First time seeing a Tandy laptop demonstrated. I always wanted to try the boot from serial feature but having seen you do it.... I think I'm satisfied with that lol.
If the floppy drive is 26 pins then it is almost certainly a standard slim 3.5 inch drive. People often perceive laptop floppy drives as being proprietary just because of the FFC connector but most of them have the same pinout which is well documented in many drive data sheets. You can even get 26pin to 34 pin adapters or get a floppy emulator with a 26pin interface that may well work as a drop-in replacement for the floppy drive. If you want to use the original drive you may be able to find a compatible belt. It may use a similar belt to the well known Citizen drives used in all kinds of machines. The belts available currently aren’t an exact match in width but typically are close enough to work.
Thanks for the suggestion. I have seen the 26-to-34-pin adapters. I've been treading lightly since the drive is powered over the interface cable, so an adapter that physically fits could be a problem if the pinouts don't line up (this kills many a FDC in the Tandy desktop systems when folks plug in regular drives to Tandy's powered interface cable, sending voltages to places they weren't designed to go). If I can dig up some more concrete details on this connector, I'd love to use a Gotek or HxC in place of the original drive. I've tried a number of belts, so far without success. I haven't given up, but I also like anything which reduces my reliance on aging drives. They're fun to have working, but can also be a liability as they age. Thanks for watching!
@@TJBChris That is part of why the 26 pin connector is so common on slim drives, it carries power as well as data. So chances are it lines up but should be easy to verify with a multimeter. BTW, I have found the pins Tandy used for power on some Tandy 1000 systems are the exact same as the ones NEC, Epson, and Fujitsu used on their systems in Japan. Drives powered via their interface cable was extremely common in Japan at the time. It appears that it was at least a pseudo standard at the time and not as proprietary as some people indicate - just not super common in the IBM world in the west. Also since it is easy to test which pins have power it is fairly easy to adapt drives for almost any system - especially if make your own floppy cables like I do.
The Amiga also has the ability to boot when connected to a Windows PC that is running Amiga Explorer and they're connected via null modem cable. I didn't learn this until many years after I had shelved my beloved Amigas. This was a great tool to have laying around when the Amiga had a faulty or missing floppy drive or the Amiga hard disk was borked or you had no Workbench floppies on hand. It came in handy years later when I dusted off my Amigas but couldn't find my Workbench floppies. I just downloaded a Workbench ADF file from the net onto my PC, connected my PC to the Amiga and used Amiga Explorer to get it to boot. Once the Amiga was booted I was then able to have it create its own bootable Workbench disks. PCs can't natively create Amiga boot disks because the floppy drives are incompatible.
Neat! Since I don't have much Amiga experience, I never knew the Amiga could do a serial boot. It's definitely a handy feature to have. Thanks for watching!
Great video! Some USB serial adapters are finicky because they buffer the incoming data and only send it to the PC periodically. FTDI based ones usually have a "low latency mode" selectable in Device Manager which improves this at the cost of tying up the USB a bit more. If your Tandy supports XTA and IDE, I'd get a low-cost CompactFlash adapter and a 128MB card and try that. You might get lucky, especially with XT-IDE. And those Conner drives have a common and fixable failure mode - there's a rubber bumper on top of the parking magnet. If you take the top cover off and remove the top magnet from the actuator, you can unstick the actuator and put a strip of Kapton tape over it to stop the actuator from sticking. It might get the drive working for long enough to recover the data.
Thanks for watching and the comments! I might try to repair the drive as well, since it'd be really nice to boot this without tethering it to another machine. If not, the XTA2SD sounds promising if I can find one. :)
That turned out to be a nice bonus. Without it I'd have been DOA. Some other Tandy portables had DOS in ROM, and I think the same option ROM scheme is used to initialize those systems to boot from ROM. That might explain why it's still there.
