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Tandy 1000 emulation

facattack

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Joined
Mar 7, 2007
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Bucks County, PA
Guaging interest on a Tandy 1000 EX replica system. Is this appropriate? I'm not making one, just wondering if anyone thinks with this new fad going on of having mini consoles if you'd buy one were it made?

Like would you pick an EX? Or even a PCJR shell?
 
Are you talking about an actual (FPGA?) recreation, or just an emulator running on an embedded ARM CPU? If you were going to do either I'd suggest the optimal strategy would be to target the 1000 TX (or TL) as the core baseline, because there's a fair body of late "Tandy Graphics and Sound" software that's a little sluggish on the 8088 models. Of course, if we're talking about a reconfigurable FPGA or an emulator you could probably implement the option of switching CPU speed and other options easily enough. (An obvious option would be to include a full PCjr-compatible mode as well.)

If the question is what the case plastics of what a Tandy 1000 "console" should look like then, sure, and EX/HX reminiscent form factor would be cute if the goal is to include a keyboard instead of having the buyer BYO their own USB keyboard. I can imagine something sporting a netbook-style 90% size keyboard and styled/colored like a slimmer, smaller, 1000 HX but with an SD card slot in place of the floppy drive. If we're talking just a cheap non-functional shell like the Commodore 64, et all, micro consoles then, no, I think it'd make more sense to style the box like a small Tandy 1000 or PCjr system unit.

It's difficult to imagine just how hard it would be to actually make a *licensed* clone like that, though. Maybe Microsoft would be okay with licensing out DOS at this point. I think the Tandy 1000 BIOS was written by Phoenix Technologies, but whether they own any of it or if the copyright for that belongs to whatever successor company inherited the Tandy Computer intellectual properties might be a fun mess to sort out, and if course if you were going to include a PCjr mode that's *another* crazy kettle of fish...
 
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