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Help with Tandy 1000 RL/HD

S

Scottmm78

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Joined
May 3, 2019
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I have a 1000 RL/HD that I believe the has a dead Floppy controller. I have tried two 720kb Tandy floppy drives and several regular 1,44 MB floppies (with a modded floppy cable and the DS jumpers set to DS0) drives spin but will not read).
The 20mb ST-325X HDD does work and the system is able to boot from the HDD which only has boot files (msdos.sys io.sys command.com and an autoexec.bat).
So I have no way to get any new data into the system, I have tried to use a 3rd party floppy controller to get a working FDD but it does not seem to work (the Sergey Kiselev FDC with multi floppy bios and a mini/micro-2 FDC card). I can get the BIOS'es do load but the drives will not read.
I have also tried to get the a XT-IDE Glitchworks Rev 04 to work but unable to get that Bios to load when using both 8 and 32kb roms.

Basically has anyone had any luck getting a 3rd part floppy controller working or a XT-IDE if so what settings bios. I know in my 1000 SL I had to remove the FDC IC but with the FDC solder in in the RL/HD not possible(Maybe ground a pin to turn it off?) I dont want to make any major unremovable mods as I'm looking sell the the RL/HD soon.

and as stupid as it sounds i even tried to take the HDD out and connect it to standard IDE controller did not work . but does still work in the rl/hd
 
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Been 20 years since I had my RL/HD But I recall the hard drive being XT IDE, not 16 bit IDE. Thats why it won't work on a regular IDE controller.
 
First, you can not add a floppy controller as long as the integrated one is still active. Even if the controller you add would be "secondary", the Tandy would still try to boot from the internal one.

Second, I think you are going the wrong way with how you troubleshoot. You say you have tried "two 720kb Tandy floppy drives and several regular 1,44 MB floppies" - but why? What is the backstory? Did you get it with no floppy drive? If there was one installed, did you, instead of trying other drives in the Tandy, test the drive that came with it with another system to check whether or not it's working?

Chances are, none of the drives you tried in the Tandy were working or correctly configured. Make sure with a different machine that you have a floppy drive that works and is *correctly* set to work in the 1000 RL/HD.

Once that is done, check the connectivity between the floppy header and the pins on the mainboard (in case the cable is bad). Then, check connectivity to the floppy controller. You may find some passive component or something along the way that failed and the FDC is just fine.

ps: seeing you write "1,44" instead of "1.44", are you from Germany perhaps? Because that mistake is mostly done by us when writing numbers in English.
 
I have one one of these machines. I can’t comment on floppy drive troubleshooting, the suggestions above seem good. I did have some trouble getting XT-IDE to work. I made these notes:
SETUPRL /A to get full options for settings (BIOS Settings).
Disabled HDD in SETUPRL, then XT IDE could kick in and take over.
XT-IDE card only works at D800 (Default doesn’t work, something else there in ROM?)
 
No did not try the Tandy FDD in another PC no way to inject 12v and 5v into the floppy ribbon, as for 1,44 vs 1.44 just fat fingered it.
Timo W. said:
First, you can not add a floppy controller as long as the integrated one is still active. Even if the controller you add would be "secondary", the Tandy would still try to boot from the internal one.

Second, I think you are going the wrong way with how you troubleshoot. You say you have tried "two 720kb Tandy floppy drives and several regular 1,44 MB floppies" - but why? What is the backstory? Did you get it with no floppy drive? If there was one installed, did you, instead of trying other drives in the Tandy, test the drive that came with it with another system to check whether or not it's working?

Chances are, none of the drives you tried in the Tandy were working or correctly configured. Make sure with a different machine that you have a floppy drive that works and is *correctly* set to work in the 1000 RL/HD.

Once that is done, check the connectivity between the floppy header and the pins on the mainboard (in case the cable is bad). Then, check connectivity to the floppy controller. You may find some passive component or something along the way that failed and the FDC is just fine.

ps: seeing you write "1,44" instead of "1.44", are you from Germany perhaps? Because that mistake is mostly done by us when writing numbers in English.
Click to expand...
No did not try the Tandy FDD in another PC no way to inject 12v and 5v into the floppy ribbon, as for 1,44 vs 1.44 just fat fingered it.

That's what I suspected that the current FDC is conflicting in my SL it was socketed so it was eazy just pull the chip this on is soldered in SMD.
 