@@TJBChris The tech skills of someone capable of digging in and finding such a resource is 100% amazing to me. Now if you can actually code in parallel port booting? That'd be a special kind of amazing. I also wonder how similar this serial booting is to "drive wire" :) Kinda looks similar! I found some discussion on floppy drive cable adapters for that machine but also a discussion on using a CF card in place of the HDD... turns out the XT-IDE thing came up in that discussion as well so there may not be a way through that without adapting existing code to compensate?
I've had a few suggestions for what size and type of belt to use. For the belts I've been able to find thus far, none have been a close enough fit to make it work. I haven't given up, but figured any way I can eliminate the need for floppy disks would extend the machine's life as these drives continue to age. Thanks for watching!
I’m also dealing with a disintegrated Mitsumi drive belt, in a typewriter of mine - turns out on Amazon you can get a kit of 3 sets of like 60 different belt sizes if you don’t know the exact size! Mine are in the mail right now, but it has practically every size imaginable. Typically they’re for Cassette players but if they’re tight they hopefully should work well. Might be a viable option here! Mine was $7 flat with shipping, so it’s an inexpensive thing to try.
I tried a few and couldn't get them to work. I'm pretty sure this system uses XTA (what we sometimes called XT-IDE, which is different from the XTIDE Universal BIOS I used in this video) as opposed to AT-IDE that most CF cards seem to like. I haven't given up quite yet...sometimes it's just a matter of finding the right card. Thanks for the suggestion and for watching!
@TJBChris Great video sir! I love these serial booting projects Reminds me of DriveWire on the CoCo's To bad they haven't done something with the parallel port using those good old Laplink parallel cables. use to love laplink cables both the parallel and the serial cables. :D
Glad you liked it! I had DriveWire in mind the entire time I was doing this...they feel very similar. I'll have to look and see if the LPT port on the 1500 HD is bi-directional...that could open up quite a few different ways of connecting drives to this system.
Glad you liked it! I have a few non-Tandy retro systems, but an Adam isn’t one of them. Outside of the Tandy/Radio Shack machines, I do have a Commodore 64, an Apple IIe Platinum, a NABU, and a Dell Dimension XPS T600.
I have an 1100FD which uses the same floppy drive. I managed to install a Gotek, but it took a lot of fiddling to get it to work. It's been over 10 years since I did it, but I seem to remember that the pinout I found for the floppy (published by Tandy!) had two pins wrong. I might be able to find my notes on that. The author of XTA2SD made a version for the 1110HD which uses the same Conner drive and oddball connector. It's in a forum on VCFed. CF cards came after the XTA was dumped so they don't have that capability. Tandy hard coded CHA in their BIOS and these were long before LBA mode, so don't expect to use different hard drives until someone hacks that part of the BIOS. Any takers? USB serial adapters vary in quality. I've found the Prolific chips are crappy, but the ones by Silicon Labs are the best with FTDI being a very close second. There are numerous Chinese clones to be avoided.
I've been wondering, if the reliability issues of the serial connection comes from most USB-to-RS232/485 adapters simply working with 5V TTL levels (0-1.xV for low, 2.x-5V for high) instead of ca. -12V for low and +12V for high signals. The Tandy should be old enough to still be more comfortable with in-spec signal levels. So, maybe booting it via serial from another Tandy might be a viable solution? 19.2kbps might be possible reliably after all then. I really like the idea of booting this device over serial cable - could still function as a terminal.
Sadly, SerDrive requires Windows XP or later, which none of my Tandy systems can run. Fortunately, I was able to get it to run at 115.2 K baud by telling SerDrive to use the named pipe mode (-p switch) for the serial-to-USB adapter's COM port. It's much more tolerable now. I've noticed these USB-to-serial adapters vary widely in capabilities, signaling, and quality. Once I find one that works, I tend to stick with it. :) Thanks for the suggestions and for watching!
