[Coco] Another Radio Shack Article

[Michael Graham]

My apologies, I've just realized the last couple of replies I sent to 
this list (from my phone) went to the wrong reply address (the private 
address of the original sender and not the list address).

I'll copy and paste the text so everyone can see what I sent.

This was the first one:

"Well, they were originally intended to be clones of the IBM PCjr. They 
were very compatible with that machine. Problem is, IBM discontinued the 
PCjr before the Tandy 1000 came out, so Tandy no longer felt comfortable 
advertising the machine as PCjr compatible, and instead chose to 
advertise it as 'MS-DOS' compatible. Which they were, but the ability to 
run MS-DOS doesn't necessarily mean it can run all PC software.

--Michael"

This was the second one:

"The Tandy 1000's graphics are so close to the PCjr's that you can 
actually add a simple logic circuit to a PCjr and it'll run almost 
anything meant to run on the original Tandy 1000. That is, except for a 
couple of programs that seem to check something in the BIOS that doesn't 
exist in the PCjr's."


Sorry they're kind of out of context now!  I'll have to figure out how 
to convince my phone to reply to the list, I guess.

--Michael



On 01/05/2014 11:30 AM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> Le 2014-01-04 à 09:50:00, Nick Marentes a écrit :
>
>> This way, Tandy had a better chance of encouraging CoCo users to 
>> switch to the Tandy PC range while not abandoning their CoCo. Late 
>> 80's/ early 90's was still too early for a capable software emulator 
>> so a card would have been the way to go. It should have been cheaper 
>> to create than a full CoCo (no case/power supply/keyboard).
>
> That wasn't possible with a PCjr-style graphics card : it did 
> 16-colour pixel graphics at only 160x200. I can think of two 
> intermediate steps between CGA and EGA graphics : first PCjr, then 
> CoCo. That's just in terms of combinations of video modes. Did you 
> expect that card to have its own video output ?
>
> (I don't know whether Tandy's graphics were any different from PCjr, 
> but I remember using a PCjr a lot, with BASICA and some ML games such 
> as Jumpman)
>
>  ______________________________________________________________________
> | Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC
>
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