More pics...

Great stuff.

Was always curious about these Tandies.
Never owned one - not available in my region back then.

That last Windows 3 screenshot is great.
Today my "Hello World!" executable has bigger memory footprint. 😁

Another Windows screenshot that illustrates probably the biggest problem with running Windows using the Tandy or CGA video modes - lack of vertical resolution.
If I really wanted to run Windows on this computer, the built in video can also do Hercules and that would be a much better experience. I'm just messing around though and obviously the Tandy 16 color mode is much better for games.

Tenorman wrote on 2021-04-08, 18:52:

I think the best use case I've found for the computer so far are the old Sierra games up to SCI0. These all have good Tandy graphics and CMS support, and can also use EMS.

There is an unofficial Tandy high-res driver for SCI1 VGA games, though: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.p ... post279300

Benedikt wrote on 2021-04-09, 16:27:

There is an unofficial Tandy high-res driver for SCI1 VGA games, though: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.p ... post279300

I did run across that. I might try it out sometime, but I think playing these games on an 8 Mhz 286 might be pretty painful.

I tried out the Tandy 640x200 16 color driver for SCI 1 this morning using the LSL1 VGA remake. The result looks pretty nice, though as I expected this game is more or less unplayable on an 8 mhz 286. The fastest machines with this video mode would only be 10 mhz, so I doubt they would fair much better. It's a fun thing to mess with, but probably of limited use on real machines just because they are so underpowered for this.

LSL1 VGA also has a lot of music and it was "interesting" to hear the CMS rendition of it. Pretty poor compared to Adlib/Soundblaster, but I had never heard it before so that was fun.

Tenorman wrote on 2021-04-10, 22:58:

I tried out the Tandy 640x200 16 color driver for SCI 1 this morning using the LSL1 VGA remake. The result looks pretty nice, though as I expected this game is more or less unplayable on an 8 mhz 286. The fastest machines with this video mode would only be 10 mhz, so I doubt they would fair much better. It's a fun thing to mess with, but probably of limited use on real machines just because they are so underpowered fun.

Games of that era ran slow even on “proper” high end hardware contemporary to the game.people just had much more tolerance for slowness

Worth noting your TL should be over clockable especially if you replace the cpu with a faster speed grade, some reports as high as 15mhz if your ram is fast enough, just get a bag of random crystals and see if it can budge

Also there were “other” font sets for Windows CGA you can cludge in to get more viewable rows of text.
One of the vintage Windows 3.x driver forums had fixed up CGA drivers and fonts to be much more usable

Great thread! I'm excited to see someone else working with a Tandy 1000 TL/2! 😃 That was my first computer. I have one now, again. It was a "recapturing my childhood" kinda purchase, about ten years ago (though the one I have is NOT the original machine my family had when I was a kid). I've bought a bunch of old classic computers for a project I never finished, but here I am working at it, and finally getting somewhere. The Tandy 1000 TL/2, though, is facing an odd problem:

Tandy 1000 TL/2 with Monotech XT-IDE CF: Weird Boot Graphic Glitch

I don't want to hijack your thread, so I made my own new thread. I just thought this was a cool thread where other people might be looking at Tandy 1000 TL/2 computer stuff and might come check out my issue.

I am wondering if it's necessary to pad the ROM when the XT-IDE card has a bunch of address options.

You don't need to pad the ROM unless you are using EMS (or have something else that needs to be at D000h). My XTCF card will boot the TL/2 just fine at D000h. The problem is if you want to add a Lo-Tech EMS card, you need 64K of contiguous memory and D000 is really the only option for that given the built in DOS ROM and generally cluttered memory map. The only other place you can stick the boot XTIDE ROM and still have the machine able to boot is CC00h. At least on my XTCF card, to do that I had to replace the EPROM with a 32K chip, set the the card to C800, and then pad 16K in front of the boot ROM so it ends up at CC00h.

Tenorman wrote on 2021-04-26, 18:01:

You don't need to pad the ROM unless you are using EMS (or have something else that needs to be at D000h). My XTCF card will boot the TL/2 just fine at D000h. The problem is if you want to add a Lo-Tech EMS card, you need 64K of contiguous memory and D000 is really the only option for that given the built in DOS ROM and generally cluttered memory map. The only other place you can stick the boot XTIDE ROM and still have the machine able to boot is CC00h. At least on my XTCF card, to do that I had to replace the EPROM with a 32K chip, set the the card to C800, and then pad 16K in front of the boot ROM so it ends up at CC00h.

I don't have any plan to put an EMS card in there. Currently, it's just the XT-IDE card and nothing else.