Turbo-Torch

I downloaded Abrams from 4 different sources and none of them have TGA support. TGA is compatible with CGA and the game defaults to CGA. EGA has nothing to do with TGA and the two are in no way compatible. Looking at a box on eBay, the tag states it's Tandy 1000 compatible and it supports CGA, EGA and Hercules. It's Tandy compatible because it supports CGA. There is also no 3 voice sound on any of the versions I downloaded. If someone has a download link to a TGA/3 voice version, I'd love to have it (although I doubt it exists). BTW, I'm using a real Tandy 1000 EX.

Nice review and I learned a new word today. 👍 I'm looking forward to working plinth into some conversations at work. 😄

Just curious, what are your plans for this computer? Did you have one BITD? Is it a model you always wanted? Are you afraid of damaging it if you open it (seems you're against any upgrades)? Without a hard drive, you'll never enjoy its full potential. I highly recommend an XTIDE card. For less than $50 you can buy the XT-CF-Mini from Blue Lava systems (on eBay) and have an instant 64 MB super fast hard drive with the included CF card. And for $13, you can replace the 64 MB card with a 2GB CF card from Amazon and have a 2,000 MB hard drive. It was instant plug n' play on my 1000 EX, and that's a computer that was never meant to have a HD. Not only will you have drive C storage space, you now have a way of getting software onto your TL. Simply pop the CF card into your modern desktop PC and copy all the programs you downloaded off the internet onto the CF card. Put it back into your TL, and there they are. A WiFi modem is also very cheap and allows you to "dial" into over 1,000 BBSs all over the world. A real dial up modem is also cool if you happen to still have a landline.

Yes. Wouldn't hurt to also buy a cleaning disk kit that you pop in the drive to clean the heads as you'll need it periodically. Any disks you buy are going to be used or new old stock and there are many factors on how they are going to react. You may get some that perform like new, or some that were poor quality 30 years ago and shed oxide all over the heads the first time you try to use one. You can also have a never opened box of good name brand disks that were stored in a bad location and the disk surface will be full of mold. The disk surface is a breeding ground for mold and a common problem.

You're not going to mess up the drive by using different density disks. The Tandy computers I've owned have used TEAC drives which have all been fine with formatting high density disks as 720K, almost never have any bad tracks and don't recall any odd corruption later on. It's possible the TL or the drive is more finicky and you'll need the more expensive double density disks. Did you use a new unformatted disk? If it was a used disk that was formatted as 1.44mb, it ain't gonna work. You'd need to degauss the disk with something like a bulk tape eraser. Lastly, flip the sliding door on the disk back and look at the disk surface under a bright light. If you see any white splotches, that's mold and this disk is no good.

I believe the TL series came with a 720K drive, which would be why 1.44 is shaded out on Deskmate. 1.44 disks are the same with the exception of a hole in one corner that allows a HD drive to recognize it. I have no issues with formatting HD disks @ 720K in my 1000 EX. I also believe the TL/3 can support a 1.44 drive if you wanted to replace your existing one or add a 2nd.

For right now, can you just exit Deskmate and drop to DOS? It's been about 35 years since I owned my SL, but I'm almost positive that most (if not all) of DOS was contained in the ROM and will show as drive C:. TL series should be the same. It was cool in that it booted to the DOS prompt faster than the few seconds it took the CRT to warm up. But it was all disabled when UPS delivered my hardcard a few days later.

So as of THIS MONTH: You're $1,400 behind in rent. Also $700 for a payday loan...which was to help pay fees on a previous payday AND ANOTHER payday loan before that? Your car has 300,000 miles and is on its last leg. And this is all Cindy's fault because you have to spend money to get her to notice you. 🤪 It sounds like you're nearing homelessness and you won't even have a functioning car to live in. And despite all that, you're ready to spend $200 on a set of controllers for an old video game console?

Does Big Sexy know you feel that way about her? 😞

For the heck of it I did an image search for Ala Software and those clam shell cases looked very familiar. I bought these two from KB Toys back in the day. That was the first time I had seen software for the TRS-80 sold outside of a Radio Shack store. They were in a bin up front and priced at 99¢ each. Also bought some 99¢ 2600 Mythicon games from that same bin. Blitzkrieg is terrible. Bombs drop from above and you just move a guy back and forth to avoid them. The kind of game you'd type in from a magazine. It does support sound, but it's poor too. Cosmic Intruders is actually pretty good. It's a clone of 2600 Outer Space (Star Ship). Good sound effects.