About a year ago I got a 2810 HD from an eBay lucky dip (Buy low and hope it ain't a mess lol), and after a weekend of recapping plus cleaning the old gunk out of then replacing the belt on the floppy drive I got it back up to it's former glory. I had also noticed that the chip used for the device firmware has huge swaths of empty space, so I also injected XUB into the Option ROM area. I ended up using one of those Syba SD-ADA45006 (or maybe it was a clone...They're mostly passive anyways) dual CF Laptop IDE adapters, and was surprised that XUB was actually able to detect CF cards on both slots, so I have a pair of CF cards loaded up in mine. iirc I got a hint about the belt from a VCFed forum post talking about a floppy belt for the 1500, and I ended up getting the one titled "Floppy Drive Belt for Korg X2, X3, Korg N364, N264, Yamaha, Technics Keyboards," as it's a 9cm (18cm cut length) flat belt and it fit just fine.
The drive's definitely not working quite right...the type is hard-coded in the ROM BIOS, so there's no changing it. The system sees the drive, but the heads don't seem to move. The hard coded drive type in the BIOS is 615 cyls, 4 heads, 17 sectors per track. I've been given some suggestions for resurrecting the drive, so I may give that a try at some point. Thanks for watching!
I have the exact same model here as well. Unfortunately the battery leaked and wreaked havoc on the power related circuitry that's located right underneath the battery compartment. Will need a lot of trace repairs but hopefully I can revive it. I believe it has a WDC16450 or similar UART if I recall. You could try swapping it with a 16550 which would probably give you better chances at higher throughput. Also, since it's a V20 you could use the XT+ version of the XTIDE BIOS. Not sure if it'll have any impact on serial drives but with physical drives the difference in throughput is noticable (suppose more efficient/more instructions available vs plain XT). Awesome job in any case!
Glad you liked the video! It turns out the USB-serial adapter is a bit fussy, but telling SerDrive to use named pipe mode (-p switch) allowed it to boot at 115.2K baud. That made a huge difference on the speed. Hopefully you can revive your 1500 HD. It's a neat little system and being able to make it go again has been a fun project! Thanks for watching!
Mmmm! I have a Sharp Widenote that has the hard disk connector torn off the motherboard… This might make it usable once again. Especially if I can find an option rom to boot from PCMCIA
If you can get the XUB code into the BIOS scan range for option ROMs, it could definitely help you out. Good luck! I hope you're as lucky as I was with the 1500 HD.
The Conner laptop drives have a rubber bumper for the head armature in the landing zone/parking area. This rubber bumper breaks down and gets sticky with age, so the heads get stuck in park. If the drive is opened up and the arm is physically moved away from park, it will spin up and likely be readable.. assuming there are no other issues with the disk.
I had tried the usual tap/freeze/etc. methods on the drive, but to no avail. Since a few folks like have mentioned the rubber bumper causing the head to stick, I will probably see if I can free it. Should be a simple enough project, and it will let me know either way if the drive is viable. Thanks for watching!
That hard drive might be fixable, I've repaired many of the latter 40-120MB Conners with about 90% success rate. All you need to do is open it up, carefully remove the upper magnet, place small piece of tape on the rubber end stop and that will fix it. Channel i80386sx has video on how to do it.
Turns out I can make it go faster than 9600 baud by telling SerDrive to use named pipe mode (-p). That makes me think my main limiter was the USB-serial device. Doing that made it much more responsive. Thanks for watching!
I'm not sure if this has a bi-directional parallel port. If it does, it could open up some possibilities. AFAIK the BIOS in this system doesn't understand parallel port drives.
@@TJBChris Yeah I searched that idea before making my comment. I found nothing. But that doesn't mean it's not possible... given the age and obscurity of such things. I know earlier T1000s used a 30 pin card edge connector for external floppy drives. Tandy 1000EX I think. Not a parallel port. But other makes/models often allowed parallel port floppy drives but I don't have any idea when that first started happening. I remember some old Toshiba laptops doing that long ago.
