Our Old Panasonic Computer Was a Tandy
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- Опубліковано 6 лип 2024
- #tandy #retrotechnology #computer I've been looking for a Tandy.. er.. Panasonic Business Partner like the one that was our first VGA-enabled computer back in 1990. But they're kind of scarce. So I got the machine behind the badge - a Tandy. Specifically a 2500XL. And this seems pretty close to what I remember... I think.
00:00 Usual excuses for not finishing the 1974 Terminal video
00:57 I'm not collecting x86s. No. Really.
02:36 I want VGA
03:44 The Tandy we never knew we had
08:38 Looking over my Tandy 2500XL
11:38 Opening it up
11:56 The Tandy Lander
12:17 Tour of the inside
13:27 Replacing the Dallas RTC
17:15 Reassembling and firing up (attempt No. 1)
18:58 Hard Drives and BIOS troubles
27:44 Reassembling and firing up (attempt No. 2)
28:38 Death of a Floppy Drive
30:10 Ontrack(tm) at last
30:48 Reassembling and firing up w/IBM 8513 (for the last time)
32:50 Ski or Die
38:09 Mean Streets
41:15 Test Drive 3
41:56 PC Paintbrush IV
44:36 Tandy sound check!
50:00 Conclusion
° Background music provided by:
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° Hangout/tip jar.
/ techtimetraveller - Наука та технологія
Warning: I did try to make sure CRT whine wasn't heard, for the benefit of younger viewers. I cannot hear it, and the 15khz frequency isn't showing up on my Spectroid app, so I'm hopeful it's not present here. But be advised it may show up around 35:20.
Also - I bought that Grid 300 SX that was sitting on ebay. If anyone encounters a Panasonic Business Partner similar in design to my 2500 that's for sale, please let me know! Definitely still want one!
I cant hear it on my Bose headphones.
Any effort on this is deeply appreciated. I think I'm too old now to hear it but it tweaked my sensory issues something awful when I could.
@@50shadesofbeige88 Excellent. It's hard to verify something you can't hear.
i'm 28 and can (luckily?) still hear crt whine. A few years ago I left a kind comment on vwestlife's channel about being able to hear CRT whine in the whole video, and how it made it pretty much unlistenable for me. He reacted with such vitriol it was astounding, as he accused me of just being a sensitive young person and that I should either learn to deal with it or quit watching. Thank you for doing your best (and it worked!) to not alienate a younger audience with your elitism and lack of empathy for something as basic as an annoying noise. You're the man! I love the creativity behind your videos.
@@Yordleton I'm not going to excuse that response, as it is really not that difficult to remove that sound from a recording.
But there is a bit of perspective involved here. People of his (and my) age grew up with this high pitched sound being there much of the time, and had to learn to block it out, which people generally can do. From that point of view, it becomes a lot more difficult to see this as a problem.
I have been able to block out this sound for as long as I can remember, had to consciously pay attention to hear it, this in spite of my hearing being pretty good, and having been much better when I was younger (nowadays, I can just hear the 15khz whine when close to a crt, when I was your age, I could hear it from a few rooms away, or at times even while being outside and walking past a house with a TV turned on inside). Its not like I didn't hear it, just that my brain blocked it out.
There is something somewhat important to that. What you hear is not really what your ears register, it is your brain's interpretation of what your ears hear, and it is possible to learn to modify how your brain interprets things. That is also a large part of what people deeply involved in audio call a 'trained ear' (so.. its not your ear but your brain which was trained)
I fully relate to and remember those days of seeing a full, VGA, photographic image on a computer screen. It was truly mind-blowing. Like, you would actually trade disks of just image files with your friends. Pictures of cars and... other things...
Yeah it's one of those experiences you just can't relate to people who are used to modern video. I feel very lucky to have been there to see it, along with Other Things lol
@@TechTimeTraveller Haha, yeah - so true. When the first VGA Sierra games came out, I remember it was such a treat just to move your character on to a new screen you hadn't seen before. I would stare at the screen - truly eye candy.
The Panasonic Business Partner 1650 was actually a Tandy 1000SL/2 in a modified 1000TL/2 case. It has the Tandy 1000 sound chip but it's disabled, so you only get PC speaker sound. It has Tandy 1000 graphics but it doesn't work in all games. It's what Panasonic got in return for Tandy selling rebadged Panasonic laptops like the 1100FD.
The Tandy 2500 was not based on anything by Panasonic, but rather on the Victor 300, made by Victor Technology -- best known for their Victor 9000, an early rival to the IBM PC. Tandy bought out Victor's computer division and used their design as the basis for the 2500 series.
So that was Victor's design. Interesting. Some publications I read suggested the 2500 design was Tandy's and they simply made Victor (and Panasonic, Grid etc) machines in that form factor after the purchase.
