I picked up a 1000 SX a couple of years ago. I bought it because I needed the monitor that was being sold with it. It came with a 20 Mb hardcard installed. A big money upgrade at the time.
14:10 I can’t believe that having a PC speaker volume control was not standard on computers of this era. I remember not being able to play certain games because it was either too early in the morning or too late at night, and the speaker loudness would have woken everyone up. Easy enough to create one if you know how, but I didn’t.
That was my 2nd comp, had it from 86'-94'. Looooooooved that machine. Eventually got the memory bumped to 512kb and added a 2nd 5 1/4" drive so I could copy stuff (then later replaced one with a 3 1/2"). Lasted through all the Sierra games until they required mice. Wrecked two joysticks for it playing BC's Quest for Tires, Thexder and Silpheed. Also wasted tons of hours with Bubble Ghost, California Raisins and Double Dragon. Never did manage to get the Light Pen for it though. Ran on MSDOS 3.2. Thanks for the memories @VWestlife!
Thank you for sharing that. My memory fails me as to my exact setup, but I know I didn't have much money so pretty sure I never got a second drive for mine. But I played all the Sierra games, was very partial to the police and space quest. And then I found starflight and omg that changed my life forever lol.
I've tricked out my own 1000SX quite a bit. Personally, I don't like the V20 upgrade because one of the biggest strengths of the SX is that it provides 100% compatibility with 4.77mh required software. I've upgraded it with a 286Xpress accelerator -- a 286 on an ISA card -- a 8087 and 80287. The card gives me 4 different speed options -- 8088 @ 4.77 or 7.16mhz, and the 286 @ 7.16mhz with Cache Enabled/Disabled -- all of which can be changed in software or with even with keystrokes if you have the program loaded in memory. I also have a Trackstar-E in it which is an Apple IIe on an ISA card -- essentially making the the Tandy a 2 in 1 PC/Apple computer. I'm using an XT-IDE + IDE-CF adapters, since the only CF-Lite that I could find had a rear slot didn't fit the Tandy. I do still need to get a serial card for it, for mouse support but I was able to find an original boxed smartwatch for it -- I'm glad to see that we have alternatives for that though!
The light pen port was used with dual monitor cad/cam systems, some digitizers for autocad also used it. lots of software used it in fact, software that was all in the 10,000-15,000 $ range which is why most do not/did not know how prolific the light pen was, Ive seen 30 of them in one office :)
... "Tandy 1000SL that you can see on the background there". Like it just happened to be there these days. Well, as every subscriber knows, it was ALWAYS there!. A whole decade of highly enjoyable video content production has been witnessed by that good old guy. Hats off to it.
maybe the memory was upgraded in 1995-1996, almost no one would provide warranty more than 12 months, also it could have been traded in and "refreshed" and resold via tandy
You kids have to know, a lot of people didn’t just waltz into Radio Shack and pick up a PC, they were the number one computer manufacturer and reseller in the US for a few years. I worked as an assistant manager in Montebello, CA and some of the business extended service plans were insanely long, offering limited parts and labor up to 5 years. Back then, a small business wasn’t going to upgrade every year or even couple of years. Computers weren’t disposable either, especially at the prices Tandy was charging. 5 year extended warranties made sense, and I’m sure went well past the point Tandy got out of the computer business in 1993.
@@StevenSmyth The prices on those computers and monitors are insane for 1980's money. It reminds me of exactly why we didn't have a computer at home when I was a kid.
The 1000 SX, the computer (I bought used) that got me through college in the 1990s and my darkest years of poverty. It wasn't fancy, but with a 14.4K modem and a local Freenet, it kept me online. I've had better computers, but this is the one I have nostalgia for. 2:50 - The keyboard may be non-standard, but in terms of quality and durability, it was only bettered by the Model M. 4:30 - I bought an internal bracket and put in a 3.5" drive. The panel cover would no longer fit, but usability beat aesthetics. 6:00 - Yup. Had the cable, connected to my dot matrix. Fun times, seriously.
That’s awesome man. Congrats on getting that old computer running again. I also like the noise of old hard drives. I hope to get a fake sound generator for my win98 box. The SSD is fast but I miss a grinding HDD.
Holy balls, does that POST beep and floppy seek test ever bring me back to my toddler years 😭 What the heck, yours takes only 15 seconds to count up 2 GB of free space? My Epson takes almost that long to count up 60 MB. Maybe because I'm running a mechanical hard drive. Brotip - replace the firmware on the XT-CF card with the "XT+" firmware that takes advantage of 80186/80188-compatible CPUs like the V20. I'd be interested to see if you get even better speed. That's a lot of great info about floppy drive setup tweaks.
I have no idea what you said with about half of that, but omg that sure brought me back to memories of putting a disc in and closing the little switch. I was always so paranoid my data would be erased. Probably cuz I was traumatized from having to use the cassette tape drive on my TRS80.
This was my first PC. I think it was Christmas time 1985. I worked at the local Shack when I was a kid and the owner let me take it home and just took payments out of my checks. Mine came with MS-DOS 3.12 and Deskmate. The onboard 16 color graphics were an amazing value for the time. MIcroprose: F19 stealth, Gunship, and Red Storm Rising . Thanks for this video!
Nice machine. I recently acquired a Tandy 4000 from recycling. Its power supply was dead, so I'm needing to replace that before I can test the rest of the machine.
Nice!! I had a Tandy 1000SX that I bought used in 1992 -- it was all tricked out with everything you mentioned, minus the math coprocessor. And of course, it had a 20MB MFM hard card. I loved playing Sierra games on it -- the Tandy sound and 16 colors were sweet as hell, for its day.
