Found myself a Tandy 2500 SX!

[AdamAnt316]

Hello, everyone! Things seem to be coming up Tandy for me lately. After finding both a TRS-80 MC-10 and a Tandy 1200HD at last month's MIT Swap, I've now acquired a Tandy 2500 SX. It was pretty much a throw-in with a boxed Commodore Plus/4 I bought at a hamfest this past weekend; it came with a bag containing accessories (seen below), but no keyboard or monitor. I have yet to open it up or plug it in; it apparently has 1MB RAM and a 52MB hard drive, but no expansion cards. Anyway, here are some pictures:

The top. A little dingy, but not bad. Will have to take pictures of the insides soon.

Front panel. The 5.25" disk drive is apparently an official upgrade.

Back panel. Why are there only 14 holes in the VGA connector? Do I need some sort of special VGA cable?

Included accessories. Is the SXSETUP program on one of the DeskMate disks, or would it have been on a different disk?

 

[vwestlife]

Why are there only 14 holes in the VGA connector?

Because the VGA pinout has changed over the years:

Do I need some sort of special VGA cable?

You can either drill a small hole to make room for that extra pin, or find an old VGA cable (or splitter) that doesn't have it.

 

[Bungo Pony]

Nice find! That was my first PC. I upgraded the hard drive in it to 1.7G and installed Win95. It crawled! Would love to get one again though

 

[Trixter]

You can either drill a small hole to make room for that extra pin, or find an old VGA cable (or splitter) that doesn't have it.

I always rip pin 11 out with needle-nose pliers. Not out of ALL my VGA cables, but I always keep 2 or 3 handy modified in this way. Takes 5 seconds.

 

[keenerb]

My 2500SX is one of my favorite desktop systems.

Not a lot of people realize it, but it DOES have the Tandy 1000-series audio capabilities, just on a different port than normal. There has been game patches and a TSR developed for a third-party add-on Tandy sound card clone that should work on this machine as well!

 

[AdamAnt316]

Thanks for the replies! I'll have to modify one of my VGA cables to fit the connector, if I don't already have one with the missing pin. Once I've done that, I'll power it up and see what it does. Guessing the BIOS battery is long flat; is the SETUPSX program on one of the DeskMate disks I pictured above, or was it on a different disk that came with the system? Also, does it need to be on a boot disk? Again, thanks!
-Adam