33:21 - That's the most expressive PC speaker music I've ever heard. Whoever programmed that in deserves a medal.
That was MENTAL
Try Lotus III: The Ultimate Challenge! You'd probably also be impressed by Inertia Player's PC Speaker mode.
An old MS-DOS game called Thunderstrike also makes great use of the PC speaker, playing a classical song using that high frequency mode.
This was a fun trip down memory lane! MS-DOS 3.30 is limited to a partition size of 32MiB, while 3.31 expands this to 512MiB. Normally, the 32MiB partition that you made and formatted should be bootable, so it seems like a drive/BIOS/FDISK compatibility issue may have misaligned the MBR and/or partition, preventing the BIOS booting from HD. OnTrack is definitely a helpful option when you can't address the BIOS limitation. When I can, I like to flash an XT-IDE image to an EPROM and install that in a network card's boot ROM socket. I can then set the HD parameters to disabled in the system BIOS, and let XT-IDE autodetect the drive once its option ROM is loaded. It's really handy if I need to pull the drive and copy files to it from another system, as the whole disk/partitions are accessible, unlike using the overlay.
Came to say exactly this. Compaq's OEM version of DOS 3.3 is my go-to for this age of machine, for this exact feature. Retail MS-DOS 4.x adds this so-called "Big FAT" but has some data corruption issues IIRC.
That LSI chip could possibly be a Gemini GC102. It is the companion southbridge to the GC101/HT101.
I had one of those "paper white" monochrome VGA monitors for a short time. It was for a computer I built myself. But it was quickly traded off.
So funny thing about the paper white VGA monitor there is no shadow mask so you can get really crisp images from it. I remember having one on our 386sx -> Pentium133 days only when we upgraded to a Pentium MMX 166 did we get a colour display. Well anyway I remember I preferred the B/W monitor for reading as the letters were really well formed on it. also later on with early dual screen support I use to use both and I use to surf the net/program on the black and white one and play games on the colour side.
Funny thing is that the same is true for cameras. The latest trend amongst camera manufacturers is to release a monochrome body due to the fact that they can produce much crisper images without the bayer filter softening them up so much.
@@achaycock Yeah I've been looking at those for some time now maybe to use in Astrophotography. I did do a IR filter mod on a DSLR once to get more light and have read about other mods where people have removed the colour filer layers to get a pure monochrome sensor array.
Tandy often partnered with another manufacturer to make Tandy/Radio Shack branded machines. My Tandy 1100FD laptop is a Panasonic too.
Interesting. I wondered who actually made their laptops. I'm sure the desktops were probably produced under contract by someone else too.
Tandy actually manufactured for Panasonic and others. Tandy owned Grid and very nearly merged with Compaq. At that time Tandy had an equal amount of manufacturing as did Compaq. The deal fell through obviously though. In the end of Tandy's time in the PC world they sold all of their manufacturing and other assets to AST.
@@TechTimeTravellerTandy did. They had a HUGE manufacturing footprint, internationally even.
What's interesting is that for my Tandy 1100FD, it didn't have a backlight, but the Panasonic version did.
@@RonLauzon there were often small differences. Especially in the Grid and Victor stuff.
Man the ski or die gameplay brought back memories of playing skate or die with my friends on their 286.
That sure looked like the terminal I used to use in my job at an auto parts store back in the late 80s. It had a 5x7 plasma display with a small number of lines.
FYI, the Tandy 1000RLX was still an XT-class machine with the sound chip at the original address. The 1000RSX was the only member of the Tandy 1000 family to be an AT-class machine with the relocated sound chip address -- and that's because it's really just a 2500SX motherboard stuffed into the 1000RL/RLX case.
Just to add to your statement, the RLX-A is unique in that the sound portion of its PSSJ is dual-ported - addressable at either 0xC0 or 0x1E0. Tandy apparently revised this with the RLX-B, where it's addressable at just the (standard) 0xC0 port again. In either case, and to your point, sound-related modification/redirection is unnecessary with the RLX systems.
We had that Tandy computer too! But it was the Tandy badged version. With EGA graphics though, it was a step up from our 8088 XT computer because it had that low density 3.5" floppy drive (not to mention the XT was slower and had CGA), and ours was also a 286, with DOS 3.3. Heck yeah!
Configuring memory is one of the things I DON'T miss about computers back then.
Very, very cool video! I always liked the high quality Tandy cases.
This is giving me some serious nostalgia. I had my older sister drive me to the computer store 30 miles away to buy Test Drive 3. I loved that game.
Test Drive 3 was my first game purchase I think from my own money. But it was so hard to control.. hehe
this video brought back memories in 1990-91 i had a Tandy 1000sl played mostly police quest and leisure suit larry but seeing this video reminded me i think i also had Ski or Die seeing the footage brought back memories that i played it alot.
