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Need some basic add on advice for my new Tandy 1000SX

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First post, by FinalJenemba

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Hi all, just picked up my first piece of 80's original hardware, a Tandy 1000SX with a monochrome monitor. It's in amazing shape and im quite in love with it, but its bone stock. Doesn't look like its ever been opened. Obviously its gonna need some mods if I want to run most games and software. I've done a ton of research and understand how to upgrade the ram and add the co-prosessor for simcity and whatnot. But im getting confused on the ISA cards.

Im going to want to add a serial card so I can get a serial mouse. And I need some kind of hard disk solution as allot of the games what to be installed somewhere. I see tons of these cards cheap on eBay, but where im getting confused is doesn't DOS require drivers for these things? Doesn't seem like any of them come with disks, this in my only computer with a 5.25" floppy so I have no way to make disks for it. Same question for the hard disk, id like to get a CF solution like this one or the lo-tech one, but cant find any literature on how to actually make it work. They all say setup for the IBM XT, but nothing about other systems. Honestly I don't really care that much about installing DOS even, I don't mind booting Tandy DOS off the floppy, I just need a place to install games and software 🤣.

Thanks!

Reply 1 of 3, by AlexZ

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You probably want https://www.glitchwrks.com/xt-ide

I just tested Tandy 1000 SL/2 on an emulator. What I found nice is that unlike all the other 88/86 machines it boots DOS from BIOS. However I never got booting from a hard drive to work. But it should be possible using XT-IDE.

I would open the case to find out how many ISA slots it has. They will probably be 8bit. Then plan what expansion cards to get. I would get XT-IDE first, then a network card. I don't think mouse will be very useful in period correct software.

Pentium III 900E, ECS P6BXT-A+, 384MB RAM, GeForce FX 5600 128MB, Voodoo 2 12MB, Yamaha SM718 ISA
Athlon 64 3400+, Gigabyte GA-K8NE, 2GB RAM, GeForce GTX 275 896MB, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Phenom II X6 1100, Asus 990FX, 32GB RAM, GeForce GTX 980 Ti

Reply 2 of 3, by jheronimus

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No, there aren't any drivers, you just have to be mindful or IRQ interrupts that are free on Tandy 1000SX. The DIP switches on the motherboard largely deal with interrupts 5, 6 and 7.

Disk controller on my Tandy 1000SX uses IRQ5 — although I'm using MFM, not sure how IDE works there. In any case the controller uses its own BIOS to work (XTIDE in your case), and the system simply switches to XTIDE BIOS during boot, and XTIDE does the rest.

With serial/printer I think you have to keep in mind that Tandy has its own printer port, so if you try to install some kind of multi I/O, you might have to check the card's jumpers to change interrupts or disable the printer part.

This page will become your best friend, if not already 😀

MR BIOS catalog
Unicore catalog

Reply 3 of 3, by FinalJenemba

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Thanks for the advice that helps allot! I'm not really looking for printer expansion, the setup actually came with a printer that will work with the stock port. Just wanting to add serial so I can use a mouse in games like simcity, lemmings and a few old adventure games. Does seem like most of the cards come with parallel also though.

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