Same with me, man was I ever hooked on police quest and space quest! And also star flight, wow. I never had the money to trick out mine much though, my biggest expenditures was a better modem, and simply the games themselves. Ugh hard to spend 50 bucks on a game working at McDonald's sometimes lol.
For another mouse option, you could also track down an old CoCo color mouse and plug it into joystick port 1. That's what we did with our HX back in the day.
Belleville, NJ...that was my local Radio Shack growing up. It was in a strip mall on Main St. with a Fayva shoe store, Mickey Music record store, Blimpie sandwich shop, Trust Company of NJ bank, Belleville Tobacco where I got a photo with "Macho Man" Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth, Grand Union supermarket, and others. My family's first home computer was bought at that Radio Shack- a Tandy 2500SX. The strip mall is still there, but that Radio Shack is gone.
Awesome!! Inspires me to dig out my Old Tandy 2500 SX/33 I've had for a long time now. One of my friends also recently gave me an old TRS-80 128k Color Computer which I've had loads of fun on so far, I just haven't had a decent way to load other software to it yet haha.
There's a Trs-80 basic software website, yet specific software besides older programming interface is unknown. I was looking up how to operate there pocket computers.
@@tarstarkusz With my 2500, which I agree is just a low-end 386 when it comes down to it(though these are all old machines now anyway), that there are a couple of things supported that I do like about this particular machine: First thing being the 2k compatible clock, which supports from 1/1/1900 to 12/31/2099. Second thing being that I do not need to load bios configuration software from a floppy, this machine has that built into the ROM. Sounds silly, but even my dad's old Packard Bell, which houses a 486 with an 850MB harddisk(I am not sure what any of its other specs are off the top of my head), doesn't support ROM based BIOS configuration. So I guess with it being low-end(again its just going to be a DOS machine anyway) I do like it for what it has to offer otherwise.
@@obsidian9998 I know of a few sources myself, the guy who gave me the old Color Computer 128K has a bunch of his own sources, I just haven't had much of a chance to play around with it further other then writing my own basic programs.
It's crazy to think that there are hundreds of frames in this video, thousands. Each frame is a picture that would have taken me an hour or maybe longer to download on my old 2400 bps modem. Not that my pc from back then could even display all the colors in one of these frames, but it could at least display 256 of them! I take so much modern technology for granted. Still though, I had so much fun tinkering around with that thing. Staying up all night trying to find numbers to dial for new bbs to visit. Spending hours downloading a shareware game, then even more time trying to make it run.
What connection do the floppy drives have? I have this exact computer with dual 5.25" floppy drives, and I am looking to connect the drives to a USB adapter I have, to read my old discs! EDIT: I guess you show the connection at 17:39 and explain it afterwards.
Something that would make old PCs through ATs and clones faster was using faster than minimum speed RAM chips. The key to that was the loose tolerances in the RAM timing windows. For example to do a RAM write the RAM had to be ready no later than Y time but *could be* ready as early as X. The minimum RAM speed specified would put the ready time for reads and writes closer to Y than X. Using faster RAM chips would make the RAM available closer to X than Y, closer to the start of the window than the end. If you installed RAM ridiculously faster than the slowest allowed, like 70ns when 150ns was specified, then the RAM would be 'born ready'. The instant the system started the read or write cycle windows the RAM would be able to provide or accept the data *right then*. Then the next read or write cycle could start as soon as the first one was finished. But in some cases the RAM speed made no difference because the computer was designed with fixed length RAM cycles. For example if the window for the start of a RAM cycle was 20ns long it would wait precisely 20ns for the RAM to be ready to begin - even if the RAM was ready to begin a read or write at 1ns after the cycle start window. Then the rest of the cycle would be set to a fixed time, even if the RAM was able to be read or written in half the time. The computer would sit there for however many nanoseconds twiddling its digital thumbs until the end of the cycle and the next cycle start window. One place you can easily tell the speed difference is in an IBM PC/XT that has the audible ticker and number count on screen during POST. With the 150ns RAM specified it goes *TICK* *TICK* *TICK* *TICK* *TICK* *TICK* *TICK*. Put 70ns RAM chips in and it goes *BBRRRRRRRRRRRRT* because the RAM is always already ready at the very start of every part of a read or write cycle while 150ns is getting close to being too slow. Back in the day, 70ns DRAM chips were hellaciously more expensive than 150ns. I used to scavenge faster chips from dead "Turbo" 8086 clones, 80286 clones and even some early 80386 clones. The same kind of loose RAM timing was often used in the early times of SIMM RAM, but by the advent of the 72 pin SIMMS RAM timings were tightened up a lot so there was little speed to be gained installing RAM much faster than specified. Could get a *little* bump mostly only detectable with benchmark tests.
One of the pins did get a little bent when I was removing it, but it still makes contact and works fine -- it passes a full diagnostic RAM check with no errors.
I used this computer in college up until late 1996. At that point I was mostly using it for word processing (with a dot matrix printer) and very slow internet access through Prodigy.
1000SX machines that shipped with two 5.25 drives had A: on the bottom drive. The one we had is still in the parents’ basement in near mint condition. We Used it from the time we got it in the mid 87 until 92 or so.
The very first computer I owned myself. I sold it back in the days of the 386 to a friend's dad. I was always fearful that I charged him too much for it not fully realizing how much it had depreciated by then. How bizarre that it's probably worth more now than what he paid for it. I had the 2 drive version with the CM-5 monitor and I think I had a Star Gemini 10X printer to go with all that. It came with a full suite of word processing and other office type software. Deskmate I believe.
You should look into getting an IDC crimp tool, ribbon cable on a roll and the connectors to make cables yourself! I've found it to be way easier and reliable, and in the long run, it ends up saving money if you find yourself fixing up stuff from back in the day regularly.