@@anjinmiura6708 I’m hoping it’s bi-directional. Even if I can’t boot from it, it could make for a usable port to attach parallel port drives to be used after doing a small boot over serial with the right drivers. More to come, I guess! 😀
The Tandy 1500 and 2820HD are GRiD designs - they acquired laptop maker GRiD in 1988. Have a look at the GRiD 1750 and you'll notice the family resemblance right away.
I don't know how, but GRiD didn't come to my mind. As a Tandy fanatic, that seems like a big miss on my part haha. I've seen the similar GRiD laptop systems as well; they're splitting images of one another. Thanks for watching!
No, that is not true. These were made at a Panasonic/Tandy joint venture facility in Texas using Panasonic components. Tandy also owned GRiD at this time, so they also sold several versions under the GRiD brand, but GRiD did not have any hand in making them. The "parent" model in question here is the Panasonic Business Partner CF-170. These were also OEMed out as Digital DECpc, Fujitsu, and even the later models were OEMed out to Siemens-Nixdorf, amongst a few others that I am forgetting.
That’s how I understood it as well. Tandy had multiple sources for their various portable systems (they made the 2800 HD, for example while Sanyo made the 1400 HD motherboard), making it tough to keep track sometimes. :)
@@TJBChris Right, everything after 1988 up until the sale to AST in 1993 was made in that joint facility. That would exclude the 1400 since it was in 1987. Fun fact: while Panasonic made the laptop designs.. Tandy made the Desktop designs. The Panasonic desktop line of computers were all Tandy machines with Panasonic branded front facias on them and very minor changes for being more "business oriented". I personally had a Panasonic FX-1650 when growing up, which was a Tandy 1000 SL/2 without the DOS in ROM or the front audio connections. I believe that there were also DEC branded versions of those as well.
@ I always wanted the Panasonic FX-1650. There were some other Panasonic branded ones, and I have seen a few DEC-branded units. The DEC units I’ve seen look like the Tandy 2500 SX/25-style low profile cases. I’ve read that DEC deciding not to have Tandy make their desktop PCs in 1992 was one of the factors that made Tandy want to punt the PC business (along with the colossal failure of the VIS).
coco3 interfacer half height floppy and a cm8 plugged roight in the botom of the coco3 ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ^_^_^_^ thanks bro!!!! please do a video of Downland ^_^
The kid inside me still drools when I see my CoCo 3 setup now. We didn't have the MPI back in the day, but the CM-8 and FD-502 are mine from when we first got the system. Modern hardware like the CoCo SDC and reproduction Deluxe RS-232 Pak are just the cherry on top for the ultimate CoCo setup!
well yourr coments of not being a practable mod the aling tandy, not bootable? very true having to have moden day laptop, to use it? well yes, the but using mostly none of the laptop? and memory and storage of you aging tandy, basicly nothing atall? the more memoey in say raspberry Pie , pico, and still have lot left over? plus, srink the hole laptop side thing down to somthing the fit in the aging tandy serial plug (well all most), and if ypur lucky, the maybe power at serial plug socket that could power it all,
another retro channel that shows off Tandy stuff? Subbed.
Welcome to the channel! Enjoy!
First time seeing a Tandy laptop demonstrated. I always wanted to try the boot from serial feature but having seen you do it.... I think I'm satisfied with that lol.
hey pixel pipes i've heard rumors that you are in fact made of pixel pipes, is that true?
/s
If the floppy drive is 26 pins then it is almost certainly a standard slim 3.5 inch drive. People often perceive laptop floppy drives as being proprietary just because of the FFC connector but most of them have the same pinout which is well documented in many drive data sheets. You can even get 26pin to 34 pin adapters or get a floppy emulator with a 26pin interface that may well work as a drop-in replacement for the floppy drive.
If you want to use the original drive you may be able to find a compatible belt. It may use a similar belt to the well known Citizen drives used in all kinds of machines. The belts available currently aren’t an exact match in width but typically are close enough to work.