Skate or Die and Ski or Die were amazing. I forgot how addictive they were! Police Quest was special - I first encountered it on our friend's Tandy 1000TX.. and then later I realized my Dad's Toshiba T5100 had EGA graphics, and PQ was the first game I was able to finally get full color on at home. Lots of fun times.
"Again" - LOLOLOL. (I did that to my dad's email as a child...)
I may have done the FDISK thing a few times haha. Also used to mess with the jumpers on our ATI CGA card because I mistakenly thought it was EGA.. I didn't understand CGA cards could display 16 colors in text mode and that that wasn't indicative of being EGA. Dad often came home to no display at all. :)
Look up the Tandy 2500 SX/25 or /33
Until LGR had a video come out a year or 2 ago about a quantex 486 like I had growing up I'd never seen anyone else talk about it and I couldn't even find a picture of one. So I know the pain.
Yeah it took me forever to find the 1st gen Pentium II Quantex full tower. I hear ya. 😂
I love this period of computers. Never heard of Tandy because I'm from a different part of the world but still fun video to watch!
I'm from Europe and I've only seen "Tandy" in some old game in the 90s and was wondering what they were, think at the time Comodore, IBM and Apple were more prominent here.
Tandy was a big hobby shop that eventually merged with Radio Shack. They did stuff like wood burning kits, plastic resin, electronic parts etc.
My first PC I owned was a Tandy 2500, took it to college in 1993! I wasn't into computers to begin with, but I discovered a certain game....DOOM. My poor little 386 SX 25 struggled along until 1995 when I built my first computer, and the sickness continued...
I had the DecStation 320sx when I was a kid. Came with a 386sx 20MHz, 1MB of RAM and a 10MB HDD. I later upgraded it to 4MB of RAM and a larger HDD and got it to boot Win95. Definitely not usable, but possible :)) Omg, the memories.
Thanks for making this video; it really helped getting the 2500 XL I had sitting in the closet up and running. In particular, the warning about Tandy using some of the ground lines on the cable for power (the original drive on mine was dead) and the bit about using a 720k floppy to run setupxl (the original RTC was also very dead) were quite helpful.
So, yeah, great video!
This was fun , Thank you for doing the Video .
I only had a Commodore 64, but I had the cassette drive and Fast Load cartridge, a 1541 & 1571 disk drives. The fast load allowed me to press play & fast forward simultaneously to load programs like 7 times faster. I got some games from a club and some I had to manually type in from magazines. Later I designed my first home on it manually, and taught my kids to type via a program I wrote. Much, much later I came across a program called Just Basic that allows for writing and editing, one of which is Rollercoaster 2000. I have a video clip on my channel of a track.
The oldest PC I have now in a Legend QDI 440BX with a slot 1 Pentium, 768 ECC ram, 40Gb. max HDD (times 4), ISA card to a 4 HDD SCSII tower, floppy, card reader, add on USB 2.0's & triple boot 98SE, XP Pro & 7 Pro. Much more on this ancient beast.
15:56 I didn't expect you had the same chipset as my 1991 PC AT… I was back then half a world away, in Poland.
Great video, I remember sinking way too much time on Ski or Die as well!
Very cool. I've been wanting to add a Tandy to my retro collection for quite some time.
30:15 - *Sees OnTrack Disk Manager*
*Starts screaming in terror*
Yes! I feel ya!
Oh wow! Ontrack! I remember that thing. I spent weeks trying to figure out what was using up conventional memory on me at boot. To find out removing that program erased my drive. That was the worst!
My first PC was a Grid 386is-16. It was a 386DX-16 machine made by Tandy except that it was in the full height desktop case. It was a pretty good machine. It did not have the Tandy sound though. Tandy was even kind enough to include 32kb of Static Ram L2 cache for the cpu. I did add a sound blaster pro later. Interestingly enough mine came with a Panasonic SVGA monitor (though rebranded as Grid). Thank you for this video. It brought back memories of that PC and using it in the early 90’s.
I was one of few people in my group of friends who had access to a computer at home in the 80s and early 90s. All my friends would much rather have a game system.
I remember playing this game when my parents visited some friends and took me with them. I also remember their computer being in the same room as they were having a party. Can't believe they let us play it with the sound on with that music :D i didnt remember it being that annoying.
Shorting the disk inserted sensor can cause some machines to cache the directory, so when you change the floppy and insert a new one, you get the same directory, even if you insert a broken one or no disk at all. If you try to write to it, you corrupt it. Ask me how I know.
My modern DS12887 replacements all died after slightly under 10 years... while the originals usually died after 15 years. I usually fix mine with an external battery, by now I'm pretty good at it... Compaq SLT-286 Laptop... DALLAS soldered to the motherboard with not enough space above it to socket it... I drilled the holes without desoldering the chip.
