fordke@infonode.ingr.com (Keith Ford x8614) (11/20/90)
Two questions from a know-nothing-about-Tandy-computers guy. (1) The Color computer (Tandy 128K ???) is on sale thru Christmas for $100. Person I talked to said they were being discontinued. My question, how available are the program packs? Is it fairly easy to locate used ones? What prices are they? The machine is to be for a 12 year old and video will be thru a television. (2) What is involved in upgrading the memory in a Tandy 1000? I'm not sure which suffix it has. Do they use the standard DRAMs like everyone else? Is the base on these machines 256K? -- | ...!uunet!ingr!fordke OR fordke@ingr.com | Micro Magic BBS (Fidonet: 1:373/12, MaBell: +1 205 830 2362) | "and the Trees are all kept equal by hatchet, axe, and saw." -Rush
yetsko@interlan.interlan.com (Mike Yetsko) (11/20/90)
Tandy 1000 memory is a very complicated issue. If you mean the original 1000, they had 128K on the main board that was dualmapped to the video and to a programmable window from 0-640K. Your first memory board MUST have DMA, as the machine didn't have it to begin with, and the BIOS assumes DMA is installed if it sees a memory addon. The addon memory installed at 00000 and the internal momory had its address adjusted to sit immdeiately after whatever memory it finds on the bus. This basically boils down to the fact that you need a Tandy memory card (or at least a card designed for the Tandy 1000) for your first memory upgrade. Since the newer boards go to 512K anyway, it's a moot point, but if you have old memory cards lying around, you 'could' put in a 256K Tandy memory card, then a PC generic memory card from 40000-7FFFF, and it would work. Later 1000 machines changed from this somewhat, as some used 256K as the base on-board memory, or even came full up with DMA. You should be more explicit in what machine you are working with. Mike Yetsko