Got one of these cheap a while back and it came with a Tandy-specific hard card, which is miraculous because I never would have found one cheap otherwise. Got a TRS 80 3000 keyboard to use with it, which is pretty badly yellowed
I keep hoping to run across one of these or a PCjr. We had these in my computer class in '87. Funny thing was, they were bought new at that point so I'm guessing the school got a pretty good deal on some old stock. Was my first intro to PC's and GWBasic. Prior to that all I had was my Atari 400 and a tape drive, so everything was an upgrade for me. :)
This take me back we owned a Tandy 1000 TX with 768k of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. It was one of the ISA hard drives on a card. Plus we had a 3rd party keyboard which was an omikey keyboard with dip switches for configuring the keyboard and one of the combinations of the switches made it compatible with a Tandy 1000 computer thanks to a PS2 to Tandy adapter. Also it was a very clicky keyboard. But sadly the keyboard met its sad demise on a base board heater. But our tandy met its sad demise when it refuse to boot anymore because of the hard drive dying. If i still owned that computer I would have replaced it with some sort of flash solution and also the Keyboard was dying as well. We also had the Tandy printer that was capable of printing in color. My dad got a 1200 baud modem so he could do his school work since he went back to college at the time.
Update on my Tandy 1000sx. It now has a ISA IDE to SD card with MSDOS 6.22 and I'm getting DRAM to upgrade it's memory to max at 640K! Update! The Tandy is now at 640KB of memory!
• I've seen some keyboards that have a Sleep key in the same place as that Hold key. That's even worse because instead of just pausing the (ACPI) system, it puts it into standby mode which is not just really annoying, but it adds a power-cycle, and thus wear-and-tear to the components, especially the hard-drive. • If the dust caused problems that bad, I would assume Tandy Labs' "new" tobacco-stained HX will have problems too. ☹ • The stripes don't mark pin 1, they're just a reference to make it easier to plug it in the same way on both ends, so you can plug it in upside down, as long as you do the same on the other end (assuming the cable doesn't have a key-pin). • You like the sound of old hard-drives? 🤨 Including old RLL/MFM drives with interrupters? 🤔
Tandy 1000 SX owner since 7 years, it's really great to see. Mine's mostly full now, serial, 2 lpt, 640k, 31mb rll drive, 360k drive, adlib, etherlink III, rtc, Iomega zip, syquest sparq and a trackball and I also have a couple of questions: I wasn't aware of that dallas rtc, it'll be much more useful than having that isa card taking up a slot. Do they work in any mother boards, or is it just something that works on tandy 1000's ? And also, will you keep that scsi card ? I may buy it off of you if not too expensive (ebay prices are way out of my reach for those...), been looking for an 8bit scsi card with a boot rom that would work in my tandy, I have only 16 bits ones that don't work in it, tho there is still one I haven't tried yet, I'll give that a try later. As for putting a 720k drive, I don't really see the point in doing so, it it for convenience ? If so, why not just put a zip drive or any other big capacity media that can go on a computer like this ? Even if it is an XT there is still a lot of options.
@@chainedenintenloup Try all your 16-bit ISA SCSI cards in the 8-bit slots, just leaving the extra edge conectors hanging... Many cards are actually downward compatible in this way. Sometimes there is an obscure jumper you have to find though.
With the NEC V20 CPU you can use the original Iomega GUEST.EXE Zip drive driver. I have 3.5" floppy drives in all my modern PCs, so having one in the 1000SX makes data transfer very easy.
How did you get the RAM working properly? I bought the same Texas Instruments 4256 10NL chips. I also read that that 15NL should be used. I was wondering what you did.
You can see an example of how Windows 3.0 would run on a machine like this (NEC V-series CPU at 7.16 MHz, CGA graphics) in my video about the Zenith eaZy PC.
I have an RCA to 3.5 mm adapter plugged into mine so I can use headphones on it, and it outputs the same sound as the front speaker... Works good. I just mute the front speaker and use the volume control on my headphones.
Cool the headphone output is a neat trick, that’s my next mod! Yes, my bad, the SX used the SN76489 (if i’m not mistaken) witch does not have DAC capability
@@RemiDupont I recommend using an RCA mono to stereo splitter. (Since the output is just mono.) And then go stereo RCA to 3.5 mini jack. It's just two small adapters you need.
Man I wish I still had my old Tandy computer that I got from a yardsale when I was a kid, but my mom made me give it away to some of her relatives that were visiting from Texas :(
My first DOS computer was an XT, with the MB replaced with a 286 after a few years, so I never owned a Tandy. I was unaware that the Tandy 1000 used the same joysticks as the TRS-80 Color. That was the first computer I ever used. Unlike the Atari and other game systems, the TRS-80 Color joysticks were analog, offering excellent positioning control for games that utilized it. The compact flash card interface is a more elegant internal storage solution than the full length ISA "Plus Hardcard 40" that I installed in an thrift-store sourced NCR PC4, a two floppy all-in-one PC clone. It seems your biggest disappointment with this Tandy 1000SX is the keyboard. It would probably cost more than all your other upgrades combined, but if you can find a Northgate Omnikey, I understand those had dip switch settings that would make them compatible with the Tandy 1000 series, were "clicky", and had a 101-key layout. Looking forward to Part 2... Would love to see a benchmark comparison with and without the math co-processor.
Out of curiosity: why did you insist on making the 3.5" disk drive the A: drive? As far as I know, booter games always came on 5.25" floppies, so wouldn't it be more practical to keep the 5.25" drive as the A: drive? Or did the Tandy 1000 allow booting from either the A: or B: drive? The dual floppy PC we had at home when I was a kid had a BIOS that could only boot from the A: drive, or the hard drive, if one was installed, but not from B:. I know there was this software that allowed you to create a special chain load disk that you would put in the A: drive that would make the computer boot from B:, but that would still be less practical, since you would have to put that helper disk in your primary drive, whenever you would want to boot something in B:.