Thanks for the suggestion. I have seen the 26-to-34-pin adapters. I've been treading lightly since the drive is powered over the interface cable, so an adapter that physically fits could be a problem if the pinouts don't line up (this kills many a FDC in the Tandy desktop systems when folks plug in regular drives to Tandy's powered interface cable, sending voltages to places they weren't designed to go). If I can dig up some more concrete details on this connector, I'd love to use a Gotek or HxC in place of the original drive.
I've tried a number of belts, so far without success. I haven't given up, but I also like anything which reduces my reliance on aging drives. They're fun to have working, but can also be a liability as they age. Thanks for watching!
@@TJBChris That is part of why the 26 pin connector is so common on slim drives, it carries power as well as data. So chances are it lines up but should be easy to verify with a multimeter.
BTW, I have found the pins Tandy used for power on some Tandy 1000 systems are the exact same as the ones NEC, Epson, and Fujitsu used on their systems in Japan. Drives powered via their interface cable was extremely common in Japan at the time. It appears that it was at least a pseudo standard at the time and not as proprietary as some people indicate - just not super common in the IBM world in the west.
Also since it is easy to test which pins have power it is fairly easy to adapt drives for almost any system - especially if make your own floppy cables like I do.
Scrabble!
Scrabble had some great sound bites in it! And this one just seems perfect for glossing over a mundane task in record time.
The Amiga also has the ability to boot when connected to a Windows PC that is running Amiga Explorer and they're connected via null modem cable. I didn't learn this until many years after I had shelved my beloved Amigas. This was a great tool to have laying around when the Amiga had a faulty or missing floppy drive or the Amiga hard disk was borked or you had no Workbench floppies on hand. It came in handy years later when I dusted off my Amigas but couldn't find my Workbench floppies. I just downloaded a Workbench ADF file from the net onto my PC, connected my PC to the Amiga and used Amiga Explorer to get it to boot. Once the Amiga was booted I was then able to have it create its own bootable Workbench disks. PCs can't natively create Amiga boot disks because the floppy drives are incompatible.
Neat! Since I don't have much Amiga experience, I never knew the Amiga could do a serial boot. It's definitely a handy feature to have. Thanks for watching!
Great video! Some USB serial adapters are finicky because they buffer the incoming data and only send it to the PC periodically. FTDI based ones usually have a "low latency mode" selectable in Device Manager which improves this at the cost of tying up the USB a bit more.
If your Tandy supports XTA and IDE, I'd get a low-cost CompactFlash adapter and a 128MB card and try that. You might get lucky, especially with XT-IDE.
And those Conner drives have a common and fixable failure mode - there's a rubber bumper on top of the parking magnet. If you take the top cover off and remove the top magnet from the actuator, you can unstick the actuator and put a strip of Kapton tape over it to stop the actuator from sticking. It might get the drive working for long enough to recover the data.
Thanks for watching and the comments! I might try to repair the drive as well, since it'd be really nice to boot this without tethering it to another machine. If not, the XTA2SD sounds promising if I can find one. :)
A notebook even scanning for adapter ROMs is so cute.
That turned out to be a nice bonus. Without it I'd have been DOA. Some other Tandy portables had DOS in ROM, and I think the same option ROM scheme is used to initialize those systems to boot from ROM. That might explain why it's still there.
@@TJBChris The tech skills of someone capable of digging in and finding such a resource is 100% amazing to me. Now if you can actually code in parallel port booting? That'd be a special kind of amazing. I also wonder how similar this serial booting is to "drive wire" :) Kinda looks similar! I found some discussion on floppy drive cable adapters for that machine but also a discussion on using a CF card in place of the HDD... turns out the XT-IDE thing came up in that discussion as well so there may not be a way through that without adapting existing code to compensate?
Heya! Happy New Year
Happy new year and thanks for watching the channel!
it would probably be easier to replace the floppy drive belt but still a pretty cool trick
I've had a few suggestions for what size and type of belt to use. For the belts I've been able to find thus far, none have been a close enough fit to make it work. I haven't given up, but figured any way I can eliminate the need for floppy disks would extend the machine's life as these drives continue to age. Thanks for watching!