That floppy drive not being able to move the heads backwards might well be a bad capacitor on the floppy controller board (the one in the drive itself).
Germany will very likely still have fax machines in 2033...
Interesting! I had that problem off camera with my 720k replacement drive.. but I wasn't shorting the switch on that one. I could only 'change' disks by either rebooting or changing back and forth from A to B. It made installing stuff like PC Paintbrush really hard.
@@TechTimeTraveller So that was why I saw a B:\> prompt at one time.
I have a 25 MHz 386 that does the same thing. I'm sure I don't have caching software installed. I'm not sure the disk sensor works on that drive, but the only way to get to recognize another disk was a reboot... that PC also has two disk drives...
I kept taking the PCs from the curb in the late 90s... now they're kinda valuable. I have a small room stuffed with ~20 of these... they almost all work.
I bought a Panasonic PC in 1990. Small form factor 8086. Came with a cga monitor and printer as pkg deal. I learned DOS and later got a modem and got on line with Prodigy. Then a year later upgraded to svga Paradise graphics and a Panasonic monitor. Anyone remember USA*FLEX? Those were the days, learning PC hardware, and the Internet in it's infancy.
UA-cam isn't showing your updates. You deserve more subs, my friend.
Thank you! Yeah UA-cam doesn't seem to be sending out notifications reliably either.
nice video, thanks ! At last TEst Drive III mentioned - I played that game in the 90's and have installed on my fast 286 machines now) It's much better on a 16 or 20mhz)
VGA is an ANALOG RGB interface. This means that there is NO limit as to the number of colors. However, the actual color palate will be limited by the number of bits assigned to each pixel. This is determined by the width of the three (or four) D/A converters inside of the video card AND the size of the video memory dedicated to the interface. CGA and EGA on the other hand had their D/A converters INSIDE of the MONITOR!. They were DIGITAL RGBI or RrGgBbIi signalled, limited to 4 or 6 bits of data per pixel.
Mean Streets! The first VGA game experience for me, too. Although that was on a friend's computer. I did get it to work on my Tandy 1000 at a later point, after we installed a (apparently somewhat rare?) upgrade, a 286 processor on an ISA card. It was in Tandy 16 color, but that was still not bad. I remember being amazed at an adventure game with a built-in flight sim.
Sound is handled by one of the NCR QFPs. By that point Tandy was using the PSSJ (Parallel, serial, sound, joystick) ASIC to handle all of the I/O ports, and the physical chip was an NCR gate array.
Everything you described sounds like my Tandy 2500RSX. Amusingly enough in the mid 00's my fist brand new car was an Acura RSX.
RSX just has a nice ring to it doesn't it? I'm not sure I'm familiar with the 2500 RSX. I know the 1000 RSX was a bit different (and really sought after by collectors). Have to look it up now!
"something called deluxe paint"
Pretty much the most important paint program for the development of the pixel art style common on the Amiga since the mid 1980s, and PC once VGA was a thing.
I think I had Deluxe Paint Animation. It's been so long I've forgotten the title. Had a lot of fun with it. Was one of my legit purchased titles.
@@TechTimeTraveller I still have a boxed copy of that around somewhere. Had to import it from the USA (I'm in Europe, and it seemed impossible to get here at the time).
But I had been using Dpaint for many years on the Amiga before that, it was the defacto standard tool for creating bitmap graphics on that platform.
@c128stuff I really wish I'd been able to convince my Dad to buy an Amiga back then. I remember in the mid 80s or so seeing that demo they did with the tiger or jaguar (some kind of big cat) prowling and the whole scene doing a flip effect. Was incredible. Had to wait 5 more years before we got something similar.
@@TechTimeTraveller vga was really a big deal for pc graphics. Together with the ps/2 mouse and keyboard connectors, that was also the last time IBM set a standard in the pc market which would last for decades.
@@TechTimeTravellerif you had convinced your dad to buy an Amiga (any Amiga)…. Your collection would have to be 3x bigger today. 😂
You can't use the 384K of RAM for shadowing the ROMs as well as well as using it as extended memory.
That's why you had to set the remap shadow memory to yes before you could use it as extended instead.
If you had more RAM you can keep the ROMs shadowed (using 384K RAM) and have extended memory as well.
I guess the system can only shadow the full 384K of upper memory and not on a ROM by ROM basis which later systems could.
Yes I think I got confused there because it was giving that general 'configuration error' message, which I mistakenly attributed to RAM. I don't think I tried leaving the remap option off after I disabled the mouse device that was the real cause of that error in BIOS. Many thanks for the refresher!
