30 Jun
1997
30 Jun
'97
10:37 a.m.
Jeff,
Ok, put in generic 1.44 mb floppy drive and Pow! Why? that oddball
half laptop shaped with out display pc has both 5v and 12v in place
of several grounds lines in that internal floppy interface inside
that 1000HX. Sometimes I use those newer 1.44 as a 720k substitute
which works for XT's, heck, I did used one recently to boot up a IBM
XT to make a new 360k disks from a bootable 720k 3.5" disks. While
back, I converted both 720k HX floppy drives by cutting two
thick traces on PCB and used them in clones.
I think it used V40 cpu and, it will support 640k by itself by adding
two bank worth of 256k x 1bit chips and move a jumper, it's on the
little board with one chip on it. The 62pin bus is backwards and
upside version of XT bus! Quite a project by itself to create a mini
adapter using 62pin to a 90 deg slot to use MFM/RLL smallest hd
controller but very doable via a small homebrew PCB.
Otherwise use 8bit rom based scsi controller instead and find a
small scsi hard drive which is much easier and more pleatiful.
Easier this way because I did try to use XT IDE which is hairy
work than that scsi solutions on a ZWL-183-92 laptop with external 5v
drawn from laptop also to the card plugged via its XT type bus
epansion slot and it saw the scsi hd easily. That is first step of
my personal project to "standardize" that clunker to use standard
scsi hd internally.
In truth, 1000HX is very nifty machine in
appearance and size. But I wished Tandy kept their heads and made
more useful design in that same shells with 386 and pentium chips in
it. :))
I've just arranged for a Tandy 1000HX and it
appears to be kind of odd. It
was bought at one of Tandy's infamous 'tent sales' where they dispose of
stuff
they've had sitting around the local 'Shack, and the guy who bought it
originally said that it didn't come with any 3-1/2" floppy installed and that
both covers are still over the bays. It boots off of an external 5-1/4"
drive, which if I remember correctly, is selectable easily enough by way of
the SETUPHX program included with it's DOS diskettes.
Huh? When we got this
machine, we worked on it without needing that
program...odd that's news to me.
Do any of you
TRS-80/Tandy knowledgable people remember ever seeing a HX set up like this?
Every one of them I've ever seen new has come with a 3-1/2" floppy in the
left-most bay, right next to the expansion connectors. I bought one of these
nifty machines when they first appeared as well, and had an external 5-1/4"
floppy and CM-11 monitor with it, as well as the PLUS memory, RS232 and 1200
bps modem cards.
Jeff jeffh(a)unix.aardvarkol.com
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Amiga enthusiast and collector of early, classic microcomputers
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757
Jason D.