I’m also dealing with a disintegrated Mitsumi drive belt, in a typewriter of mine - turns out on Amazon you can get a kit of 3 sets of like 60 different belt sizes if you don’t know the exact size! Mine are in the mail right now, but it has practically every size imaginable. Typically they’re for Cassette players but if they’re tight they hopefully should work well. Might be a viable option here! Mine was $7 flat with shipping, so it’s an inexpensive thing to try.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll definitely give it a try. For $7, it’s an easy thing to try.
I wonder if a compact flash card could be made to work in place of the harddrive?
I tried a few and couldn't get them to work. I'm pretty sure this system uses XTA (what we sometimes called XT-IDE, which is different from the XTIDE Universal BIOS I used in this video) as opposed to AT-IDE that most CF cards seem to like. I haven't given up quite yet...sometimes it's just a matter of finding the right card. Thanks for the suggestion and for watching!
@TJBChris
Great video sir!
I love these serial booting projects
Reminds me of DriveWire on the CoCo's
To bad they haven't done something with the parallel port using those good old Laplink parallel cables.
use to love laplink cables both the parallel and the serial cables. :D
Glad you liked it! I had DriveWire in mind the entire time I was doing this...they feel very similar. I'll have to look and see if the LPT port on the 1500 HD is bi-directional...that could open up quite a few different ways of connecting drives to this system.
Fun video, do you have a Coleco Adam?
Glad you liked it! I have a few non-Tandy retro systems, but an Adam isn’t one of them. Outside of the Tandy/Radio Shack machines, I do have a Commodore 64, an Apple IIe Platinum, a NABU, and a Dell Dimension XPS T600.
@@TJBChris I used to work at Radio Shack in the early 90s, yet I never had a Tandy. I wanted one.
A well deserved celebratory bourbon. Neat way to keep the hardware alive.
That's impressive!
I have an 1100FD which uses the same floppy drive. I managed to install a Gotek, but it took a lot of fiddling to get it to work. It's been over 10 years since I did it, but I seem to remember that the pinout I found for the floppy (published by Tandy!) had two pins wrong. I might be able to find my notes on that.
The author of XTA2SD made a version for the 1110HD which uses the same Conner drive and oddball connector. It's in a forum on VCFed.
CF cards came after the XTA was dumped so they don't have that capability.
Tandy hard coded CHA in their BIOS and these were long before LBA mode, so don't expect to use different hard drives until someone hacks that part of the BIOS. Any takers?
USB serial adapters vary in quality. I've found the Prolific chips are crappy, but the ones by Silicon Labs are the best with FTDI being a very close second. There are numerous Chinese clones to be avoided.
I've been wondering, if the reliability issues of the serial connection comes from most USB-to-RS232/485 adapters simply working with 5V TTL levels (0-1.xV for low, 2.x-5V for high) instead of ca. -12V for low and +12V for high signals. The Tandy should be old enough to still be more comfortable with in-spec signal levels. So, maybe booting it via serial from another Tandy might be a viable solution? 19.2kbps might be possible reliably after all then.
I really like the idea of booting this device over serial cable - could still function as a terminal.
Sadly, SerDrive requires Windows XP or later, which none of my Tandy systems can run. Fortunately, I was able to get it to run at 115.2 K baud by telling SerDrive to use the named pipe mode (-p switch) for the serial-to-USB adapter's COM port. It's much more tolerable now. I've noticed these USB-to-serial adapters vary widely in capabilities, signaling, and quality. Once I find one that works, I tend to stick with it. :) Thanks for the suggestions and for watching!
