not to the 12 volt line for shorts. I have the 1000TX the TL's older brother.
Tandy acquired GRiD in the late 1980s.
That case would be great for a sleeper pc or at least an upgraded system from that era
just an old trick, you can take an 1.44mb floppy and tape over the hole in the top right corner and then you can format that disk to 720k with the tandy drive.
I remember this trick now! Fortunately I have a stock of about 200 new 720k disks. It's the 1.44s that I seem to be weirdly short of.
All the TLs are missing those chips. If you count it up, you most likely have 768k of RAM total. 128k of graphics ram and 640k of conventional RAM. I have this same machine and it is configured the same way.
Running the PSU without load may not be the very best idea, is it?
Blowing caps? The term is "spitzen-sparken".
This computer was badly obsolete in 1991.
First
second..?
Odd. I always thought Tandy looked like a toy and seemed kind of fake.
I definitely agree on the first generation models.. especially that hideous white Tandy keyboard. The SL/TL/RL still radiate cheapness but I do recall some serious businesses including our school using them.
@@TechTimeTraveller To be fair, at that time i was still a die-hard Apple guy. How times have changed...
@@TechTimeTraveller Boo! That weird keyboard that came on the pre-xL Tandy 1000s was part of the charm! ;)
It was completely apropos that Tandy reused the keyboard from their original failed attempt to beat the IBM PC with "superior technology", IE, the Tandy 2000, on the 1000, which technically isn't a clone of the PC but of the PCjr, a machine that was intentionally sabotaged by IBM to make sure it *couldn't* substitute for the real thing. Somehow the Tandy 1000 succeeded in spite of quite literally being made of bad ideas. And then Tandy just couldn't stop being weird, churning out the EX and HX in that mutant giant TRS-80 Color Computer form-factor case, and of course the TX, effectively a PCjr with a 286 CPU upgrade...
Personally I'm not really fond of the SL/TL series mainly because, well, by 1989 Tandy really should have known the joke, as funny as it was, was over. They certainly still managed to move plenty of them but they weren't really a good deal anymore; a smart shopper could pretty easily get a real AT clone for the price of a TL. Schools ended up with them for the same reason they were still buying Apple IIe's into the 1990's, contracts and inertia.
*yelling at screen* UNPLUG THE REMAINS OF THE VIDEO CONNECTOR FIRST!
I did but I see that may not have made the cut.