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Looks like Tandy 1000 worths gold now...

Reportedly CBS paid $20,000 for the 1000SL used in the show. It was sealed in the original box.
 
You kind of need a brand new looking machine for a TV show where the prop is going to be used prominently and is supposed to be new. Besides after the show is over they sell all the props off and if the show was popular they tend to make decent money on the stuff (after they take the writeoff for tax purposes).
 
$20K might be peanuts for a major network hit, but I think for most smaller cable shows it is still quite a bit.
 
$20,000 makes sense when you are are a business, have a giant amount of money, want a trusted reliable transaction at all circumstances, and making sure what you buy is in a guaranteed perfect condition for demonstration with no flaws to be seen during said presentation; visual, physical and mechanical.

I doubt a business would take a $25 deal from someone in a dark, cold alley in Chinatown, even if the computer looked completely new.
 
The stuff in the background can be broken and or painted so they get that stuff cheap. I do wonder where they get the stuff that is still in the box hanging on shelves (old store liquidations maybe that get rented out as props?).
 
Trixter said:
I would imagine Evan is rubbing his hands with glee (IIRC VCF sold it to them).
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So in the end, they still got it from someplace in New Jersey. The machine did look showroom new in the show and props (pun intended) to the production staff for making it as period accurate as possible. Sheldon Cooper would likely approve.
 
musicforlife said:
tandy never released its graphic mode as a card?
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That's not technically possible, since Tandy (and the PCjr it's based on) uses system memory as video memory (the last 128k of whatever memory is installed in the machine).
You can use many banks of videomemory, and switch between them on-the-fly. CGA compatibility is done by remapping the B000h-segment onto a bank in system memory.
So the only way to make it truly compatible is to integrate the logic on the mainboard.
 
Many "tandy graphics" games (like, at least half of them) just used the 32K window at B800 in 320x200 16-color mode. A video adapter could certainly support that. Yes, it wouldn't work with any game that used more than one video page, or did things "by the book", but it would work with all the games made lazy programmers, which was hundreds.

The real problem with making an adapter, however, is forcing hundreds of games to display Tandy graphics when they don't detect a Tandy system. I'd say less than 25% of games that supported tandy graphics had a setup program that let you force the mode; the rest would try to detect tandy and abort if not found. I think that's just as much a reason such an adapter would be impractical.
 
Trixter said:
Many "tandy graphics" games (like, at least half of them) just used the 32K window at B800 in 320x200 16-color mode. A video adapter could certainly support that. Yes, it wouldn't work with any game that used more than one video page, or did things "by the book", but it would work with all the games made lazy programmers, which was hundreds.
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Yes, since EGA was also out already, most developers probably tried to do a lowest-common-denominator approach, where they could support both EGA and Tandy with a minimum of effort.
The 'fancy' stuff is probably more likely to be found in PCjr-specific titles, such as Pitfall II and River Raid, using the banking system for fast and smooth vertical scrolling.

Trixter said:
The real problem with making an adapter, however, is forcing hundreds of games to display Tandy graphics when they don't detect a Tandy system. I'd say less than 25% of games that supported tandy graphics had a setup program that let you force the mode; the rest would try to detect tandy and abort if not found. I think that's just as much a reason such an adapter would be impractical.
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Indeed, we've found the same with the Tandy Sound Card. In theory it works, but in practice you need to patch tons of games to make decent use of it.
Perhaps if a Tandy/PCjr-compatible card had been available since day 1, things would have been different, because developers could take that hardware into account.

Things are nasty anyway... Game Blaster/CMS has similar issues: the original cards had a way to detect them. The Sound Blaster had CMS-capability, but lacked the detection hardware. Many early games won't work on Sound Blasters because there's no way to skip the detection.
 
Actually, I am not quite persuaded that making an ISA Tandy Graphics Card would be impossible. As we know, the Graphics Adapter in the Tandy 1000 TX and the later 1000 machines (except the SL & SL/2) had the ability to use the 128KB above the first 640KB of RAM solely for the graphics. 128KB should be more than enough for any game which may have used paging to access more than 32KB of video memory. It was not quite 100% compatible with Tandy 1000 supporting games, but it worked most of the time.

As we know, it is possible to implement a Tandy sound chip in a PC. But in an AT class system, you can't implement it at I/O C0-C7 where the 1000s and the PCjr. put it. That is because IBM put the 2nd DMA controller there in the PC AT. Another address area is required, which breaks compatibility with most or all Tandy 1000 games.

Finally, you have the issue of BIOS detection. Tandy 1000 games detected these systems by such methods as looking for a text string TANDY in the BIOS and then checking an identifier byte at FC00:0000 to be 21.

Fortunately, all but two of the seven games which have not yet been patched to work on a Sound Blaster hail from just one company. Anyone care to take a crack at fixing them ;)
 
Retro Canada said:
Blame on last Young Sheldon episode ??? The prices are skyrocketing on ebay...

I wanted a tandy 1000 to test the tandy graphics on my mce2vga but not at these prices... :/

BTW: has anyone tested it already ?
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Even the EX and HX models have shot up in value recently, I might be partially to blame for that. :rolleyes: I think my EX was only $70 USD.
 
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