VOGONS


First post, by dysamoria

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Hello everyone. A Tandy 1000 TL/2 was my family's first computer when I was a kid (age 12?). I have one now, again. It was a "recapturing my childhood" kinda purchase, about ten years ago. The one I have is NOT the original machine my family had when I was a kid. I bought a whole 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:

I'm trying to get an XT-IDE CF-to-IDE card from Monotech to work in my Tandy 1000 TL/2. So far, the ROM is working (IDE_XTPL.BIN, though the original one it came with had the same results shown below). I used FDISK to partition the drive on the Tandy, installed DOS 5.0 from Tandy's distribution on 3.5" diskettes, but cannot run things from the drive or boot from it. Prior to doing fdisk /mbr, I had a freeze at booting from C or when trying to make a system disk with SYS from my C:\DOS folder. After doing FDISK /MBR, I get this weirdness every time I try to boot C:

file.php?mode=view&id=108281

🤪 Those lines move! They march along the screen, toward the left, 1 block per second. Nothing else happens at this point.

I tried booting to a known good CF card that is happily working in my Tandy 2500 XL/2, but the same weirdness happens.

Any ideas?

My first thought is that there's conflict between the CF/IDE controller and the graphics chip, but my reading so far on Tandy 1000 TL/2 specs shows they're not in the same I/O range (??). The system RAM is the factory standard 640K, but I have a batch of 64kx4 chips on the way from eBay. Don't know if this has any impact on anything.

The system came with an old XT hard drive, but I have that disconnected for now while I troubleshoot the CF-to-IDE issues. Disabling the onboard HD controller chip (via SETUPTL2 /A) did not affect anything, so I put it back on.

There are no other cards slotted.

Is it still necessary to pad the XT-IDE ROM, when the XT-IDE card has a bunch of address options? Only TWO of the available addresses I can use on the Monotech card will give me the boot ROM. D000 and D800. None of the others will work.

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Reply 2 of 30, by dysamoria

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Harvester757 wrote on 2021-04-23, 19:01:

Doesn’t Tandy 1000 TL have DOS in ROM? If so, it may conflict with XT-IDE ROM.

Run setup utility and ensure primary startup device is set to DISK.

It's set to disk already. The XT-IDE ROM wont even work without that change.

Reply 3 of 30, by Tenorman

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Harvester757 wrote on 2021-04-23, 19:01:

Doesn’t Tandy 1000 TL have DOS in ROM? If so, it may conflict with XT-IDE ROM.

Run setup utility and ensure primary startup device is set to DISK.

You can't disable the built in DOS in ROM. If you use a higher DOS version, the D: drive where you would usually access it is gone, but it is still there cluttering the memory map. This was a cool feature when the computers came out, but in hindsight with CF adapters so prevalent, I wish there was an option to get rid of it entirely.

No idea what would be causing your graphical corruption unfortunately. My TL/2 will boot perfectly fine at D000 (see the other thread).

[Compaq Presario 633 | DOS 6.22 / Win 3.1 | DX4 100 Overdrive | 28M RAM | SB16 CT2770A | SPEA Media FX (Soundscape S2000) ]
[GA-6BXC R2.0 | Win98SE | Via C3 Ezra 866 | 384M RAM | TNT2 32M | Voodoo2 8M | SB32 CT3670 | Ensoniq Soundscape Opus]

Reply 4 of 30, by dysamoria

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Tenorman wrote on 2021-04-26, 18:06:

No idea what would be causing your graphical corruption unfortunately. My TL/2 will boot perfectly fine at D000 (see the other thread).

I have RAM chips on the way. I don't see why that would matter, but, if the graphics chip behaves differently in terms of I/O mapping... Yours has the upgrade, and mine should too, once those chips get here (if they work). I don't expect it to help, but...

Reply 5 of 30, by Tenorman

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When I first got my TL/2, it only had 640k and it booted from D000 just fine. One idea: Have you tried a different CF card? XT IDE cards can be pretty picky about them. I never had the same problem you had, but I had to try a few, I had cards that wouldn't be recognized at all, or would only sporadically. You can probably find a list of known working CF cards somewhere, but the two I had that work are a 64MB Toshiba and a 1 GB Adata.

