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Tandy 1000 EX on TV?

T

Tupin

Experienced Member
Joined
Jun 7, 2009
Messages
436
Location
St. Louis, MO
I tried using my recently acquired Tandy 1000 EX on my TV, and all I got was a bunch of squiggly lines. Nothing is in the disk drive. What do I need to do to get it to be on my TV?
 
You won't be able to do anything on an EX without a disk of some sort, but you should be able to see the Memory Size and BIOS information. Of course, old-style composite video output may not like your TV and vice versa. More info about the TV would be helpful.
 
First, we need to confirm that it's not a problem with the computer. Does it give you the POST beep and try to boot the disk drive? If that's the case, then your TV may not like the composite output from the Tandy. Some computers and game consoles put out slightly nonstandard video signals. In particular, many of them have a refresh of exactly 60Hz, while on NTSC TVs the refresh is a bit less than that. Adjusting the vertical hold usually fixes this. Generally, it's not a problem on most TVs made after the '70s. Some TVs don't have a user-adjustable vertical hold; for those you can get a video stabilizer box.
 
Yeah, I guess it's not the computer.

I tried using an RF cable with an RCA to coax adapter, I guess that won't work.
 
It works! I just had to plug the cable into composite rather than RF. Too used to the CoCo and Commodore, I guess. :p

It says it needs a system disk, though. Could I just use a 5.25 floppy version of MS-DOS?
 
Yes, that should work. However, Tandy bundled versions of MS-DOS (2.11-3.3) specific to their systems. They offer Tandy specific functionality that a vanilla version of MS-DOS would not.
 
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