creepingnet
Veteran Member
Well, this thing is FINALLY working!
Took me awhile.
I have decided to do away with the stealth setup and put the hard disk in it's proper place - reason being, I did not want to harm the 65W PSU by having 2 floppies and a 90's hard disk attached.
The big issue here was getting it to display color on my 80's Mitsubishi color TV, which has a composite input. One thing I did was to keep from waking the girlfriend (or the crazy man upstairs) during late night rounds of _____ Quest sierra games from the 80's and long rounds of Ultima - I disconnected the internal speaker, so I could control the volume of the Tandy through the Mitsubishi.
The next hurdle, and the one that prompted this post, was to get color in composite....something that had been an issue with this particular Tandy 1000 in the past (as I had forgot) was that it would not display in color in composite mode. This differed vastly from my previous Tandy 1000 score, a 1000 EX, which was an all-in one with the video mode changers (at startup) listed above the function key F3.
The Tandy 1000, I tried and toiled (much to my girlfriend's chagrin) getting that blasted Tandy to display in color. I tried different O/S's, problem is, all of the Tandy 1000 startup disks include DOS versions too old to recognize the 500MB SCSI HDD. When I tried booting with the regular F3 function key - that did not work either, the biggest hurdle is, finding out that it was F12, and having to find the manual (on TVDog's Tandy 1000 archive) to figure that out.
Finally, tonight, I spent almost 2-3 hours toiling with that thing trying to get it to display color, messing with the Mode commands, messing with the ANSI.SYS driver, trying to force games to display in color using various graphics mode command line options. However, then I downloaded the manual, and in 2-3 tries, I figured out that I could press and hold F12, and all was right in the world - I fired up Police Quest in it's full 16-color, 3-voice sound glory, and all was right in my man cave again.
So for those out there tinkering with Tandy 1000's, heres some hints for you if you want composite video in color......
1.) If you have a Tandy 1000 before the EX, likely you will need to press and hold (or "spam" (ie. repeatedly hit)) F12 on startup to get "TV Mode". This should work for the 1000 and 1000A (what I have).
2.) Not ALL 1000's require a TV Mode change on startup, my Tandy 1000 EX (that I gave away to a user whom I think was named KZUP7XP or something like that), the Tandy 1000 EX seems like it naitively boots into TV mode when started up without an RGB monitor present. The Regular 1000's just boot into B&W and require F12 at statup (not F3 like the EX or 1000 SX have) to boot into TV mode. Also, you don't need a special version of DOS, standard MS-DOS works fine (I use 6.22), as the feature is summoned via BIOS call and is a part of the TGA display adapter, not triggered by the core operating system (as I was starting to think).
Took me awhile.
I have decided to do away with the stealth setup and put the hard disk in it's proper place - reason being, I did not want to harm the 65W PSU by having 2 floppies and a 90's hard disk attached.
The big issue here was getting it to display color on my 80's Mitsubishi color TV, which has a composite input. One thing I did was to keep from waking the girlfriend (or the crazy man upstairs) during late night rounds of _____ Quest sierra games from the 80's and long rounds of Ultima - I disconnected the internal speaker, so I could control the volume of the Tandy through the Mitsubishi.
The next hurdle, and the one that prompted this post, was to get color in composite....something that had been an issue with this particular Tandy 1000 in the past (as I had forgot) was that it would not display in color in composite mode. This differed vastly from my previous Tandy 1000 score, a 1000 EX, which was an all-in one with the video mode changers (at startup) listed above the function key F3.
The Tandy 1000, I tried and toiled (much to my girlfriend's chagrin) getting that blasted Tandy to display in color. I tried different O/S's, problem is, all of the Tandy 1000 startup disks include DOS versions too old to recognize the 500MB SCSI HDD. When I tried booting with the regular F3 function key - that did not work either, the biggest hurdle is, finding out that it was F12, and having to find the manual (on TVDog's Tandy 1000 archive) to figure that out.
Finally, tonight, I spent almost 2-3 hours toiling with that thing trying to get it to display color, messing with the Mode commands, messing with the ANSI.SYS driver, trying to force games to display in color using various graphics mode command line options. However, then I downloaded the manual, and in 2-3 tries, I figured out that I could press and hold F12, and all was right in the world - I fired up Police Quest in it's full 16-color, 3-voice sound glory, and all was right in my man cave again.
So for those out there tinkering with Tandy 1000's, heres some hints for you if you want composite video in color......
1.) If you have a Tandy 1000 before the EX, likely you will need to press and hold (or "spam" (ie. repeatedly hit)) F12 on startup to get "TV Mode". This should work for the 1000 and 1000A (what I have).
2.) Not ALL 1000's require a TV Mode change on startup, my Tandy 1000 EX (that I gave away to a user whom I think was named KZUP7XP or something like that), the Tandy 1000 EX seems like it naitively boots into TV mode when started up without an RGB monitor present. The Regular 1000's just boot into B&W and require F12 at statup (not F3 like the EX or 1000 SX have) to boot into TV mode. Also, you don't need a special version of DOS, standard MS-DOS works fine (I use 6.22), as the feature is summoned via BIOS call and is a part of the TGA display adapter, not triggered by the core operating system (as I was starting to think).