Hah, I remember Ski or Die, wasn't sure if it was Skate or Ski, but the music and them GFX confirmed it, though that was not a game I was into, it was a friend of mine that went nutz abut it :P
Surprisingly, OTHS are the initials for my high school. I do not remember seeing these machines, so I can't say it was from that school, but they're also a few years before I went there, so it's possible they had already been replaced by then.
The Initials stood for...what?
Sorry, not offering that much information.@@firesurfer
so the access software realsound thing was incredible, but it had a couple drawbacks; it relied on the CPU entirely to generate the more complex music, and it was pushing everything through the crappy PC speakers that were generally provided. Access actually had guides in their user manual on how to hook up a better speaker to your PC to get decent sound
Yeah it definitely sounded better on the Tandy here because I had the external speaker option. It was just mind blowing to me in 1990 that they were able to do that at all with no additional hardware!
of course the paper white monitor looked sharp, it didn't have a shadow mask!
glad to have found this channel, your content is very neurodivergent friendly, subcribing and turning on notifications, gonna dive into more of your content, youre such a lovely and adorable bloke :3
Many thanks for the high compliment!
so funny, at about 27:15 when you said 32Mb I knew I was right about 10 minutes earlier, yup limit reached
I had a Tandy TL/2 that still works to this day and have never done a single solitary thing to it. The 20 MB hard drive - running DR-DOS - it all works like a champ. Back when 2 layer micro boards just lasted FORVER if it was a Tandy TL it probably came with CGA because mine was… 🤮🤮🤮 but the one thing the tl/2 DID have was an onboard sound card that had a mic/headphone Jack and that was AMAZING playing games especially Prince of Persia
Nothing lame about being amazed by cool image manipulation back then. I had the same experience, though I grew up doodling around in a program called Dr. Halo and later somehow my dad got the MS-DOS Autodesk suite which came with an image editor and animator that I never figured out, but you could look at neat .FLI animations that it came with.
We got Autocad somehow.. no idea why, but I remember being obsessed with Titanic back then and I tried to recreate it in CAD. :)
so was tandy somehow so large, compared or alongside ibm, that they had to get their own graphics mode, roger roger and winter games
I had one of these as a hand-me-down for a brief period of time about 20 years ago! I spent a fair bit of time playing Hoyle Card games on it before I borked it :(
The eBay seller you showed in the picture isn't too far from me, but they appear to be sold out of these now...
I remember my 2500 EX had PC-DOS 3.something in ROM, but MS-DOS 6.0 on the hard drive as well as Windows 3.1 that I installed.
I see there's a Tandy 2500 SX model that is a 386, perhaps that is what your PC was a clone of. Mine was definitely a 286 because I remember me fighting it to get Windows to run in 386 Enhanced mode is how I ultimately killed it. (I was like 12, so don't be too hard regarding my stupidity...)
I believe you could enter parameters for a smaller drive, with ide, and it would still work... After a format and as a small drive.
The Deskmate was not in the BIOS chip. It was in it's own ROM chip and that also included bootable DOS.
For curiosity.. do you know which chip that would have been on this machine?
@@TechTimeTraveller I don't. I'm sorry. I used to.... I ran a "Computer Center" for Radio Shack in 1992 and 1993. I even replaced a few of the chips with an upgraded one, but it was in the 1000 line and a very long time ago.
@markshade8398 Yeah I did a big hunt through tandy service manuals hoping to cross ref the chip part numbers and ID then on the board but strangely couldn't find the usual part list you'd find for other models. Many thanks for your helpful comments regardless!
@@TechTimeTraveller The X2816BP EEPROM is the Deskmate/ROM DOS, and is likely common between models. The large 40-pin 16-bit ROM is the BIOS. The BIOS ROM jumper switches between that and 8-bit ROMs in the even/odd sockets.
Tandy owned GRiD from 1988 onwards so not sure if they OEM'd for them beforehand or the GRiDs with Tandy parts were after the acquisition.
Grew up with a Tandy 1000 TX.
39:12 “Your name is Tex… *You’re* job is to solve the case” **facepalm**
My first PC was a Tandy 486 (DX or SX) that was about 25mhz and came with a whopping 100MB hdd and Windows 3.11
When you're showing the games are you just acoustically recording sound from the PC speaker or did you do something more elaborate? I find it curious that Tandy made PCs for companies like Panasonic. vWestlife demonstrated what I believe was a Tandy 1100 Fd notebook computer that he said was made by Panasonic for Tandy, he called it a Pandy. If I understand what you're saying, quite the reverse happened here. Interesting.
I love you videos. But have you ever considered exploring the enormous tech jump that happened 2019-2023 ???
That smudge on your screen during PC Paintbrush made me try to clean my screen a few times, how may of you folks had that problem?