Oh, I hadn't finished watching the video and had it paused as I was typing my previous response. Just now did I see it boot and it clearly tried to boot from both disk drives consecutively when it did. That's a cool feature! Those Tandy 1000 series were cool machines indeed. 🙂
I have the 3.5" drive set to the A: drive. I just put the 5.25" drive on top because that's how I always saw PCs configured back in the '80s and '90s so it looks better to me that way. Also the Tandy has a neat feature where if you press F3 during the memory test it will swap the A: and B: drives so then I could boot from a 5.25" disk if I wanted to.
I had a Tandy 1000 with 3.5 floppy drive. and it looks like yours on screen. my Tandy 1000 came with a hard drive and some games like: Roboman, Battle Chess, Tetris and some kind of word document with if you can I did find program the Tandy 1000 Hard Drive drive.
VWestlife, I happen to have the Radio Shack Computer Centers 1985 Catalog (copyright 1984) if you want it. It's 64 pages of nothing but their Tandy computer items, including the Tandy 1000 shown as New for '85'. I don't see anything about a Light Pen in it. Let me know.
Great video. I'm in the process of doing many of these upgrades to my 1000 SX right now. I've ordered a math co-processor - I got the C8087-2 with the gold on it. Is there any difference between the ones with the gold and the ones without?
So you could have your program disk in one drive and data disk in the other drive. Or to load large programs or games which required more than one disk to run.
@@vwestlife Right, but was it a matter of necessity or just convenience? Since once the program was loaded into memory, the disk can be ejected and another disk can be inserted for data. And also could the computer copy disks with just 1 drive?
But old computers often didn't have enough RAM to load the entire program into memory, so it would still need to access the disk, for example, to load the spelling checker in a word processor.
I'll bet you're fun at parties :) Just kidding, I loved the information. Our family had one of these when I was 12, so it brought back so many magical memories... Programming in gw basic, playing Thexder, buying my first Sierra graphical adventure game at Radio Shack (Space Quest!) Simpler times.
This is a lot of effort to go through in order to play Leisure Suit Larry and Maniac Mansion! I approve!
Omg I never played Larry much, but I was all over all of the space quest and police quest. Wow those were the days.
Starflight!
i guess I am kinda off topic but does anybody know of a good site to watch newly released movies online ?
I picked up a 1000 SX a couple of years ago. I bought it because I needed the monitor that was being sold with it.
It came with a 20 Mb hardcard installed. A big money upgrade at the time.
14:10 I can’t believe that having a PC speaker volume control was not standard on computers of this era. I remember not being able to play certain games because it was either too early in the morning or too late at night, and the speaker loudness would have woken everyone up. Easy enough to create one if you know how, but I didn’t.
Happy to see you doing the old computer reviews again!
That was my 2nd comp, had it from 86'-94'. Looooooooved that machine. Eventually got the memory bumped to 512kb and added a 2nd 5 1/4" drive so I could copy stuff (then later replaced one with a 3 1/2"). Lasted through all the Sierra games until they required mice. Wrecked two joysticks for it playing BC's Quest for Tires, Thexder and Silpheed. Also wasted tons of hours with Bubble Ghost, California Raisins and Double Dragon. Never did manage to get the Light Pen for it though. Ran on MSDOS 3.2. Thanks for the memories @VWestlife!
Thank you for sharing that. My memory fails me as to my exact setup, but I know I didn't have much money so pretty sure I never got a second drive for mine. But I played all the Sierra games, was very partial to the police and space quest. And then I found starflight and omg that changed my life forever lol.
I've tricked out my own 1000SX quite a bit. Personally, I don't like the V20 upgrade because one of the biggest strengths of the SX is that it provides 100% compatibility with 4.77mh required software. I've upgraded it with a 286Xpress accelerator -- a 286 on an ISA card -- a 8087 and 80287. The card gives me 4 different speed options -- 8088 @ 4.77 or 7.16mhz, and the 286 @ 7.16mhz with Cache Enabled/Disabled -- all of which can be changed in software or with even with keystrokes if you have the program loaded in memory. I also have a Trackstar-E in it which is an Apple IIe on an ISA card -- essentially making the the Tandy a 2 in 1 PC/Apple computer.
I'm using an XT-IDE + IDE-CF adapters, since the only CF-Lite that I could find had a rear slot didn't fit the Tandy. I do still need to get a serial card for it, for mouse support but I was able to find an original boxed smartwatch for it -- I'm glad to see that we have alternatives for that though!
Awesome! I love videos about old computers and especially long videos of such - I hope you do more computers after the Tandy!
The light pen port was used with dual monitor cad/cam systems, some digitizers for autocad also used it. lots of software used it in fact, software that was all in the 10,000-15,000 $ range which is why most do not/did not know how prolific the light pen was, Ive seen 30 of them in one office :)
... "Tandy 1000SL that you can see on the background there". Like it just happened to be there these days. Well, as every subscriber knows, it was ALWAYS there!. A whole decade of highly enjoyable video content production has been witnessed by that good old guy. Hats off to it.
Actually prior to a few years ago it was the 1000RL on the table -- and for a while, the IBM PS/1.
The Bus Mouse was a very classy upgrade for this machine.
Saw that thumbnail and thought this was a Techmoan video.
Why? He's not the only one who uses a white background.
@@vwestlife True XD
White background ?...
Is this a Phil's Computer Lab video ?
not gonna lie the thumbnail tricked me too
lol same here
it feels like it's been forever.....love your channel.......
The light pen was available at their Computer Center stores (11- and 01+ stores). It was special order at 01- stores.