[Compaq Presario 633 | DOS 6.22 / Win 3.1 | DX4 100 Overdrive | 28M RAM | SB16 CT2770A | SPEA Media FX (Soundscape S2000) ]
[GA-6BXC R2.0 | Win98SE | Via C3 Ezra 866 | 384M RAM | TNT2 32M | Voodoo2 8M | SB32 CT3670 | Ensoniq Soundscape Opus]

Reply 6 of 30, by dysamoria

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Interestingly, now that I have the four extra RAM chips installed, there’s no weird video striping. It still hangs at “Booting C>>C”, but it’s back to not having weird stripes.

I tried FDISK /MBR again, to no avail. I switched back to D000h, but same deal.

I have tried another CF card, the one that’s working great in my Tandy 2500 XL/2, with the same result.

I disabled the HD and parallel port controllers to see if it would help any. Nothing. Since I still want to copy data from the XT hard drive, I’m going to put that controller back on and ... well, I don’t know what else to do at this point.

Reply 7 of 30, by dysamoria

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Tenorman wrote on 2021-04-27, 15:27:

When I first got my TL/2, it only had 640k and it booted from D000 just fine. One idea: Have you tried a different CF card? XT IDE cards can be pretty picky about them. I never had the same problem you had, but I had to try a few, I had cards that wouldn't be recognized at all, or would only sporadically. You can probably find a list of known working CF cards somewhere, but the two I had that work are a 64MB Toshiba and a 1 GB Adata.

Would you mind listing your Tandy 1000 TL/2’s setuptl2 /a settings, and your XT-IDE settings?

Reply 8 of 30, by Tenorman

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Sure, I can do it, but FYI - I won't be able to get to it for a probably a few days.

[Compaq Presario 633 | DOS 6.22 / Win 3.1 | DX4 100 Overdrive | 28M RAM | SB16 CT2770A | SPEA Media FX (Soundscape S2000) ]
[GA-6BXC R2.0 | Win98SE | Via C3 Ezra 866 | 384M RAM | TNT2 32M | Voodoo2 8M | SB32 CT3670 | Ensoniq Soundscape Opus]

Reply 9 of 30, by dysamoria

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Tenorman wrote on 2021-04-28, 13:23:

Sure, I can do it, but FYI - I won't be able to get to it for a probably a few days.

No problem. Thanks!

Reply 10 of 30, by dysamoria

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In the mean time, is anyone else using a CF card in a Tandy 1000 TL or TL/2? What model of CF card are you using? Which IDE interface?

I feel like I can't fix this one. It's just been sitting open on the work table for a month without any more ideas on what to even TRY to solve the problem. If I abandon the CF card mass storage, the hard drive will eventually fail and then the computer is useless. 🙁

Reply 11 of 30, by jasa1063

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This problem happens when you have the XT-IDE BIOS set to full operating mode. It steals 1K from the top of memory. This does not play nice with the Tandy 1000 using system memory for video memory. Adding the 128K video memory upgrade as you did will fix the this issue with video corruption. I have a Tandy 1000 TL/2 with an XT-IDE adapter with the ROM address set to CE00. C800-CBFF is taken up by the onboard IDE BIOS. You need to set the primary boot device to Disk instead ROM. Once you have avoided the BIOS conflict and configured the Setup properly it should boot just fine. I highly recommend SanDisk Ultra or Ultra II CompactFlash cards. I had no end trouble with other brands on Tandy 1000 TL/2.

Reply 12 of 30, by dysamoria

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jasa1063 wrote on 2021-06-03, 05:21:

This problem happens when you have the XT-IDE BIOS set to full operating mode. It steals 1K from the top of memory. This does not play nice with the Tandy 1000 using system memory for video memory. Adding the 128K video memory upgrade as you did will fix the this issue with video corruption. I have a Tandy 1000 TL/2 with an XT-IDE adapter with the ROM address set to CE00. C800-CBFF is taken up by the onboard IDE BIOS. You need to set the primary boot device to Disk instead ROM. Once you have avoided the BIOS conflict and configured the Setup properly it should boot just fine. I highly recommend SanDisk Ultra or Ultra II CompactFlash cards. I had no end trouble with other brands on Tandy 1000 TL/2.

Thanks for your reply and suggestions.

