Tandy 1000 TL/2 - Having Your Cake & Eating It Too

The Tandy 1000 was the first computer that I owned. I have very fond memories of it going all the way back to 1985. It is no wonder I own 5 of them in total. My Tandy 1000 TL/2 is what I am going to cover today and what makes it unique from all the other Tandy 1000s I have. In 1988 Radio Shack released the Tandy 1000 SL & TL computers. These had several enhancements over previous models. The graphics could now go all the up to 640x200x16 colors on a standard CGA monitor. It had a DAC for recording and playback of digital sound. MS-DOS 3.3 was included in ROM for almost instant booting of the computer without need for a floppy diskette. The keyboard connector was now a standard DIN5 keyboard connector and Tandy included an Enhanced 101 keyboard. System setup was done with a separate program that saved the system configuration to an EEPROM. The TL could be upgraded to 768K of memory. The extra 128K was then used for video memory freeing the lower 640K for DOS and user programs. The TL also had a real time clock using a standard CR2032 CMOS battery. The TL/2 released a year later also had an onboard XT IDE connector for an XT IDE hard drive of 20MB or 40 MB.

My Tandy 1000 TL/2 has the following configuration:

             8MHz 80286 CPU

             8MHz 802XL Math Coprocessor

             768K of memory

             3.5” 720K & 5.25” 360K diskette drives

             Lo-Tech XT-IDE card with 2GB CompactFlash card and adapter

             Lo-Tech 2MB EMS board

             Everex EV-170 IO card with 2nd parallel enabled

             XirCom PE3-10BT parallel Ethernet adapter

             Diamond Speedstar ET4000 1MB SuperVGA video card

             MCE2VGA converter (Allows CGA output on VGA monitor)

             Tandy Deluxe Joystick

             MS-DOS 6.22

The Lo-Tech XT-IDE adapter can boot to either the 3.5” or 5.25” floppy drive. The parallel port built into the Tandy 1000 TL/2 is non standard. That is why I decided on the 2nd parallel port and Xircom PE3-10BT adapter. That 2nd parallel port allows you to connect many more external devices like a ZIP drive than just using an ISA Ethernet card. You may be asking why I have the MCE2VGA converter and that I also have a SuperVGA adapter installed. It turns out you can use a utility called VSWITCH to switch between VGA and CGA graphics. You need the 768K ram upgrade in order to do this. This allows you the best of both worlds. The system will by default boot up using VGA. Using VSWITCH, you can switch back and forth between the CGA and VGA graphics. This allows you to run most of your Tandy 1000 programs that use its 160x200x16, 320x200x16 or 640x200x16 CGA graphics modes. I use a VGA switch box to switch between CGA & VGA using only 1 LCD monitor. The is a real space saver, otherwise it would require separate CGA and VGA monitors. The Lo-Tech 2MB EMS board can also be used for upper memory using a driver called UMBEMS.SYS. This converts the 64K EMS page frame to an upper memory block. I have a multi-boot DOS configuration that allows me to switch between EMS and UMB as well as VGA and CGA.

I consider this my ultimate Tandy 1000 computer. I can run VGA and Tandy 1000 CGA programs on the same computer and have either EMS or Upper Memory. I can boot to either floppy drive as needed. As the title says it’s like having your cake and eating too😊

Deskmate 3.5 running in 640x480x16 VGA mode

Deskmate 3.5 running 640x200x16 Tandy CGA mode

Personal Deskmate 2 running in 640x200x4 Tandy CGA mode









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