I would really love to find some way to integrate a raspberry pi into the system, either allowing the r-pi to run in a window on the Tandy (if using VGA) or vice-versa. The r-pi doesn't have video in but it does have composite out, so if I could cobble video in on the Tandy I might be able to do something like that. Alternatively, I could use a crossover cable with the r-pi to connect it to the Tandy, and maybe VNC or telnet into one or the other.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPYY0uOSSY4

Yep, that is exactly what I'm looking to do, more or less. It would be cool to do a 320x200 window inside a larger 640x480 window, but I'm not sure that is going to be possible as there aren't too many graphical OSs that I'd be able to run (Win 3.0 or Win 3.1 maybe, maybe one of the really old OS/2 versions like OS/2 1.2 or 1.3). Dos 6.22 with a shell is more likely, in which case I'll have to stick with fullscreen like in the vid. But still cool.

Another cool raspberry pi project I'd like to try out I found on instructables:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberri-Per … onal-Assistant/

You could sorta have your own "Jarvis" ala Ironman that way.

Ok good news is I finally powered it up and it works, bad news is I don't have a system disk for it and have to wait until I get one of my other retro systems working or get a usb floppy ( I have heard bad things about them)
and see if I can use that to make some system disks.

Don't Tandy machines have DOS in ROM? You should be able to do something without a floppy.

SquallStrife wrote:

Don't Tandy machines have DOS in ROM? You should be able to do something without a floppy.

Only some of them do. The 1000A, 1000SX and 1000TX (the model I have) need a boot disk. I think the EX, HX and RLX and RSXs do have DOS in ROM, possibly others as well but definitely not the one I have. I know for a fact the model we had growing up had to have a boot disk as well.

Good news is it detects the future domain SCSI card, unfortunately I don't have any drives to test with (other than the PCMCIA thing and that may be a long shot). I have a parallel port Zip drive and I bought an I/O board with an LPT port on it, so I may be able to use that for sneakernet once I finally do get an HD.

I have a scsi drive back at my mom's but it is a SCA drive, not the older 50 pin kind. I'm really not sure how I'm going to fit an HD in there, I don't really want to muck around with a hardcard but that may be an option too (just not preferable due to the small size and age of the drive).

snorg wrote:

I think I can format 1.4mb floppies as lower density,

No, you can't. Trying to reformat 1.44mb floppies to a lower density won't produce a stable format and your data will disappear or become garbled eventually. This was a big problem in the early Mac community for a long time when 1.44mb floppies were first introduced and some users still had machines with 400k or 800k drives and lower density floppies started to be replaced by the 1.44mb ones and you couldn't buy the low density disks in stores anymore so users started trying to reformat the high density disks as low density and it never ended well. The easiest (and usually most expensive) solution was to use an external high density drive. You'll need to source some 720k floppies if you expect your data to last. Another route would be find a parallel port 1.44mb drive like a Backpack drive.

I currently have 2 low density floppies that will have to do until I get the HD working. One of the other forum members has kindly offered to send me some (and a drive!) for cost of shipping.

Well crud. My Everex board finally showed up today, but it is about 2 inches too long for the case. I thought it might be a close fit, but from the photo it looked like it might just squeeze in. I guess I'll have to save it for another project, it seems a shame to waste it. Although it would probably need to go in a 286 or 386 system, not sure what the memory bandwidth would be like over 16 bit ISA but probably not too awesome I'm guessing.

I do have another shorty memory board that I picked up, when I put it in it was recognized but I think it was tripped up by the missing bank of RAM. So I'll have to try each of the 16 possible combinations for the DIP switch bank to see if I can get that bank to be deactivated. Or buy RAM to populate the bank but I think that will have to wait.

Yay! So my mathco finally came today, I'll have a whack at installing that this weekend. I also have a magneto optical drive and 4 650mb disks that I managed to pick up pretty reasonably, that will be getting installed in place of one of the floppies as an HD replacement. I was going to go CF but I don't have a SCSI to IDE converter, and they are way too expensive, and I can't seem to find a good way to get a board to build an XT-IDE controller, the folks running those projects don't have any stock on hand and the more recent revisons have surface mount components. I'd rather stick to through-hole seeing as how it has been years since I did any kind of electronics project.

http://www.bootdisk.org - get your DOS Boot disk and get that Tandy going!