- I don't have the XT-IDE BIOS set to full operating mode. I tried it and there was no improvement. I saw recommendations that XT computers should not use it, so I went back to the non-full mode.

- The 128K video memory did seem to stop the video corruption. I can't remember if I tried address CE00, but I did try every available address on the card (there are quite a few, but only two or three provide operation at all for the XT-IDE BIOS).

- The boot device is set to Disk, not ROM. The XT-IDE card wont operate at all with it set to ROM. Interestingly, the XT-IDE card lets me boot to the Tandy 1000 ROM from the boot menu, which is nice.

- Which SanDisk CF card are you using in your Tandy 1000 TL/2? Maybe it's just my CF card that's problematic at this point. I heard that SanDisk CF cards aren't bootable, so I went with Transcend's industrial cards (a 512MB card works fine in my Tandy 2500 XL/2, but not the 1000 TL/2 so far). If you're booting from one, I'd love to try the same model in my machine.

Thanks again 😀

Reply 13 of 30, by jasa1063

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dysamoria wrote on 2021-06-12, 15:20:
Thanks for your reply and suggestions. […]
Show full quote
jasa1063 wrote on 2021-06-03, 05:21:

This problem happens when you have the XT-IDE BIOS set to full operating mode. It steals 1K from the top of memory. This does not play nice with the Tandy 1000 using system memory for video memory. Adding the 128K video memory upgrade as you did will fix the this issue with video corruption. I have a Tandy 1000 TL/2 with an XT-IDE adapter with the ROM address set to CE00. C800-CBFF is taken up by the onboard IDE BIOS. You need to set the primary boot device to Disk instead ROM. Once you have avoided the BIOS conflict and configured the Setup properly it should boot just fine. I highly recommend SanDisk Ultra or Ultra II CompactFlash cards. I had no end trouble with other brands on Tandy 1000 TL/2.

Thanks for your reply and suggestions.

- I don't have the XT-IDE BIOS set to full operating mode. I tried it and there was no improvement. I saw recommendations that XT computers should not use it, so I went back to the non-full mode.

- The 128K video memory did seem to stop the video corruption. I can't remember if I tried address CE00, but I did try every available address on the card (there are quite a few, but only two or three provide operation at all for the XT-IDE BIOS).

- The boot device is set to Disk, not ROM. The XT-IDE card wont operate at all with it set to ROM. Interestingly, the XT-IDE card lets me boot to the Tandy 1000 ROM from the boot menu, which is nice.

- Which SanDisk CF card are you using in your Tandy 1000 TL/2? Maybe it's just my CF card that's problematic at this point. I heard that SanDisk CF cards aren't bootable, so I went with Transcend's industrial cards (a 512MB card works fine in my Tandy 2500 XL/2, but not the 1000 TL/2 so far). If you're booting from one, I'd love to try the same model in my machine.

Thanks again 😀

I am using a 2GB CF SanDisk Ultra in my Tandy 1000 TL/2.

Reply 14 of 30, by dysamoria

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jasa1063 wrote on 2021-06-16, 00:28:
dysamoria wrote on 2021-06-12, 15:20:
Thanks for your reply and suggestions. […]
Show full quote
jasa1063 wrote on 2021-06-03, 05:21:

This problem happens when you have the XT-IDE BIOS set to full operating mode. It steals 1K from the top of memory. This does not play nice with the Tandy 1000 using system memory for video memory. Adding the 128K video memory upgrade as you did will fix the this issue with video corruption. I have a Tandy 1000 TL/2 with an XT-IDE adapter with the ROM address set to CE00. C800-CBFF is taken up by the onboard IDE BIOS. You need to set the primary boot device to Disk instead ROM. Once you have avoided the BIOS conflict and configured the Setup properly it should boot just fine. I highly recommend SanDisk Ultra or Ultra II CompactFlash cards. I had no end trouble with other brands on Tandy 1000 TL/2.

Thanks for your reply and suggestions.

- I don't have the XT-IDE BIOS set to full operating mode. I tried it and there was no improvement. I saw recommendations that XT computers should not use it, so I went back to the non-full mode.

- The 128K video memory did seem to stop the video corruption. I can't remember if I tried address CE00, but I did try every available address on the card (there are quite a few, but only two or three provide operation at all for the XT-IDE BIOS).