At a certain moment I got the impression that the so called "music" were just rhythmic beeps that had to hide MORSE CODE
The tandy 8079053 is an intel 8053 clone, the keyboard interface... there was a big 40 pin intel microcontroller on every 8 bit and 16 motherboard remember ??? they became less common as they got built into the chipset... The tandy 1000 had a 74LS164 chip which implemented serial in (from keyboard) to parallel out ( being to the 8155 for the PIO, timer and keyboard ).
Many thanks. I was hoping to find a parts catalog somewhere to cross reference the numbers but didn't have any luck.
25:20 The reason it is giving you that error of non-Dos partition is that DOS 3.3 cannot "see" a partition larger than 32MB. DOS 3.3 was the last version of DOS to be limited to fat12. DOS 3.31 introduced fat16 at least according to Google. I don't remember any DOS 3.3 system with fat16, perhaps it was a patch to 3.31 which came after DOS 4. Either way, DOS 3.3 which is shown at 24:39 definitely will never see a fat16 partition. That is why it doesn't see it as a DOS partition.-
That Brooktree bt476kp chip is likely the VGA RAMDAC. The Tandy 3-voice is a PSG TI SN76496 (16 pins) on the 1000's, but NCR 8496 (16 pins) or PSSJ-3 on later models, unfortunately none of your images show such a chip (or at least I can't identify one, though "PSSJ-3" might not actually be a 16-pin chip if it maybe incorporated the other i/o.)
The Headland GC101 and 113 chip is the 286 "chipset", which likely replaced a bunch of individual chips found on a typical 286. The LSI L4A8026 , given what LSI made was likely the hard drive or floppy controller chip, hard to tell since every link on the web goes nowhere.
Usually empty sockets listed as "odd" and "even" indicate a program rom (eg ROM BASIC.) But that would likely not co-exist with DeskMate. I've seen these on PC/XT's and those have always been ROM BASIC. The XICOR chip is listed as EPROM, and the Tandy part list says U36 - PVGA1B, so probably video bios.
When you started messing with the hard drives... The largest hard drive you'd have at the time, at best, was 120MB. And that is late 386 sizes. MFM/RLL drives you'd usually find on 286's would be like 20-40MB. To use larger drives you always needed a utility that came on a floppy disk to install a type of bootloader (eg ontrak disk manager, which I later see you used.) On top of that, the version of DOS (3.3) that came with the Tandy likely can't see that large of a hard drive (32MB partitions max.) If you feel like getting rid of the noise of the hard drive you can find 4GB IDE "SSD" drives on amazon. These are usually a good alternative when you don't need the vintage loading time, but you don't want to use it with Windows.
BTW, there is a part list at web.archive.org/web/20050217204246/support.radioshack.com/support_computer/doc30/30582.htm
Unfortunately some parts are just listed as "IC socket" and not helpful.
Thanks so much for this! Much appreciated for all the details. I sort of have familiarity with conventional 286/AT class motherboards but it's been 30 years and then Tandy is kind of its own thing. This was most helpful!
31:06 Wooowh! Deja-vu :)
You repeatedly stated that you may have misremembered your Panasonic having a 386SX, but it is entirely possible that you didn't. Due to the SX being a 386 running on a 16 bit bus, the chip could and indeed often was, installed on 286 class motherboards. Clock for clock, they actually performed a little more slowly than their 286 counterparts, but naturally offered access to more memory and the possibility of running 32 bit applications. I suspect in the early 1990's the knowledgable buyer would have little reason not to buy a 286 instead of a 386SX.
It sounds to me like what you had was an offshoot of the Tandy 2500rsx or Tandy 2500sx. Which both have the 386sx at 25mhz and VGA built in
That's what I'm thinking too. The only reason I'm having doubt is that we replaced the Panasonic with a PS/2 Model 30 again after and had that for a few years.. my Dad wasn't the type to downgrade. Something doesn't make sense there.
I had a Tandy Sensation 486 which I'm looking for again as one of my vintage computers. I have the VIC20, And Tandy CoCo 3 which I had also, but The Sensation is like you said a Ghost, I can't seem to find it anywhere.
I actually have seen those on ebay from time to time but they go for hundreds sometimes. Definitely seems to be a following for them. If I see one I'll definitely pass it along to you.
@@TechTimeTraveller That'd be cool. I keep scan the market on eBay for them but never see them.
@johnglielmi6428 Yeah they get snapped up pretty fast. Last one sold on Aug 3.. dead HDD.. $450. Another sold in July for $650. I check ebay several times daily so if another shows up I'll msg you here.
@@TechTimeTraveller The first game I ever played on my sensation was "The 7th Guest" cool game and I think it was the very first to have full motion video in a video game. It was produced by Trilobyte: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobyte_(company) just wanted to share a little nostalgia with you.
4:44 -- Was this system even sold at retail in Canada? A friend of the family had one BITD, and he apprently got it via some surplus sale, not through the usual retail channels. My personal suspicion is that it "fell off the truck", but I do not know how/where they were normally sold.