I’m not sure but I think the 6 in 96 may be a 0 so 1990.
Me too :)
But there are other zeroes on the same label and they're not written that way.
maybe the memory was upgraded in 1995-1996, almost no one would provide warranty more than 12 months, also it could have been traded in and "refreshed" and resold via tandy
You kids have to know, a lot of people didn’t just waltz into Radio Shack and pick up a PC, they were the number one computer manufacturer and reseller in the US for a few years. I worked as an assistant manager in Montebello, CA and some of the business extended service plans were insanely long, offering limited parts and labor up to 5 years. Back then, a small business wasn’t going to upgrade every year or even couple of years. Computers weren’t disposable either, especially at the prices Tandy was charging. 5 year extended warranties made sense, and I’m sure went well past the point Tandy got out of the computer business in 1993.
@@StevenSmyth The prices on those computers and monitors are insane for 1980's money. It reminds me of exactly why we didn't have a computer at home when I was a kid.
A great video as always. These older systems are great fun.
Can't wait for Part 2: Electric Boogaloo
Electric Boogaloo? What's that?
@@Lachlant1984 a movie and a allways sunny joke
Great job and commentary. Be sure to rewind the CF card every week.
The 1000 SX, the computer (I bought used) that got me through college in the 1990s and my darkest years of poverty. It wasn't fancy, but with a 14.4K modem and a local Freenet, it kept me online. I've had better computers, but this is the one I have nostalgia for.
2:50 - The keyboard may be non-standard, but in terms of quality and durability, it was only bettered by the Model M.
4:30 - I bought an internal bracket and put in a 3.5" drive. The panel cover would no longer fit, but usability beat aesthetics.
6:00 - Yup. Had the cable, connected to my dot matrix. Fun times, seriously.
That’s awesome man. Congrats on getting that old computer running again. I also like the noise of old hard drives. I hope to get a fake sound generator for my win98 box. The SSD is fast but I miss a grinding HDD.
What a nice comprehensive video on a classic... thank you!
Fantastic video; I love it! Great job!
The SX is an awesome PC in the Tandy range!
Holy balls, does that POST beep and floppy seek test ever bring me back to my toddler years 😭
What the heck, yours takes only 15 seconds to count up 2 GB of free space? My Epson takes almost that long to count up 60 MB. Maybe because I'm running a mechanical hard drive. Brotip - replace the firmware on the XT-CF card with the "XT+" firmware that takes advantage of 80186/80188-compatible CPUs like the V20. I'd be interested to see if you get even better speed.
That's a lot of great info about floppy drive setup tweaks.
I can also try enabling DMA mode. I'll cover that in Part 2.
I have no idea what you said with about half of that, but omg that sure brought me back to memories of putting a disc in and closing the little switch. I was always so paranoid my data would be erased. Probably cuz I was traumatized from having to use the cassette tape drive on my TRS80.
This brought back some memories...
I see VWestlife video, I give thumbs up. I’m a simple man!!
This was my first PC. I think it was Christmas time 1985. I worked at the local Shack when I was a kid and the owner let me take it home and just took payments out of my checks. Mine came with MS-DOS 3.12 and Deskmate. The onboard 16 color graphics were an amazing value for the time. MIcroprose: F19 stealth, Gunship, and Red Storm Rising . Thanks for this video!
Nice machine. I recently acquired a Tandy 4000 from recycling. Its power supply was dead, so I'm needing to replace that before I can test the rest of the machine.
If you have a Murphys in proximity, you might find a replacement.
Or replacement components.
Were you able to find it yet?
Nice!! I had a Tandy 1000SX that I bought used in 1992 -- it was all tricked out with everything you mentioned, minus the math coprocessor. And of course, it had a 20MB MFM hard card. I loved playing Sierra games on it -- the Tandy sound and 16 colors were sweet as hell, for its day.
Same with me, man was I ever hooked on police quest and space quest! And also star flight, wow. I never had the money to trick out mine much though, my biggest expenditures was a better modem, and simply the games themselves. Ugh hard to spend 50 bucks on a game working at McDonald's sometimes lol.
The 1000SL was my first computer and I have been looking for one for a while now.
This video has inspired me to clean up my Tandy 1000sx.
great video on these very cool tandy computers which i am new to..wish i had your computer now how !
Please continue! I have my Tandy 1000sx and monitor waiting for Resurrection
For another mouse option, you could also track down an old CoCo color mouse and plug it into joystick port 1. That's what we did with our HX back in the day.
Nice! This is the model i'd want if i had room for a Tandy 1000
I love the form factor of that computer. I used to have a 1000 EX and dreamed about having one of these.
Belleville, NJ...that was my local Radio Shack growing up. It was in a strip mall on Main St. with a Fayva shoe store, Mickey Music record store, Blimpie sandwich shop, Trust Company of NJ bank, Belleville Tobacco where I got a photo with "Macho Man" Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth, Grand Union supermarket, and others. My family's first home computer was bought at that Radio Shack- a Tandy 2500SX. The strip mall is still there, but that Radio Shack is gone.
Awesome!! Inspires me to dig out my Old Tandy 2500 SX/33 I've had for a long time now. One of my friends also recently gave me an old TRS-80 128k Color Computer which I've had loads of fun on so far, I just haven't had a decent way to load other software to it yet haha.
There's a Trs-80 basic software website, yet specific software besides older programming interface is unknown. I was looking up how to operate there pocket computers.
@@tarstarkusz With my 2500, which I agree is just a low-end 386 when it comes down to it(though these are all old machines now anyway), that there are a couple of things supported that I do like about this particular machine: First thing being the 2k compatible clock, which supports from 1/1/1900 to 12/31/2099. Second thing being that I do not need to load bios configuration software from a floppy, this machine has that built into the ROM. Sounds silly, but even my dad's old Packard Bell, which houses a 486 with an 850MB harddisk(I am not sure what any of its other specs are off the top of my head), doesn't support ROM based BIOS configuration. So I guess with it being low-end(again its just going to be a DOS machine anyway) I do like it for what it has to offer otherwise.