You 100% get how the business works. Now use it to your advantage! Start a new SuperReport from scratch and pretend to be someone famous. Never say you're that person, just insinuate it in a roundabout way. For example, you've been handed the gift of being a Dollar Store version of Woody Harrelson. If I saw a youtube video of you doing a SuperReport and the name of the channel was something like "I'm Woody!" I'd be like how cool is that!! Woody Harrelson is a fan of the 5200! Instant click of the subscribe button from me. Within weeks, you'll be on your way to a million subscribers. As the channel explodes, you'll be able to get guests and even reoccurring guests. You can interview for a George Wendt clone and have a Norm! soundtrack whenever he shows up. YOU have the power to make the 5200 more popular in 2023 than it was in 1983!

For bonus content... What manufacturer has the best looking cartridge? Original Atari? Activision Parker Bros. Big Five's red shell inserted into Big Sexy?

Would mind listing out each of those games and ranking them from 1 to 10 (10 being best)? Also add a letter A if you feel the game works best with the original 5200 Analog stick, D for an 8 way stick like the Competition Pro and T for Trak-Ball. Feel free to explain why if you want. And if you don't mind, give a small review on the extreme ends. Such as why you hate a 1 game and really like a 10 game? Thanks!

My opinion is some type of internal corporate rule over compatibility issues, and nothing to do with cutting costs (at least early on). 2600 is in its heyday and Atari produces a deluxe two button joystick to use with newer games that support it. No matter how it's stated on the box, idiots will still be screaming they bought this new game and can't use it with their old controllers. That'll turn into Atari is scamming us into paying more money to play a game I already paid for! You received pack in paddle controllers which were paperweights until you bought a game that used them. When you did happen to buy one of those games, no problem as you already have the controllers and can play. Opposite of cost cutting and probably a good psychological move. Those cool, yet useless controllers taunted me for weeks, and the first game I bought was Night Driver so I could finally make use of them. Indy 500...included the driving controllers. Star Raiders...included the touchpad controller. Now they did deviate with the keyboard controllers. When I bought BASIC Programming, they were included, but if I remember correctly they gave you a choice of with or without when it came to keyboard games. Trak-ball controllers were not required for any game. My remote control joysticks definitely broke the mold in design and added a lot of extra hardware. $$$ An easy solution for 2 button joystick games would have been to also make them compatible with a one button stick in dumbed down way. Simply flip an A/B skill switch or the Color/B&W switch to select the type of joystick you're using.

I agree, what appears to be a large crack is really decorative pinstriping, and the chunks of missing plastic are advanced cooling mods. People pay good money for those kinds of upgrades.

You may want to consider retaking the photos on a different surface. What's going on there is a bit of a turn-off.

It's possibly a controller issue, but I've not heard of that happening. The EX is usually very reliable. Try posting about your problem in the Tandy section of vcfed.org There are at least two guys there who are extremely knowledgeable when it comes to the internal workings of the EX/HX series. If you're new to the forum, you have to be patient as your first 10 posts won't show up right away. Mods have to ok each one which could take up to a day. It's a spam deterrent thing.

https://retrocmp.de/fdd/mitsubi/htandy.pdf Around page 64. Is the drive doing anything? Spinning up, trying to seek tracks, red light on?

Did you clean the heads (as mentioned by DistantStar) before trying that new disk? If not, there's a good chance the build up will instantly etch and destroy any new disk you insert. The new drive you bought may be fine, but you may have destroyed that new disk if you tried it in the old drive first. Look closely for radial scratches on the disk surface. Also, there's nothing special about the EX drive. It's just a DSDD 360K unit. The 55BV should be fine as long as the jumpers are set correctly.