SteveHere said:
I have one one of these machines. I can’t comment on floppy drive troubleshooting, the suggestions above seem good. I did have some trouble getting XT-IDE to work. I made these notes:
SETUPRL /A to get full options for settings (BIOS Settings).
Disabled HDD in SETUPRL, then XT IDE could kick in and take over.
XT-IDE card only works at D800 (Default doesn’t work, something else there in ROM?)
Click to expand...
And that is the catch-22 I'm stuck in I have that file on floppy and on a cf card but cause get it into the PC .

But the 0xD800 Adress bit is good to know something to work with atleast.

May have to bite the bullet and pull that FDC
 
Scottmm78 said:
I have also tried to get the a XT-IDE Glitchworks Rev 04 to work but unable to get that Bios to load when using both 8 and 32kb roms.
Click to expand...
I also have a 1000RL, and my XT-IDE Rev 1 card was a struggle to get working with it. The memory layout of this machine (I believe from the extra video and audio modes) is very particular, and the XT-IDE ROM must be padded (while running at C800h, I believe) with 16kb of FF bytes before the start of the XT-IDE BIOS, to avoid XT-IDE being corrupted by evil Tandy activity.

Lo-tech was kind enough to build a padded ROM image of XT-IDE Release 566 for this machine for their XT-CF card. However, this did not work with my Rev 1 card. I ended up building a new XT-IDE image for my card and then padding it myself with the FF bytes, before it would work.

If you want to try the one I built (release 624), it's on my Tandy page. However, since yours is a different card revision, you will probably need to make your own. Unfortunately the way I did this involved using an EEPROM programmer.. if you don't have one handy, there may be another way using DOS software for dumping and flashing through the XTIDE card. But for me, having the programmer (a TL866II) made things much easier to fix when things went sideways.

Loosely, here are the steps I took to configure and pad XT-IDE for the 1000RL:

1: Download the latest release of XT-IDE and use xtidecfg to make a new configuration. Some important parts that eventually worked for me were:
* Full operating mode enabled (yes)
* kiB to steal from RAM [1] (this may be sub-optimal)
* Primary IDE Controller, Device type, make sure your correct card is selected
2: Still using xtidecfg, flash XTIDE to the EEPROM
3: Pull the eeprom chip out, put it in a USB programmer (like a TL866 family programmer), dump it to a file
4: Write 16kb of FF bytes to a file, then append the file with the XT-IDE ROM dump. I think I used something like "cat xtide-dump.bin >> padding-16kb.bin"
5: Using the EEPROM programmer, write the newly padded image back to the ROM
6: Put the ROM back into the XT-IDE card, and boot the 1000RL

If it does work for you, it might be cool to make the image available on the web somewhere for other Tandy owners, along with information about the configuration and card revision you used. I would be happy to host it.

As a side note, it would be nice if xtidecfg.com could just add the 16kb FF padding (or some configurable size sled) itself, without the need for any other tools, for systems like this that need finer control over where exactly in memory XT-IDE lives.
 
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Timo W. said:
My RL/HD is currently in storage, but isn't SETUPRL part of the ROM drive?
Click to expand...
Not on mine. I had to get setuprl in through the floppy in order to set up the BIOS for XT-IDE... that might be an issue for Scottmm78 if the built-in controller prevents XT-IDE from taking over.
 
Is there a way to delete the bios values. I managed to kill my machine, I can't boot anymore, I think I made a wrong setting on the floppy drives, so no Floppy, no XTA HDD, no XT-IDE, no nothing.
I can't find a keystroke that let's me in the bios. I see no chance of starting setuprl from any drive. Man that was a dumb move. I had to investigate the "slow-music mt-32 playback" and so I checked some bios settings...I must have used the wrong values...
 
Remove the coin cell and either wait 10 minutes or short the two terminals (while the system is OFF). That should zap all BIOS settings. Then reinstall the coin cell and power on the system.
 
Timo W. said:
Remove the coin cell and either wait 10 minutes or short the two terminals (while the system is OFF). That should zap all BIOS settings. Then reinstall the coin cell and power on the system.
Click to expand...
Good thought, but this system stores its BIOS settings in an EEPROM. Jeffrey Hayes details a process for resetting that chip about halfway down the following page:


I have, uh, "tested" this process myself... ;)

dr.zeissler said:
I had to investigate the "slow-music mt-32 playback" and so I checked some bios settings...I must have used the wrong values...
Click to expand...
The playback rate is a function of the PIT in most cases. Beyond that, I'm wondering if there might be a potential conflict between the serial port on the motherboard and the one on the expansion card you'd installed?
 
That was a though one...

I wanted to free some resources and therefore deactivated the floppy controller, but this was a big failure.

I never got over "Boot Disk failure". The machine does not boot from anything (Internal Floppy, XTAHD, XTIDE, Future-Domain-SCSI Controller with SCSI HDD Dos 3.3, internal Rom).
The solution was to put in a ISA Floppy controller...then the machine went right into the XTAHD. Never thought about that the first time....