About a year ago I got a 2810 HD from an eBay lucky dip (Buy low and hope it ain't a mess lol), and after a weekend of recapping plus cleaning the old gunk out of then replacing the belt on the floppy drive I got it back up to it's former glory. I had also noticed that the chip used for the device firmware has huge swaths of empty space, so I also injected XUB into the Option ROM area. I ended up using one of those Syba SD-ADA45006 (or maybe it was a clone...They're mostly passive anyways) dual CF Laptop IDE adapters, and was surprised that XUB was actually able to detect CF cards on both slots, so I have a pair of CF cards loaded up in mine. iirc I got a hint about the belt from a VCFed forum post talking about a floppy belt for the 1500, and I ended up getting the one titled "Floppy Drive Belt for Korg X2, X3, Korg N364, N264, Yamaha, Technics Keyboards," as it's a 9cm (18cm cut length) flat belt and it fit just fine.
Looks like something Nokia or Sony once tortured users with.
neat, dint knew this excists. now I might try this on my diy computer.
I hope it helps you out! If you can get XUB into an option ROM, it's a handy thing to have in your back pocket.
It's the drive dead or wrong'type' selected in BIOS
The drive's definitely not working quite right...the type is hard-coded in the ROM BIOS, so there's no changing it. The system sees the drive, but the heads don't seem to move. The hard coded drive type in the BIOS is 615 cyls, 4 heads, 17 sectors per track. I've been given some suggestions for resurrecting the drive, so I may give that a try at some point. Thanks for watching!
I have the exact same model here as well. Unfortunately the battery leaked and wreaked havoc on the power related circuitry that's located right underneath the battery compartment. Will need a lot of trace repairs but hopefully I can revive it.
I believe it has a WDC16450 or similar UART if I recall. You could try swapping it with a 16550 which would probably give you better chances at higher throughput. Also, since it's a V20 you could use the XT+ version of the XTIDE BIOS. Not sure if it'll have any impact on serial drives but with physical drives the difference in throughput is noticable (suppose more efficient/more instructions available vs plain XT).
Awesome job in any case!
Glad you liked the video! It turns out the USB-serial adapter is a bit fussy, but telling SerDrive to use named pipe mode (-p switch) allowed it to boot at 115.2K baud. That made a huge difference on the speed.
Hopefully you can revive your 1500 HD. It's a neat little system and being able to make it go again has been a fun project! Thanks for watching!
Very cool!
Mmmm! I have a Sharp Widenote that has the hard disk connector torn off the motherboard… This might make it usable once again. Especially if I can find an option rom to boot from PCMCIA
If you can get the XUB code into the BIOS scan range for option ROMs, it could definitely help you out. Good luck! I hope you're as lucky as I was with the 1500 HD.
Can it serial boot Xenix?
I've never tried...could be interesting. There was XENIX 86 available... I'll have to add that to the backlog!
You could try tapping that presumed dead hard drive to encourage it to spin up long enough to work & image it off.
The Conner laptop drives have a rubber bumper for the head armature in the landing zone/parking area. This rubber bumper breaks down and gets sticky with age, so the heads get stuck in park. If the drive is opened up and the arm is physically moved away from park, it will spin up and likely be readable.. assuming there are no other issues with the disk.
I had tried the usual tap/freeze/etc. methods on the drive, but to no avail. Since a few folks like have mentioned the rubber bumper causing the head to stick, I will probably see if I can free it. Should be a simple enough project, and it will let me know either way if the drive is viable. Thanks for watching!
That hard drive might be fixable, I've repaired many of the latter 40-120MB Conners with about 90% success rate. All you need to do is open it up, carefully remove the upper magnet, place small piece of tape on the rubber end stop and that will fix it. Channel i80386sx has video on how to do it.
Thanks for the info on the drive. It's definitely something to check out. It'd be nice to make it work again.
38400bps its max for i8250 serial port controller.
Turns out I can make it go faster than 9600 baud by telling SerDrive to use named pipe mode (-p). That makes me think my main limiter was the USB-serial device. Doing that made it much more responsive. Thanks for watching!
AWESOME ....Subbed you.....
