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Tandy 1000 Upgrades.

The Sony drive has a standard connector and four-pin power connector. That adapter gives it an edge connector and a bigger power connector.
 
Okay, now there are bigger problems. The 3.5 inch drive responds, but it still doesn't read anything. The 5.25 wasn't working, so I switched the cable on the 3.5 from J2 to J3, and they both booted up, but neither responded.

I'll use my Tandy 1000EX for now, I'm getting a DOS game in the mail soon.
 
Tupin, what i see on that adapter is the molex for the large plug, but NO power to the 3.5inch, i believe it lets you plug in the tandy drive and be able to use it in a standard pc, i would be careful when using that particular model of tandy floppy, the 4-pin mini and the lines for the power on the cable ARENT seperate on the drive, the traces connect into each other, if you use a standard cable, u will ground out the floppy and the power supply won't turn on, if you use the 4-pin with the standard cable, same thing will happen, the PS won't start, i believe that adapter rids u of that problem, or make a special cable by removing the ground pins one of the connectors, then marking that cable as specially modded.
 
Getting lost over here. Does the floppy drive need that controller? My Tandy doesn't use that card, and it uses the power supply and no plug on the card at all. I'll open it up tomorrow and take pictures, see if we can compare notes. If necessary I might have a suitable drive extra.
 
Still need help. Either both the floppy drives go on at the same time, only the 3.5 inch drive goes on, or neither go on. There's a cable with a black connector and a gray connector, the 5.25 inch drive has one edge connector, while the 3.5 inch has 2. Which ones go to where?
 
Tupin said:
Still need help. Either both the floppy drives go on at the same time, only the 3.5 inch drive goes on, or neither go on. There's a cable with a black connector and a gray connector, the 5.25 inch drive has one edge connector, while the 3.5 inch has 2. Which ones go to where?
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Sounds like an addressing problem to me. You might have to move the drive select jumper on the disk if there's no twist in the ribbon cable. If the replacement floppy drive is sufficiently old enough it should have one. New ones have all but eliminated the DS jumper.
 
I never actually replaced the drive. I just put it back in the machine, and now neither drive works. Here's the cable I'm using to connect the drives:
 

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Okay, I see no twist there, so check the jumpers if they are what they ought to be.

What are the models of both floppy drives? I might be able to look them up (or you can also) and see what jumpers go where.

Also, just ran across an adapter to let you use a pinned type drive where a board edge connector ought to be used if it's needed.
 
Got sidetracked and tried it again today. Well, I'm back where I started. 5.25 drive works, not the 3.5 drive. Guess I'll just keep looking for a 1.44 MB drive.

I think I also need an NEC V20, my fully expanded Tandy 1000 booted up Alien Syndrome but was so slow it was unplayable.
 
Okay, so now it sometimes says the drive is not ready. I opened it up to see how it starts up, and noticed it doesn't move much. It uses a 34 pin connector, of which I only have one other model. The other one came from a similar machine that also had a similar adapter on it, but rather than having just one connector, it had another one that adapted the power supply pins. I plugged it in like the original drive and it didn't work.

I'm not sure where to go from here, I don't know if a floppy drive will work so I don't want to buy one until I do, and I also need a faceplate for 3.5 drive in a 5.25 enclosure.
 
Tupin:
What model Tandy 1000 do you have? Is it a 1000, 1000A, 1000SX, or what?
 
Need a little time to to go through my Tandy manuals and try to figure this out. If you had a 1000SX you wouldn't have a problem at all.
Hang in there!
 
In the mean time, I'll get a floppy cable for a modern computer so I can put a 5.25 in it to transfer files.

I don't see why any old 34 pin drive wouldn't work...
 
A word of caution about that. The way the 1000SX works is that a particular floppy drive's position, that is either "A" or "B", is dependent on the jumper settings within that particular drive. The 1000SX uses a floppy cable without the familiar twist. If you use a modern 3 1/2" floppy on the 1000SX as your "B" drive, in the absence of movable jumpers, you must resolder the hard-wired jumpers on the floppy's pcb. The easiest way is to leave the 3 1/2" as the "A" drive and easily change the jumpers on the 5 1/4" drive to "B". I think the 1000 gets it's power through the drive cable, therefore most of the above may not apply. Unless you can come up with a super 8-bit floppy controller that likes the 1000, the most you will be able to realize is a 3 1/2" 720KB/1.44MB floppy operating at 720KB only, and a 5 1/4" DS-DD 360KB floppy. As far as I know, none of the 1000 series BIOS will natively support high density drives. I'll keep checking . . .
 
I just want a 720K drive, so that's fine.

I guess I'll just bite the bullet and buy a 1.44MB drive and hope it works, at least they are cheap.
 
I have a 1.44MB drive in my original 1000 and it works perfectly as a 720K drive. The original Tandy floppy cable is very short and does not use a twist, but if you retrofit a standard floppy cable with the twist, then you won't have to worry about messing around with the drive select jumpers on the floppy drive(s).

Also, the older 1000s use standard Molex power connectors. I believe it was only the 3.5" floppy drives in the 1000HX and newer models that combined the power with the data cable.

Finally, don't believe Radio Shack when they said you need to upgrade the ROM in the original 1000 in order to support a hard drive. My 1000 has the original, never upgraded 01.00.00 ROM and I am able to just pop in a Seagate ST11 controller and hard drive and it works perfectly.
 
I don't have a cable with a twist AND edge connectors, will any standard universal cable work? Also, if I use the universal cable, can I just use the 3.5 connector rather than the adapter and a card edge?
 
Tupin said:
I don't have a cable with a twist AND edge connectors, will any standard universal cable work? Also, if I use the universal cable, can I just use the 3.5 connector rather than the adapter and a card edge?
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Feel free to experiment for yourself. It only takes a few minutes to swap out the cables and see what works and what doesn't.
 
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