http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/1kfaq.html#II.C

Tandy and their blasted one cable FDD!! Still being a pain in the @$$ over 20 years later.

Tandy and their blasted one cable FDD!! Still being a pain in the @$$ over 20 years later.

Lemme give you a little history. IBM introduced a different system with the PC, the cable twist, to eliminate the need for moving jumpers. Traditionally, floppy drives were jumpered to select the drive letter. However, Tandy still used the old-fashioned method on the 1000 line.

Any 1.44MB drive will work in a T1000, albeit that it can only use double density disks due to the controller. The caveat is that the cable has an edge connector that would need an adapter to work on most 1.44MB drives since they have IDE-type connectors (some Alps 720k drives used in IBM ATs came with adapters like this).

So assuming you can get the drive into the computer and connected, you'll still need to make sure it's jumpered properly.

I suppose I should additionally ask if there's any modern flash-memory options for a Tandy 1000 SX, since that could potentially be even easier and/or cheaper than trying to source legacy components.

XTIDE with a CompactFlash card seems like the best way forward.

The XT-IDE is awesome, and will breathe new life into your Tandy. If you're still interested in floppies, there's an XT-FDC being made by the same people at the Vintage Computer Forums.

Edit: I should make clear that the XT-IDE is a hard disk option that works with IDE flash devices(CF, Disk on Module). The FDC is just a floppy controller, no flash support. If you want flash based floppy support, you need an HxC floppy emulator.

But you don't really need floppies on flash, IMO. Just mount (physically) your CF card where you can access it, remove it when you want to transfer files, and use DOS in a VM to format it how you want it. If you really want to dump floppies, copy the images over to CF and use rawrite on the Tandy.