Thanks and welcome to the channel!
Kinda surprised a parallel port floppy drive isn't/wasn't a thing...
I'm not sure if this has a bi-directional parallel port. If it does, it could open up some possibilities. AFAIK the BIOS in this system doesn't understand parallel port drives.
@@TJBChris Yeah I searched that idea before making my comment. I found nothing. But that doesn't mean it's not possible... given the age and obscurity of such things. I know earlier T1000s used a 30 pin card edge connector for external floppy drives. Tandy 1000EX I think. Not a parallel port. But other makes/models often allowed parallel port floppy drives but I don't have any idea when that first started happening. I remember some old Toshiba laptops doing that long ago.
@@anjinmiura6708 I’m hoping it’s bi-directional. Even if I can’t boot from it, it could make for a usable port to attach parallel port drives to be used after doing a small boot over serial with the right drivers. More to come, I guess! 😀
pog
The Tandy 1500 and 2820HD are GRiD designs - they acquired laptop maker GRiD in 1988.
Have a look at the GRiD 1750 and you'll notice the family resemblance right away.
I don't know how, but GRiD didn't come to my mind. As a Tandy fanatic, that seems like a big miss on my part haha. I've seen the similar GRiD laptop systems as well; they're splitting images of one another. Thanks for watching!
No, that is not true. These were made at a Panasonic/Tandy joint venture facility in Texas using Panasonic components. Tandy also owned GRiD at this time, so they also sold several versions under the GRiD brand, but GRiD did not have any hand in making them. The "parent" model in question here is the Panasonic Business Partner CF-170.
These were also OEMed out as Digital DECpc, Fujitsu, and even the later models were OEMed out to Siemens-Nixdorf, amongst a few others that I am forgetting.
That’s how I understood it as well. Tandy had multiple sources for their various portable systems (they made the 2800 HD, for example while Sanyo made the 1400 HD motherboard), making it tough to keep track sometimes. :)
@@TJBChris Right, everything after 1988 up until the sale to AST in 1993 was made in that joint facility. That would exclude the 1400 since it was in 1987.
Fun fact: while Panasonic made the laptop designs.. Tandy made the Desktop designs. The Panasonic desktop line of computers were all Tandy machines with Panasonic branded front facias on them and very minor changes for being more "business oriented". I personally had a Panasonic FX-1650 when growing up, which was a Tandy 1000 SL/2 without the DOS in ROM or the front audio connections. I believe that there were also DEC branded versions of those as well.
@ I always wanted the Panasonic FX-1650. There were some other Panasonic branded ones, and I have seen a few DEC-branded units. The DEC units I’ve seen look like the Tandy 2500 SX/25-style low profile cases. I’ve read that DEC deciding not to have Tandy make their desktop PCs in 1992 was one of the factors that made Tandy want to punt the PC business (along with the colossal failure of the VIS).
coco3 interfacer half height floppy and a cm8 plugged roight in the botom of the coco3 ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ^_^_^_^ thanks bro!!!! please do a video of Downland ^_^
The kid inside me still drools when I see my CoCo 3 setup now. We didn't have the MPI back in the day, but the CM-8 and FD-502 are mine from when we first got the system. Modern hardware like the CoCo SDC and reproduction Deluxe RS-232 Pak are just the cherry on top for the ultimate CoCo setup!
5.99lbs lol
I thought it was hilarious. If you left the thing on your desk for a couple weeks, it might accumulate enough dust to be 6 lbs. :)
#1! 😂
well yourr coments of not being a practable mod the aling tandy, not bootable? very true having to have moden day laptop, to use it? well yes, the but using mostly none of the laptop? and memory and storage of you aging tandy, basicly nothing atall? the more memoey in say raspberry Pie , pico, and still have lot left over? plus, srink the hole laptop side thing down to somthing the fit in the aging tandy serial plug (well all most), and if ypur lucky, the maybe power at serial plug socket that could power it all,
No