Now the slowdown MT32 playback...the slot was free...I copied PQ2 to the internal XTAHD and...music is fine....my thoughts on this:
The I/O card has all ressources activated, so parallel and two serial ports so the serial connection has perhaps two COM1 ports...to bad I did not find the jumpersettings so I tested a bit.

If I deactivate the serial ports )took out J7+J8) everything is working...but there are other options, like COM3 jumpering or both COM1 and COM2 on the same IRQ4 (tested with checkit3). My original setting does not work (see picture) , but COM3 or both COM1/2 on IRQ4 did not slowdown the MT32 playback....so next thing is to check what solution is best. Perhaps the serial connection does work so I can hook-up the mt-32 on the internal serial port and make interlnk/intsvr to use the COM connection on the I/O card.

If I can't do that, I will let the com-ports on the I/O card deactivated.

IMG_1333.jpeg
 
The MT32 slows massively down on mt32 playback on a patched SCI midi driver for serial connection on my Tandy 1000.
The music plays slower than half of the normal speed and even slower if there is much gfx-movement.

This is due to my additional COM Ports that seem to make the internal COM-Port crazy.
 
Because I did not find the correct jumper settings I had to troubleshoot them for myself.
After severel hours of testing I got everything working. If someone will try this with his T1000RL and the same IO card here are the jumpers.

Here is what I intended to use the connections:

TANDY:
- IDE Interface (XTAHD) 32MB (C:) + 8MB (E:)
- LPT1 > deactivated
- COM1/I4 > use with MT32 serial conecction

IO-CARD:
- COM2/I3 > intersvr
- LPT1/I7 > Zipdrive (palmzip-driver) > OPL3LPT (not tested due to the lack of usable games)

Here is what is still left to do, figure out
- Best settings in the Tandy1000RL setup
- Getting more Midi-Patches (MT32, CM32L, SC55)
- Getting EGA Hires Art aspect-corrected for the tandy 1000 640x200 16color mode.
- Getting an external 5,25 Floppy working on that Tandy 1000RL/HD (perhaps I have to change the LPT settings on the IO card again)
- Getting GEM to work with 640x200 16colors
- Getting Win30 640x200 16color (Tandynouse could be fixed due to great find from cloudschatze)

Doc
 

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dr.zeissler said:
Because I did not find the correct jumper settings I had to troubleshoot them for myself.
After severel hours of testing I got everything working. If someone will try this with his T1000RL and the same IO card here are the jumpers.

Here is what I intended to use the connections:

TANDY:
- IDE Interface (XTAHD) 32MB (C:) + 8MB (E:)
- LPT1 > deactivated
- COM1/I4 > use with MT32 serial conecction

IO-CARD:
- COM2/I3 > intersvr
- LPT1/I7 > Zipdrive (palmzip-driver) > OPL3LPT (not tested due to the lack of usable games)

Here is what is still left to do, figure out
- Best settings in the Tandy1000RL setup
- Getting more Midi-Patches (MT32, CM32L, SC55)
- Getting EGA Hires Art aspect-corrected for the tandy 1000 640x200 16color mode.
- Getting an external 5,25 Floppy working on that Tandy 1000RL/HD (perhaps I have to change the LPT settings on the IO card again)
- Getting GEM to work with 640x200 16colors
- Getting Win30 640x200 16color (Tandynouse could be fixed due to great find from cloudschatze)

Doc
Click to expand...
What Card is that that is connected to the HDD in this setup. and where can i find more information in it
 
indyjoenz said:
I also have a 1000RL, and my XT-IDE Rev 1 card was a struggle to get working with it. The memory layout of this machine (I believe from the extra video and audio modes) is very particular, and the XT-IDE ROM must be padded (while running at C800h, I believe) with 16kb of FF bytes before the start of the XT-IDE BIOS, to avoid XT-IDE being corrupted by evil Tandy activity.


As a side note, it would be nice if xtidecfg.com could just add the 16kb FF padding (or some configurable size sled) itself, without the need for any other tools, for systems like this that need finer control over where exactly in memory XT-IDE lives.
Click to expand...

I used your modified BIOS file on a rev 4 and was able to the the card Bios loaded just fighting with the onboard HDD controller to get the CF to boot.

Also pulled the FDC chip and was able to get the external Floppy card (Sergey Kiselev's FDC)with Gotek working. wishing someone made a XD-IDE/FDC combo. Only one ISA slot is a pain . Do I want FDD or do I want storage
 
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