Comment by Dwedit

Comment by Dwedit a day ago

4 replies

Yes, I know it's just a "retro looking computer" to frame a YouTube video but...

I had to look up the Tandy 1000 RSX, because it seemed very wrong to have 16-color VGA graphics coming out of a computer labeled as "Tandy 1000".

Tandy 1000 RSX was the last model from 1991, and it had Super VGA rather than the famous "Tandy graphics" that originated with the IBM PCJr. It did not come with an Adlib or Sound Blaster card, which is what was depicted in the YouTube video. But the computer did have one ISA slot, and an Adlib or Sound Blaster compatible card could have been installed.

It also had a 386 processor rather than the 286 normally found on Tandy 1000 computers, and 1MB of RAM.

vikingerik a day ago

VGA on a Tandy 1000 wasn't all that unusual. Most if not all of the earlier Tandy 1000 models that had ISA slots could take a VGA card in them. The hardware worked fine (it's just memory bus accesses under 1mb and I/O port instructions), it just depended on software support to do anything with it. Tandy's magazine PCM often listed and rated add-in VGA cards. I remember reading of a later version of DeskMate that supported VGA resolution.

  • Trixter 3 hours ago

    Most Tandys with 8-bit ISA slots could not take a VGA card because the internal graphics chip could not be disabled. It was only the later series where that became an option.

  • Mountain_Skies a day ago

    The late Lonnie Falk would have been happy to see that PCM did such a good job of covering Radio Shack's computers that it is thought of as Tandy's magazine. Falsoft's line of magazines covering that area probably added at least a few million to Tandy's bottom line.

Trixter 3 hours ago

While the picture isn't technically incorrect for an MPC level one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC) system, it borders on anachronistic because, as you note, many hoops would have to be jumped through. Any 386dx-33 or 486 clone would be much more period-correct.