They have a composite out and CGA (actually TGA which is much better than CGA, but not quite as good as EGA). Composite to TV sucks. There's a TV mode/40 column text mode that you can use by holding down a function key when booting, but it's still horrible without a proper CGA monitor. Games that use TGA mode are awesome and they almost always support the Tandy 3 voice sound. It's an old IBM compatible PC, so you're not going to have HDMI or component mods like a game console. They come with 256K, a parallel printer port, 2 joystick ports, external disk drive port and one internal Plus Expansion slot which is a non standard ISA. There is a Plus Ram expansion board that allows you to expand to 640K...it also adds DMA and 2 more Plus ports. The EX/HX did not have an RS232 standard. Radio Shack sold that separately as a Plus card or you could buy a 300 or 1200 baud internal modem (also Plus cards). Unfortunately Radio Shack never sold a hard drive kit for this series. Today there are riser adapters that convert the non standard ISA Plus pins to a standard ISA edge adapter. They allow you to use standard small ISA cards which is extremely useful. Best of all, those adapters are very inexpensive. Technically you can now add a VGA card, but it's not very useful imo since most software utilizing VGA will need more than an 8088 processor. The Tandy Plus Expansion RAM board is rare. If you buy an EX/HX without one already installed, you'll have a hard time finding one. There are modern 3 in 1 replacements available. There are pros and cons when comparing them to the original Tandy board. They give you 640K (plus an extra 96K UMB), a serial port and an XT-CF interface. It gives you pretty much everything you need at a very reasonable price. Downside is it doesn't have DMA or give you any expansion slots...so you're locked out of expanding further by using ISA adapters, ISA boards or any of the Plus boards Tandy offered. My EX has the original Tandy Plus expansion board (with full 640K) and two ISA adapters plugged into it. First slot is a dual port RS232 (port one 25 pin, port two 9 pin) and second slot has a Blue Lava XTIDE CF. Also an external 3.5 floppy drive, a CRT CGA monitor and V20 processor upgrade. The XTIDE is the equivalent of a superfast 2,000 MB hard drive using DOS 6.2. Back to monitors...CGA is crazy rare and expensive these days! TexElec sells a nice RGBtoHDMI converter for $120 which works perfectly with modern LCD TVs. If you have an old VGA monitor, you can use any $2 hdmi to vga adapter with it. This is a photo of the expansion port section.

That's a good question!

You claiming he only sold one at a fixed price and questioning the current $67 bid, sounded like you had issues with his post and auctions. Hopefully I cleared up what you were missing.

I see he had two auctions at a set price $18 with free shipping. Each auction had 5 available with a total of 10 sold. He put another up with extra items and people are bidding it up to what they're willing to pay. What's the problem?

Midway plywood Williams plywood Atari plywood and MDF. MDF is incredibly strong and will last forever as long as it isn't rained on...arcade games were never designed to be outside in the weather. As far as condition after 40 years... Anything and anyone is a product of its environment. When you're a kid raised by grandma in a poor druggie infested neighborhood, you'll have experienced those kinds of seedy arcades with trashed games. Raised in a nice area, and your arcade memories will be of well maintained games in pristine condition, located in spectacular arcades. Decades later, you have a choice of buying the trashed games or well preserved/maintained games. No different than buying a dented up, beat to hell car that spent years outside in a ghetto apartment parking lot...or the same make and model that was kept in a climate controlled garage from day one.

I've been a Model III guy for over 40 years, but I've never been much into the Model I. If you post those photos in the Tandy section of VCFED, I'm sure someone can give you more detailed info. I didn't see that OMIKRON MAPPER II name in the original photos. If that daughter board is a CPM upgrade, you're usually given the option of CPM or TRSDOS when you turn on the computer, so there may be no reason to remove it...and that would be one heck of a valuable upgrade to have imo. Have you tried to boot that computer up yet? http://www.trs-80.org/omikron-mapper/ The info is confusing. It appears to be a data separator, like I originally thought...but to run CPM, do you need the MAPPER I? I also wonder if that II upgrades your system from SD to DD disk operation? On daughter board kits like that, you typically remove a large socketed IC and plug the daughter board into that socket, then install that IC onto the daughter board. Your last pics are much better, and now that I can see what those wires attach to, I have no idea what that floating board is for. First thought is maybe some kind of buffer, but I'm not aware of the Model I ever having any issues with the RS232.