Nice computer. It really will look a lot better with a little cleaning...maybe try a Mr clean magic eraser on that nasty brown stain on the side of the case and on any other difficult to remove scuffs and stains.

Anyway...again its a very cool tandy pc. I really like the simple boxy case and that stb video card it came with.

If you haven't found it already...here is the original information for your system from radio shack's archive:

http://support.radioshack.com/support_computer/1400.htm

All your specs and other useful information is all there.

Hope to see you set this system up with a cool cga/ega monitor, keyboard and mouse and see it in action one day.

Congrats on a nice find.

Yeah that's actually what I was reading from as I was listing off the specs. 🤣 Thanks though, it is a pretty neat computer. I was talking to someone else and they said I should try shoving an ISA VGA card in there and see if that'll work. I'll probably give that a go later today and maybe I'll post a follow up of it working. 😁

King_Corduroy wrote:

It's an interesting machine in that it's a plain 80286 PC clone and in no way has any relation to Tandy's past 1000 line of machines.

It has EGA-compatible video, which is better than Tandy, so aside from backward compatibility I guess there was no need to put in Tandy graphics. It would probably have been too expensive to develop a chip that is both Tandy and EGA-compatible at the same time. EGA chips can be bought off the shelf.

It's a shame if it has no audio though.
From what I understood, the Tandy audio was originally at an IO address that was later re-used by the AT-standard. But there are some AT-compatible machines with the same sound chip, located at a different address (Tandy 1000RLX?). Shame if they didn't put that on.

As far as I see the specs make no mention of it so I assumed it was without that feature, not sure to be honest though.

This seems to be the brochure: http://maben.homeip.net/static/s100/tandy/bro … y%20catalog.pdf
No mention of graphics/sound options. Looks like they were marketed as business machines.

Scali wrote:

This seems to be the brochure: http://maben.homeip.net/static/s100/tandy/bro … y%20catalog.pdf
No mention of graphics/sound options. Looks like they were marketed as business machines.

On a side note...I really love looking at these awsome old Tandy/Radio Shack catalogs! Thanks for the link.

Yeah thanks for finding that, these old magazines and sales brochures are wicked cool. 😁

my dad had this computer for his business when i was ten years old.. i used it to burn eeprom chips for him and to run bedford payroll software

I wonder... Since many Tandy 1000 supporting games used a simple detection routine that basically searched for the presence of the string "Tandy" in the BIOS code, did many games trip on machines like these? Tandy 2000 and Tandy 3000 systems had no support for the special graphics and sound capabilities of the Tandy 1000 series, but may still have contained the string "Tandy" somewhere in their BIOSes, perhaps as part of the copyright statement. But then again, since these were basic IBM PC clones, they probably licensed standard clone BIOSes from the likes of Phoenix and AMI, so perhaps those systems didn't contain the String Tandy in their BIOSes at all.

Did any of you Tandy 2000 and Tandy 3000 owners ever notice any games with Tandy 1000 support flat-out refusing to work on these systems? Or perhaps starting up with no working audio, a black screen, or simply locking up?

digger wrote on 2019-02-10, 13:24:

I wonder... Since many Tandy 1000 supporting games used a simple detection routine that basically searched for the presence of the string "Tandy" in the BIOS code, did many games trip on machines like these? Tandy 2000 and Tandy 3000 systems had no support for the special graphics and sound capabilities of the Tandy 1000 series, but may still have contained the string "Tandy" somewhere in their BIOSes, perhaps as part of the copyright statement. But then again, since these were basic IBM PC clones, they probably licensed standard clone BIOSes from the likes of Phoenix and AMI, so perhaps those systems didn't contain the String Tandy in their BIOSes at all.

Did any of you Tandy 2000 and Tandy 3000 owners ever notice any games with Tandy 1000 support flat-out refusing to work on these systems? Or perhaps starting up with no working audio, a black screen, or simply locking up?

Games would usually ask you on startup which screen resolution and what sound card your system supported, so it wouldn't try to run Tandy graphics and sound unless you specifically entered that when the game booted.

sliderider wrote on 2020-01-15, 11:33:

digger wrote on 2019-02-10, 13:24:

I wonder... Since many Tandy 1000 supporting games used a simple detection routine that basically searched for the presence of the string "Tandy" in the BIOS code, did many games trip on machines like these? Tandy 2000 and Tandy 3000 systems had no support for the special graphics and sound capabilities of the Tandy 1000 series, but may still have contained the string "Tandy" somewhere in their BIOSes, perhaps as part of the copyright statement. But then again, since these were basic IBM PC clones, they probably licensed standard clone BIOSes from the likes of Phoenix and AMI, so perhaps those systems didn't contain the String Tandy in their BIOSes at all.

Did any of you Tandy 2000 and Tandy 3000 owners ever notice any games with Tandy 1000 support flat-out refusing to work on these systems? Or perhaps starting up with no working audio, a black screen, or simply locking up?

Games would usually ask you on startup which screen resolution and what sound card your system supported, so it wouldn't try to run Tandy graphics and sound unless you specifically entered that when the game booted.

That may have been the case in later games, but many earlier games would autodetect PCjr and Tandy 1000 systems and enable their special graphics and sound modes without requiring manual configuration. The earlier Sierra adventures based on the AGI engine were a notable example of that. But also many booter games would work like this. Those were the games I was wondering about.