- The boot device is set to Disk, not ROM. The XT-IDE card wont operate at all with it set to ROM. Interestingly, the XT-IDE card lets me boot to the Tandy 1000 ROM from the boot menu, which is nice.

- Which SanDisk CF card are you using in your Tandy 1000 TL/2? Maybe it's just my CF card that's problematic at this point. I heard that SanDisk CF cards aren't bootable, so I went with Transcend's industrial cards (a 512MB card works fine in my Tandy 2500 XL/2, but not the 1000 TL/2 so far). If you're booting from one, I'd love to try the same model in my machine.

Thanks again 😀

I am using a 2GB CF SanDisk Ultra in my Tandy 1000 TL/2.

Do you know the model/part number?

Reply 15 of 30, by jasa1063

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dysamoria wrote on 2021-06-17, 19:34:
jasa1063 wrote on 2021-06-16, 00:28:
dysamoria wrote on 2021-06-12, 15:20:
Thanks for your reply and suggestions. […]
Show full quote

Thanks for your reply and suggestions.

- I don't have the XT-IDE BIOS set to full operating mode. I tried it and there was no improvement. I saw recommendations that XT computers should not use it, so I went back to the non-full mode.

- The 128K video memory did seem to stop the video corruption. I can't remember if I tried address CE00, but I did try every available address on the card (there are quite a few, but only two or three provide operation at all for the XT-IDE BIOS).

- The boot device is set to Disk, not ROM. The XT-IDE card wont operate at all with it set to ROM. Interestingly, the XT-IDE card lets me boot to the Tandy 1000 ROM from the boot menu, which is nice.

- Which SanDisk CF card are you using in your Tandy 1000 TL/2? Maybe it's just my CF card that's problematic at this point. I heard that SanDisk CF cards aren't bootable, so I went with Transcend's industrial cards (a 512MB card works fine in my Tandy 2500 XL/2, but not the 1000 TL/2 so far). If you're booting from one, I'd love to try the same model in my machine.

Thanks again 😀

I am using a 2GB CF SanDisk Ultra in my Tandy 1000 TL/2.

Do you know the model/part number?

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Compact-SDCFH- … uct_top?ie=UTF8

Reply 16 of 30, by dysamoria

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jasa1063 wrote on 2021-06-19, 02:28:
dysamoria wrote on 2021-06-17, 19:34:
jasa1063 wrote on 2021-06-16, 00:28:

I am using a 2GB CF SanDisk Ultra in my Tandy 1000 TL/2.

Do you know the model/part number?

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Compact-SDCFH- … uct_top?ie=UTF8

Thanks so much 😀 I ordered one. Will see what happens.

Reply 17 of 30, by jasa1063

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jasa1063 wrote on 2021-06-19, 02:28:
dysamoria wrote on 2021-06-17, 19:34:
jasa1063 wrote on 2021-06-16, 00:28:

I am using a 2GB CF SanDisk Ultra in my Tandy 1000 TL/2.

Do you know the model/part number?

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Compact-SDCFH- … uct_top?ie=UTF8

Good luck!

Reply 18 of 30, by dysamoria

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jasa1063 wrote on 2021-06-19, 22:30:

Yay, I was able to partition the CF card, install DOS 5, and boot from the CF card when my hard drive is disconnected. 😀

I'm still encountering the same freezing when trying to boot from CF while the hard drive is connected. I want to be able to move content from the hard drive to the CF card, but the CF wont boot with the HD present. I tried the XT-IDE ROM address you used and this wont even give me the XT-IDE ROM at boot. Must be something about the type of XT-IDE card I have?? I have to use D000 or D800.

What address are you using for your XT-IDE controller? I've been going through several addresses, and the default of 300, plus two more I've tried, have all resulted in the same. Am I not ever going to be able to use the XT hard drive already present in this machine with the CF card at the same time?

THANKS SO MUCH for the CF card recommendation! This is further than I have gotten before!

Last edited by dysamoria on 2021-06-25, 00:07. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 19 of 30, by pentiumspeed

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Any chance the hard drive is a conner or very early IDE hard drive that uses cirrus logic IDE controller on the hard drive's? This cirrus logic chipset on the hard drives is not compatible when trying to make 2 drive to work on one cable.

Otherwise, what is the hard drive you have in this tandy?

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.