- VCF South West - June 14 - 16, Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at University of Texas at Dallas
- VCF West - Aug 2 - 3, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA
- VCF Midwest - Sept 7 - 8 2024, Schaumburg, IL
- VCF SoCal - Mid February 2025, Location TBD, Southern CA
- VCF East - April 2025, Infoage Museum, Wall NJ
-
Please review our updated Terms and Rules here
TX or TL?
- Thread starter Great Hierophant
- Start date
The 640x200x16 mode was not BIOS-supported and you had to program the registers directly to use it. This contributed to it's unpopularity, and also because using it would exclude people who had TXs and earlier and did not have this mode.
I think that the ROM DOS had a command that would let you boot from either floppy, or at least on the HX it did. Sort of handy.
It's only some keys (particularly the numeric keypad) that have different scan codes and cause trouble. I think that booter games would pose the biggest problem with this.
This apparently only affects colors other than white. A game like Ms. Pac-Man that uses the 640x200 composite mode (which has artifacting mixed with white) would look the same on a Tandy and an IBM CGA card. Games that use the 320x200 composite mode (like Archon) might look different because you're mixing colors with the artifacting.
And as I've mentioned, the onboard floppy, printer port, and joysticks can be disabled on the TL.
Cloudschatze
Veteran Member
How is this accomplished?
I don't know exactly, but someone here mentioned the TL having a setup program, which may have an option to disable it.
Great Hierophant
Veteran Member
None of the TL manuals give a setting to disable on-board peripherals in their setup programs.
Ok, I found it. Bit 1 of port FFEBh disables the joystick ports on the TL.
Cloudschatze
Veteran Member
You have to use the super-secret, "/a" switch. Even so, Tandy didn't provide any option in the setup utilities to disable the joysticks...
... Which makes this interesting. (Thanks, Fallo!)
I'll have to give this a shot. According to the same section in the TL technical manual, it ought to be possible to disable the "sound chip" as well...
Great Hierophant
Veteran Member
Bit 2 disables the sound chip.
Mike Chambers
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2006
- Messages
- 2,621
i'm a bit late to this thread. i have a 1000TX (and an HX) which i've found to be excellent for old-school gaming. luckily i got mine with a 20 MB IDE hard drive, which made it that much better. between the TX and TL it's basically a choose em based on your personal prefs i guess, but i'll tell you that it's very cool to be able to carry it over to the TV now and then for a bit of marble madness or ultima 6 on a bigger screen.
one major advantage of the TX is being able to output the tandy enhanced graphics modes to a TV, can't do that with the TL i believe.
one major advantage of the TX is being able to output the tandy enhanced graphics modes to a TV, can't do that with the TL i believe.
Great Hierophant
Veteran Member
Being able to see 320x200x16 screens on a big TV is important to me, and more to the point, it preserves the composite color capabilities of many games. With a TL I would have to stick a CGA card for any composite color, and then only CGA composite color.
The TL is a much more flexible machine, virtually all of it can be disabled. You can put in a high density floppy controller, a standard gameport, a bidirectional or better parallel card that would be LPT1.
Of course, you'll still want a RGB monitor because of the futility of trying to use 80-column text on TVs.
Remember though that the Tandy video doesn't use the OSC line on the bus, and so you'll get composite colors that are very different from those of CGA.
...and it uses a standard XT keyboard as opposed to the 90-key ones. It's also got the 640x200x16 graphics mode and DAC, although hardly anything supports them.