@@obsidian9998 I know of a few sources myself, the guy who gave me the old Color Computer 128K has a bunch of his own sources, I just haven't had much of a chance to play around with it further other then writing my own basic programs.
@ 13:08 - Pin 1 of IC7 TMS4256 (second row from the top, at the left) doesn't seem to be properly connected, looks like it's out of the socket...
No, all of the pins are properly connected.
It's crazy to think that there are hundreds of frames in this video, thousands. Each frame is a picture that would have taken me an hour or maybe longer to download on my old 2400 bps modem. Not that my pc from back then could even display all the colors in one of these frames, but it could at least display 256 of them! I take so much modern technology for granted. Still though, I had so much fun tinkering around with that thing. Staying up all night trying to find numbers to dial for new bbs to visit. Spending hours downloading a shareware game, then even more time trying to make it run.
Amazing video. So well done.
...and thanks so much for sharing all of this!
Too bad you couldn’t have found one of those floppy drives for the Bondwell laptops you had. I would love to have seen those work.
The floppy drives were the least of that computer's problems!
Love it! I'd still love to get my hands on an old TL/2, RLX HD, and/or RSX HD!
What connection do the floppy drives have? I have this exact computer with dual 5.25" floppy drives, and I am looking to connect the drives to a USB adapter I have, to read my old discs! EDIT: I guess you show the connection at 17:39 and explain it afterwards.
Something that would make old PCs through ATs and clones faster was using faster than minimum speed RAM chips. The key to that was the loose tolerances in the RAM timing windows.
For example to do a RAM write the RAM had to be ready no later than Y time but *could be* ready as early as X. The minimum RAM speed specified would put the ready time for reads and writes closer to Y than X.
Using faster RAM chips would make the RAM available closer to X than Y, closer to the start of the window than the end. If you installed RAM ridiculously faster than the slowest allowed, like 70ns when 150ns was specified, then the RAM would be 'born ready'. The instant the system started the read or write cycle windows the RAM would be able to provide or accept the data *right then*.
Then the next read or write cycle could start as soon as the first one was finished.
But in some cases the RAM speed made no difference because the computer was designed with fixed length RAM cycles. For example if the window for the start of a RAM cycle was 20ns long it would wait precisely 20ns for the RAM to be ready to begin - even if the RAM was ready to begin a read or write at 1ns after the cycle start window. Then the rest of the cycle would be set to a fixed time, even if the RAM was able to be read or written in half the time. The computer would sit there for however many nanoseconds twiddling its digital thumbs until the end of the cycle and the next cycle start window.
One place you can easily tell the speed difference is in an IBM PC/XT that has the audible ticker and number count on screen during POST. With the 150ns RAM specified it goes *TICK* *TICK* *TICK* *TICK* *TICK* *TICK* *TICK*. Put 70ns RAM chips in and it goes *BBRRRRRRRRRRRRT* because the RAM is always already ready at the very start of every part of a read or write cycle while 150ns is getting close to being too slow.
Back in the day, 70ns DRAM chips were hellaciously more expensive than 150ns. I used to scavenge faster chips from dead "Turbo" 8086 clones, 80286 clones and even some early 80386 clones.
The same kind of loose RAM timing was often used in the early times of SIMM RAM, but by the advent of the 72 pin SIMMS RAM timings were tightened up a lot so there was little speed to be gained installing RAM much faster than specified. Could get a *little* bump mostly only detectable with benchmark tests.
Hi. Looks like a pin is not in on one of the RAM chips on the 2nd bank, closest to the vent slots.
yep, 12:55
One of the pins did get a little bent when I was removing it, but it still makes contact and works fine -- it passes a full diagnostic RAM check with no errors.
Damn this reminds me of the never ending hunt for better ram chips for each computer I had. Lol
I used this computer in college up until late 1996. At that point I was mostly using it for word processing (with a dot matrix printer) and very slow internet access through Prodigy.
Could you please show that SCSI drive in action (in part III maybe)?
1000SX machines that shipped with two 5.25 drives had A: on the bottom drive. The one we had is still in the parents’ basement in near mint condition. We Used it from the time we got it in the mid 87 until 92 or so.
I've seen them both ways, with the A: drive at either the bottom or top.
The very first computer I owned myself. I sold it back in the days of the 386 to a friend's dad. I was always fearful that I charged him too much for it not fully realizing how much it had depreciated by then. How bizarre that it's probably worth more now than what he paid for it. I had the 2 drive version with the CM-5 monitor and I think I had a Star Gemini 10X printer to go with all that. It came with a full suite of word processing and other office type software. Deskmate I believe.
I remember those printers. I can't recall the brand I had, but yeah really loved my dot matrix.
You should look into getting an IDC crimp tool, ribbon cable on a roll and the connectors to make cables yourself! I've found it to be way easier and reliable, and in the long run, it ends up saving money if you find yourself fixing up stuff from back in the day regularly.
Got one of these cheap a while back and it came with a Tandy-specific hard card, which is miraculous because I never would have found one cheap otherwise. Got a TRS 80 3000 keyboard to use with it, which is pretty badly yellowed
My first computer was a hand-me-down Tandy 1000EX, this was in the early 90s.
Do you have a patreon? ...I am extremely thankful for the thoroughness of your content. It is unrivaled on this platform.
No.