We had a family friend who owned a Compucentre franchise. I think he may have had access to business distribution channels, I remember they kind of catered to both clienteles. Reading up on the Business Partner line it really doesn't seem like something that was aimed at home use.
My comment was actually about the Sanyo 16 Plus, not the Panasonic. Sorry if I was unclear.
DOS 3.3 is limited to 32MB disk partitions(FAT12). So if you boot with DOS 3.3, it will never see those partitions.
34:52 - It would run faster on a '386 if it were programmed using 'software timing loops' vs using the RTC for correct timing.
So bridging two pins makes the drive think there's always a floppy inserted...
And my floppy disk drive never notices when I eject a disk (doesn't invalidate the FAT cache)...
I wonder if I'm somehow bridging those pins accidentally... I always have to push ^C when I put a new disk in (which makes multi disk installers often not work correctly).
It could be a faulty switch stuck in the closed position. On
mine soldering that switch closed produced a situation where I'd put a disk in and it would still think the previous disk was inserted and list out files from that disk. Weird things can happen when that switch fails or is shorted.
OnTrack takes away 10kB of conventional memory. EzDrive does the same for the cost of 5kB. ;) (XT-IDE does it for 1kB)
9:15 Sometimes those RTCs are used as system timers or store critical variables! Mostly for cost reduction reasons, but this is what kills a lot of otherwise useful machines. My favorite RTC failure was on uxwbill's channel when a Compaq Prolinea listed the current date and time as: 99/99/5598 at 99::3:26.Y2K is no match for it!
22:59 I believe DOS 3.3 won't recognize a partition >32MB, by the way. And seriously, I want to buy that 3.5" Microscience off you! I've probably got a 40MB Western Digital drive that would be era appropriate for this machine that I'd be willing to trade...
If this machine was a 386 or 486, I'd be actively searching for one. I also like the Tandy design, especially these little pizzabox machines! I'm aware that with the right hardware you can "make" it into a 386/486, but those clip on/insertion things are rarer than hen's teeth at this point and probably significantly outvalue the entire computer.
I wonder if anyone at all will have a Tandy in 5598.
@@TechTimeTraveller I'd be shocked if the name Compaq was remembered at all, god forbid anyone actually still had a Prolinea 575e, which is a Pentium 1 class machine!
Iirc there’s a UA-camr called Necroware who is making a new version of the 1287, called the nwx287, which has an easily replaceable battery and is a drop in replacement for these Dallas RTCs
Maybe I can get one for my CDi
I have one of those panasonic units a few months ago i sold on ebay. I didnt know it was a tandy 1000 clone or i probably wouldve asked more than $50 for it.
32mb primary partition limitation is totally a dos 3.3 thing. Oh... did you set the partition active? else it won't boot 🙂
Yeah I figured. I did try setting it Active but it refused to touch it, and that's when I decided to go the Ontrack route.
0:31 Oh no who did that to the poor defenceless floppy drive????
40:14 Tex Murphy is the protagonist in mean streets? Is that game a part of the Tex Murphy saga? Like under a killing moon and those games?
I think so. I think they were all linked.
Necroware has a rtc replacement and even has a video about it
I've got a Tandy 2500 SX/33 that looks the same, they also made it in a 25mhz version, maybe that's what you had.
I'm kind of thinking that may be the case. I wish I could remember but 33 years kind of reduces things to a mental smudge.
It seems like at 24:03 you've accidentally set up the hard drive with only 3 sectors per track instead of 62, a typo which will definitely keep the hard drive from booting, as well as causing serious borkage to the partition table!
This system should support hard drives up to 504MB in size.
And yes, MS-DOS 3.x only supported partition sizes up to 32MB. So if you had a larger hard drive you would have to partition the drive into 32MB sized chunks.
Typo is entirely possible. Or an editing error: I actually tried 4 drives but for tome reasons cut it to just the first 2. Many thanks for the info.. I might just re test.. I have another drive same size and can see if having things verified entered correctly changes anything.
@@TechTimeTraveller Yeah, I thought that maybe its's just an editing error, you've probably not shot everything in order, but DOS is extremely picky about drive parameters. Even with drives that supported translation modes, if you partitioned and formatted a drive with different parameters, it will not be bootable and you might lose your data.
When LBA was used later, it was a godsend, it made stuff so much easier than CHS :D
DOS has the 32 MB limit
dos memory management for games -> triggering moment
Just thinking about it makes my hands start shaking.. :)
6:50 386sx is a 286 that is upgraded isn’t it?
No it's a 386 downgraded to a 16bit databus
1:02 hey, I've got that HP Pavillion! Cool case, but absolutely infuriating to do any work on because of all the screws
Yep. Did you get the Quantum Bigfoot HD in yours?
