Try the command

INTRO SPECIAL

and the CTRL-F5 key to capture a screen shot. Then post the shot here.

Thanks very much for your interest and help. Please look at the image and see that the shell is intact, and that the ASCII text within is the problem (which I thought would have been the easy part!) 😀 Since I know how to navigate this program, I was even able to bring up a graphical image from within the included Paint app with no problem. Navigating the Music app, I was able to play all supplied 3-voice tunes. The only issue is being able to see where you are because of the text problem. The Personal DeskMate program, by the way, can be downloaded at the following page (pdm2.zip): http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/deskmate.html

I don't have a solution for you, but DOSBox is constantly being improved. You can try to download one of the as-yet unreleased versions listed in this thread:

DOSBox SVN Builds

You should first try:

http://www.aep-emu.de/cvscompile/dosbox.htm

since it is as close the the next official release as possible. If that doesn't work, try ykhwong's or gulikoza's versions.

Think it's not possible to get it to work, iirc it relies on the tandy
bios or something. But i never looked too deep into it (quite tricky
stuff) so i might be wrong.

On the other hand, this is the only emulator that actually brings up the shell itself, which is a huge step forward. Please note that the few characters that you see in the shell image are not actually generated characters (F2, F3, etc), they are merely graphical elements incorporated into the shell to represent these functions. So the problem is still with ASCII charactes applied to the shell, which, incidentally, display fine at the prompt. For these reasons, it may not be the Tandy BIOS, and we may be close to a solution. I will try the BETA versions and report back. Thanks! 😀

For these reasons, it may not be the Tandy BIOS

Well i suppose the tandy bios had some character table at a fixed
location or something, and the prog reads this one (crap in dosbox).
Regular int10 should work, uses the "correct" tables.
But as i said i didn't delve too deep into it as far as i remember.

WD,
Thanks for your insight, as this makes a lot of sense. Tandy had a way of making various "premium" versions of DeskMate proprietary, and they kept doing this until the decline of the program around 1991 in favor of Windows 3.0/3.1. If you are correct, the question then becomes whether or not there is a way to redirect the program to look at the correct character table? Please bear in mind that I am not a programmer beyond the writing of a ton of DOS batch files over the years. Thanks for any further insight you might offer.

I'll try to have a look at the bios docs and listings, maybe it doesn't
make sense what i'm talking about 😉

There was some thread about deskmate somewhere on the forums,
maybe i'll dig that up, could contain useful information as well.

I looked up the other DeskMate thread only to find that it dealt with exactly the same subject over a year ago. One message mentioned that there may have been fonts in the Tandy ROM. The shell images look like they are looking for a font table at a certain memory location which is not there, hence the displyed garbage. If this is correct and if we knew the memory location, it would be theoretically possible to map a table into memory using a debug script, and then launch "Desk" from a batch file. Any thoughts about this?

One message mentioned that there may have been fonts in the Tandy ROM.

That was me 😉
Tandy roms seem to have font tables in their very high area, at a different
location than the pcjr (dosbox has neither, but uses the graphics rom).
You can't really use a debug script or something, but would need to
recompile dosbox (well after adding some loader for the tandy rom,
which should be quite easy if it's just for the font).

Thanks for your insight, but what you describe is probably beyond my current level of experience. I will check back here from time to time to see if one of the developers has enough interest to include Tandy ROM in a future release. At least I have a direction, and a partial solution thanks to DOSBox. BTW, this forum is a refreshing change from other emulator forums, where people actually take an interest rather than dismiss you just for making a suggestion. I won't mention names, but there is one forum that I wouldn't "MESS" with (pun intended). Thanks again, WD, and eveyone else who tried to help.

Does this program work in Tand-Em?
http://www.oldskool.org/pc/tand-em

I don't think Tand-Em works in DosBox but it may work in VPC.

TandEm is tricky but if you get it working somewhere it should
get at least over the fonts problem.

Tand-Em appears to want only the original Tandy 1000 ROM which is different than the Tandy 1000 HX or TX ROM. I have tried it before, but I got an error message related to the above when trying to launch.

retrograde station should have a working one

The fonts in the rom don't seem to be the cause, but there's a call to
int10/ah=10 which seems to be different on tandy2000 from the regular
vga definition. They are copying entries from the font tables using this
interrupt call.
Maybe the tandy1000 behaves the same, or the tandy detection of
deskmate identifies the dosbox tandy emulation wrongly as tandy2000
or so.

WD,
Can't thank you enough for the research and effort. I guess the question now is whether or not a fix for a future release of DOSBox is a possibility? I have tried just about every emulator out there (including Tand-Em), and this seems to be the best hope.

What about using MESS? It emulates some Tandys (if you have the ROMS).

Can DOSBox write to ROM areas? If so, a program that puts the original ROM in place can be made (effectively putting the fonts in their place) and intercepting INT 10h to point to correct font tables.

MESS can be configured for the Tandy 1000 HX and it sucessfully goes through the entire "boot" routine. Depending on what you have compiled in the program's required disk image, it can even successfully run CGA-based software, including old games. But as soon as you put "Personal DeskMate 2" into a disk image and try to run it, you get all garbage on the screen. That's why I was excited about DOSBox, because the actual shell does come up, and if you know how to navigate the program without being able to see the fonts, as I do, you can even verify that everything else is indeed working. So, as you can see, I continue to think that DoSBox has the best promise.

As I alluded to earlier, it's also refreshing to be able to ask about a subject on a forum such as this and not be blown out of the water, as with MESS. If the developers choose not to pursue it, that's fine, as I understand there are a lot of requests. But the interest and courtesy are still very much appreciated.