I keep hoping to run across one of these or a PCjr. We had these in my computer class in '87. Funny thing was, they were bought new at that point so I'm guessing the school got a pretty good deal on some old stock. Was my first intro to PC's and GWBasic. Prior to that all I had was my Atari 400 and a tape drive, so everything was an upgrade for me. :)
I had a cassette tape drive for my TRS 80. Boy was that thing a headache!
Great Machine. Great Video.
This take me back we owned a Tandy 1000 TX with 768k of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. It was one of the ISA hard drives on a card. Plus we had a 3rd party keyboard which was an omikey keyboard with dip switches for configuring the keyboard and one of the combinations of the switches made it compatible with a Tandy 1000 computer thanks to a PS2 to Tandy adapter. Also it was a very clicky keyboard. But sadly the keyboard met its sad demise on a base board heater. But our tandy met its sad demise when it refuse to boot anymore because of the hard drive dying. If i still owned that computer I would have replaced it with some sort of flash solution and also the Keyboard was dying as well. We also had the Tandy printer that was capable of printing in color. My dad got a 1200 baud modem so he could do his school work since he went back to college at the time.
Update on my Tandy 1000sx. It now has a ISA IDE to SD card with MSDOS 6.22 and I'm getting DRAM to upgrade it's memory to max at 640K!
Update! The Tandy is now at 640KB of memory!
• I've seen some keyboards that have a Sleep key in the same place as that Hold key. That's even worse because instead of just pausing the (ACPI) system, it puts it into standby mode which is not just really annoying, but it adds a power-cycle, and thus wear-and-tear to the components, especially the hard-drive.
• If the dust caused problems that bad, I would assume Tandy Labs' "new" tobacco-stained HX will have problems too. ☹
• The stripes don't mark pin 1, they're just a reference to make it easier to plug it in the same way on both ends, so you can plug it in upside down, as long as you do the same on the other end (assuming the cable doesn't have a key-pin).
• You like the sound of old hard-drives? 🤨 Including old RLL/MFM drives with interrupters? 🤔
Part 2 still in the works?
Yes.
@@vwestlife PLEASE Put up part 2!!
Tandy 1000 SX owner since 7 years, it's really great to see. Mine's mostly full now, serial, 2 lpt, 640k, 31mb rll drive, 360k drive, adlib, etherlink III, rtc, Iomega zip, syquest sparq and a trackball and I also have a couple of questions:
I wasn't aware of that dallas rtc, it'll be much more useful than having that isa card taking up a slot. Do they work in any mother boards, or is it just something that works on tandy 1000's ?
And also, will you keep that scsi card ? I may buy it off of you if not too expensive (ebay prices are way out of my reach for those...), been looking for an 8bit scsi card with a boot rom that would work in my tandy, I have only 16 bits ones that don't work in it, tho there is still one I haven't tried yet, I'll give that a try later.
As for putting a 720k drive, I don't really see the point in doing so, it it for convenience ? If so, why not just put a zip drive or any other big capacity media that can go on a computer like this ? Even if it is an XT there is still a lot of options.
Holy crap, there was an Iomega Zip drive that worked on the SX? (SCSI?) Didn't they show up in the mid-90s?
@@TrackZero No, I use the parallel version, there was a third party driver made for xt class cpus.
@@chainedenintenloup
Try all your 16-bit ISA SCSI cards in the 8-bit slots, just leaving the extra edge conectors hanging...
Many cards are actually downward compatible in this way.
Sometimes there is an obscure jumper you have to find though.
@@chainedenintenloup Nice!
With the NEC V20 CPU you can use the original Iomega GUEST.EXE Zip drive driver. I have 3.5" floppy drives in all my modern PCs, so having one in the 1000SX makes data transfer very easy.
The number 5291 at 17:43 probably means that it was manufactured in the last (52nd) week of 1991.
Wow good detail, that's pretty cool. So do you know where these were manufactured? Or at least assembled?
How did you get the RAM working properly? I bought the same Texas Instruments 4256 10NL chips. I also read that that 15NL should be used. I was wondering what you did.
7:27 i think this is 90 not 96
But there are other zeroes on the same label and they're not written that way.
@@vwestlifeare they handwritten or stamped? Cause if they are handwritten it could be a goof.
I need a V20 and XT-CF adapter for mine, fortunately it already has a 3.5 inch drive, albeit 720k.
Does that SCSI hard drive work? I don't think you've demonstrated it.
Really cool! Would windows 3.11 work on it?
No. The newest version of Windows you can run on it is 3.0.
You can see an example of how Windows 3.0 would run on a machine like this (NEC V-series CPU at 7.16 MHz, CGA graphics) in my video about the Zenith eaZy PC.
Did you ever make part 2?
Not yet.
Love that machine, it’s just to bad that the audio out port is only outputting one of the 3 voices (4 with the DAC)
The 1000SX does not have the DAC. That feature was introduced with the SL/TL and later models.
I have an RCA to 3.5 mm adapter plugged into mine so I can use headphones on it, and it outputs the same sound as the front speaker... Works good. I just mute the front speaker and use the volume control on my headphones.
Cool the headphone output is a neat trick, that’s my next mod!
Yes, my bad, the SX used the SN76489 (if i’m not mistaken) witch does not have DAC capability
@@RemiDupont I recommend using an RCA mono to stereo splitter. (Since the output is just mono.) And then go stereo RCA to 3.5 mini jack. It's just two small adapters you need.
That PC was used for the POS
I worked for RS, I know a lot about the company and the parts
It would be great if you could demonstrate a gotek drive on an old PC machine!
MMMMMMMMH! BEAUTIFUL MINI TOWER!
Nice! Are you coming back to vintage computers?
I never left them.
Of funny! I put an inport Microsoft mouse in my SX as well. Just feels like it fits! Nice and period-specific.