@@TechTimeTraveller Yep! The couple I got it from asked me to throw the hard drive away though, so I decided to take it out and just give it back to them instead. Got the rest of the computer for free though, so I can't complain
Dunno about faxes in 2033 in America, but I just saw a news article about a couple of guys getting arrested in Japan for sending thousands of bomb threats and the like to schools and universities in Japan... via FAX. So yeah, I totally see fax machines being around here in 2033. :P
I wonder if this came from a SchoolMate Plus! Network! I have been looking for a copyof SchoolMate Plus! For ages.
You can get brand new dallas chips on mouser if youre a purest like me
Yeah, the memories.. Leisure Suit Larry anyone?
I remember the day a friend brought that to our school computer lab...
This is not meant to come off as being rude but. The video at the start sounds like an LGR video. The background music style and the voice-over all sounded so familiar.
I don't know what to say - that's just how I speak. The background music is similar because myself, LGR and lots of other UA-camrs only have so many options - epidemicsound and UA-cam itself being the main ones. Jazz is the default I resort to not because I love it particularly but because with both epidemic and youtube, it tends to be the only relaxed, subtle music suitable for long duration background use. I've tried other stuff but always get complaints about honky tonk pianos, sudden loud guitar riffs, crazy drums, and other irritating bits. It's amazing how little background music on offer out there for creators really works for that purpose.
Anyway, I think it's the same as anything else - in a medium with millions of creators it's inevitable some may sound similar. Especially if it's a documentary - the template for those was established long ago on television.
@@TechTimeTraveller It's all good. I thoroughly enjoyed your video. I was complimenting you on an enjoyable video. The music is quite relaxing to hear when doing retro videos. Keep doing what you're doing, I loved it.
Maybe LGR sounds more like TTT. Just saying. 😂
OTHS...is it Ottowa Technical High School ? ..im in Australia so just guessing
Can you put me in touch with the seller? I want to see if he has SchoolMate Plus!
I'll see if I can dig up his ebay nick. Pretty sure its the same guy that just sold one again last month. Should still be available in ebay if we search under sold or completed items.
@@TechTimeTraveller I am not interested in the Tandy units themselves, I am interested in a piece of extremely rare Tandy Software used in School Systems called SchoolMate Plus! This was a special Novell Netware 2.11 Enabled version of Deskmate.
Its funny to watch this with all that old crap ...mfm drives, memory managers,crt displays andega and cga ha i remember those. most of my stuff from that era went to the dump via scap car trunks. still got a few mb hard drives (i take them apart for the magnets) and 1 crt display waiting for the dump.i have a bunch of tape drives and modems.
In some ways these older PCs remind me of Model Ts.. they do what their modern equivalent does but it's a lot more hands on. There's definitely things like memory management I don't miss too much. BTW what do you do with the magnets?
They are incredibly powerful. So are very good on the fridge etc. I am 62 and only got into pc's since my wife bought a 286 for her business. My first was an ibm xt with 2 10 meg drives. dialup with a 2400 b modem (to a friends bbs Allante ) I cant imagine WWW on that Oh also a Huuuge 360 floppy. @@TechTimeTraveller
OTHS maybe OSGOODE TOWNSHIP HIGH SCHOOL ? Also SD 90-91 School District ?
7:41 *Paper* white was better for reading text and simple graphics. Easier on the eyes.
12:25 confessions?
Having worked at Radio Shack in the mid 80's, I use to love people coming in the the store and looking at items (mostly stereo equipment) and saying things like, that item look exactly like mine but mine is better, it's Sony. Tandy corp. would purchase expensive "BIG" name brand items and re-badge it as Realistic. Ok, back to your regularly scheduled program.
I got a Realistic head unit and tape deck back in 1990 for Christmas (thought it was an Amiga.. was disappointed but not that disappointed). The head unit lasted 30 years before the left speaker channel died. The tape deck still works.
Looking back, I was hard on Radio Shack stuff. Me and my friends considered ‘Realistic’ branded stuff a joke and yet in the summer we’d go visit the local Radio Shack every day and look at all the Realistic stuff.
@@pikadroo Did you remember to bring your Battery Club of the Month card? 😁
@@TechTimeTraveller I've still got my TRS-80 Model 1 (Level 2 Basic, 16k) that still works though the monitor has a horizontal video shake problem. Some of the stuff Radio Shack sold was garbage, there were some gems too. My only regret was selling my Minimus 7 book-shelf speakers some time back.
@bokami3445 One thing I found interesting of theirs was the 'Archer' computer keyboards.. Commodore 64, Atari, TI.. I'm not sure how they got those or who they were targeting at. I have an Atari 1200 keyboard NOS in Archer bag. But it doesn't mention it's for Atari and it has a little tag on it that shows how it is wired.