I wonder i you could solder in second CF card connector onto that XT IDE card and use them as master and slave at the same time.
No, you can only use one of them at a time.
Not that you can't have insane drive space in logical drives already given the relatively tiny size of programs.
Nice video. Out of curiosity would you ever do videos on old Macintosh computers?
Yes.
i cant find anything like that ide to card edge adapter, has anyone else been able to find one?
It's not IDE, so maybe that's why you can't find one. It is a 34-pin floppy drive connector. (IDE is 40 pins and is not used for floppy drives.)
Great video. I wonder if that CF benchmark was bottlenecked by the hardware it is plugged into haha.
Man I wish I still had my old Tandy computer that I got from a yardsale when I was a kid, but my mom made me give it away to some of her relatives that were visiting from Texas :(
I love this type of videos 🙌😏👍
that was simular to one of my first PC's i had and learnt on
My first DOS computer was an XT, with the MB replaced with a 286 after a few years, so I never owned a Tandy. I was unaware that the Tandy 1000 used the same joysticks as the TRS-80 Color. That was the first computer I ever used. Unlike the Atari and other game systems, the TRS-80 Color joysticks were analog, offering excellent positioning control for games that utilized it.
The compact flash card interface is a more elegant internal storage solution than the full length ISA "Plus Hardcard 40" that I installed in an thrift-store sourced NCR PC4, a two floppy all-in-one PC clone.
It seems your biggest disappointment with this Tandy 1000SX is the keyboard. It would probably cost more than all your other upgrades combined, but if you can find a Northgate Omnikey, I understand those had dip switch settings that would make them compatible with the Tandy 1000 series, were "clicky", and had a 101-key layout.
Looking forward to Part 2... Would love to see a benchmark comparison with and without the math co-processor.
Out of curiosity: why did you insist on making the 3.5" disk drive the A: drive? As far as I know, booter games always came on 5.25" floppies, so wouldn't it be more practical to keep the 5.25" drive as the A: drive? Or did the Tandy 1000 allow booting from either the A: or B: drive? The dual floppy PC we had at home when I was a kid had a BIOS that could only boot from the A: drive, or the hard drive, if one was installed, but not from B:. I know there was this software that allowed you to create a special chain load disk that you would put in the A: drive that would make the computer boot from B:, but that would still be less practical, since you would have to put that helper disk in your primary drive, whenever you would want to boot something in B:.
Oh, I hadn't finished watching the video and had it paused as I was typing my previous response. Just now did I see it boot and it clearly tried to boot from both disk drives consecutively when it did. That's a cool feature! Those Tandy 1000 series were cool machines indeed. 🙂
I have the 3.5" drive set to the A: drive. I just put the 5.25" drive on top because that's how I always saw PCs configured back in the '80s and '90s so it looks better to me that way. Also the Tandy has a neat feature where if you press F3 during the memory test it will swap the A: and B: drives so then I could boot from a 5.25" disk if I wanted to.
I had a Tandy 1000 with 3.5 floppy drive. and it looks like yours on screen.
my Tandy 1000 came with a hard drive and some games like: Roboman, Battle Chess, Tetris and some kind of word document with if you can I did find program the Tandy 1000 Hard Drive drive.
Did you ever get a Gotek working on the SX? Much as I tried, I simple could not get it to work.
I have never used a Gotek.
VWestlife, I happen to have the Radio Shack Computer Centers 1985 Catalog (copyright 1984) if you want it. It's 64 pages of nothing but their Tandy computer items, including the Tandy 1000 shown as New for '85'. I don't see anything about a Light Pen in it. Let me know.
I already have it, plus it's online at www.radioshackcatalogs.com
Great video. I'm in the process of doing many of these upgrades to my 1000 SX right now. I've ordered a math co-processor - I got the C8087-2 with the gold on it. Is there any difference between the ones with the gold and the ones without?
Does the SX take the same math co-processor as the TX?
No, it takes an 8087 co-processor while the 1000TX (which has an 80286 CPU) uses the 80287.
Any news on Part2?
Eventually.
Did you ever get the math coprocessor? If so did it make a difference? Thanks
I did a video about it. See my video about the 8087 chip.
@@vwestlife thanks I found it!
@@vwestlife I won't be installing either.
That adress at NJ is now a Subs Store "Blimpie"
I put a V20 cpu in my Tandy 1000A but it still feels slow. Wish I could find a turbo mod for it.
Watch EEVBlog's video about it.
So what was the point of the dual drives model with 2 same floppy drives?
So you could have your program disk in one drive and data disk in the other drive. Or to load large programs or games which required more than one disk to run.
@@vwestlife Right, but was it a matter of necessity or just convenience? Since once the program was loaded into memory, the disk can be ejected and another disk can be inserted for data. And also could the computer copy disks with just 1 drive?
But old computers often didn't have enough RAM to load the entire program into memory, so it would still need to access the disk, for example, to load the spelling checker in a word processor.
Love the video! Thanks!
13:16 Bent pin on one of those RAM chips
Yes, but it's still making contact, so it's fine. I didn't want to bend it back, for fear of snapping it off.
Pretty sure that doesn't say 96 on the warranty sticker but 90...
I'll bet you're fun at parties :) Just kidding, I loved the information. Our family had one of these when I was 12, so it brought back so many magical memories... Programming in gw basic, playing Thexder, buying my first Sierra graphical adventure game at Radio Shack (Space Quest!) Simpler times.
Still have my Tandy 1000 with two 5.25 floppies; RAM upgraded to 384K.
What can this be used for?
Old games and fun.
VWestlife Yeh. I have an old one upstairs which has real pinball on it I don't recall the make and model.
Had the NEC CPU, math coprocessor, 640 memory and a 10 MB hard drive. Later I added a 1.44 MB floppy.