Maniac Mansion on a real Tandy 1000RLHD

[BadOeynhausenLP]

Don't be a tuna head! Lol

[goblinadg]

omg just like the one i has in 1991 !!!! i wish everything was so simply again

[RickTommy]

So do I.

[Lachlant1984]

Wow, your average PC couldn't produce sound like that from its internal speaker, I understand these Tandys had enhanced sound chips in them, the music in this game reminds me of something from the Sega Master System.

[Cowclops]

Indeed - while the PC speaker is only capable of beeping at various frequencies, the Tandy sound synth was capable of two square waves and a noise track used for percussion. I believe SMS was capable of 3 or 4 square waves + noise, so their capabilities are similar.

[Cowclops]

No. It doesn't use "two square waves and noise." It uses arpeggiation to make it sound like its playing more than one note at a time, but the PC speaker is not capable of polyphony.

As for why you can play mods through a pc speaker, that is basically using pulse width modulation to turn the PC speakers "on" or "off" beep into something that sounds very faintly like it would sound like on a real sound card.

tl;dr version: Yes, it is true, and check your facts before saying something isn't.

[samplesmasher]

@Cowclops : ok, my fault. was a bit too fast with my opinion, maybe caused by errors in translation (sorry, i'm from germany). my evidance is based on the fact, that the PC Speaker could produce sounds like that, it's not impossible!

the only thing i wanted to say, that "your average PC could produce sound like that from its internal speaker". (not as Lachlant1984 said)

[CptTuttle]

I wonder if not the Tandy 1000 and the SMS actually shared the SAME sound chip?

[Cowclops]

@CptTuttle Pretty close to the same. The tandy 1000 and SMS use very slightly different versions of essentially the same texas instruments chip. According to wikipedia, the manner in which they generate white noise is different, but everything else is functionally identical.

[ratix98]

man i only had the 1000SX at 4 .77MHZ with 2 floppys

[Cowclops]

my dad actually had a 1000SX also... you could run them at 7.16mhz with the 1.5 multiplier. His had a single 5.25" and a 20MB hard drive though, rather than dual floppies.

my RL definitely ran maniac mansion considerably faster than his SX did.

[ratix98]

my sx still works too. i have one of those hardcards 100MB. i think my dad got his hands on it at a computer show he went to. does a damn fine job.

[grimlock047]

this brought back memories, not only from "lucas film" games but from other old DOS games

[ScabbaRanker]

I fuckin loved that game.

[Atarillusion]

Hi! Very fast! These game in my old PC XT @ 10MHz with CGA graphics is too slow.

[Cowclops]

Yup. One benefit of Tandy Graphics besides that it is 16 colors vs 4 color CGA is that its also capable of much faster screen refreshes than old CGA. So games like this run quite a bit better.

[archaon98]

i have a cat, and i break buildings with my head.

[matttheman597]

How do you turn the mouse on?

[Cowclops]

Shift-M

[memphiselle]

Maniac Mansion rocks da hous!!!!!!!

[kodai666]

Oh, I'm very well aware of the specs on the 1000 line. I was just curious if you bought the HD or upgraded an regular RL. Many people tried to save a buck and put a hardcard or seprate controller in the systems. As for DOS on the EEPROM, I still think it was what made the 1000's a cut above most other PC's at the time. The XT bus with a 286 and 386 CPU was a killer though. That and a slightly smaller length case than normal so full length ISA's oculdnt fit.

[kodai666]

Ok, here are a few questions. Did you buy your RL with HDD or did you put one in yourself? If you did it yourself, did you go with a "hardcard" or a drive and seprate controller. If so was it RLL or MEM? I miss working on Tandy's. My father and I bought about 100 different Tandy's at a Radio Shack tent sell and I fixed them up and sold them at a local computer show. Everybody at the show always called me "Tandyman". I did hate that part, lol.

[Cowclops]

Tandy 1000RLs had a built in "Smartdrive" controller which was basically an 8 bit chopped down version of 16 bit ATA, so it didn't need a separate RLL/MFM controller or anything. This particular computer, the 1000RLHD, came with 768KB ram and a 20MB seagate hard drive.

[Cowclops]

This is not the computer I originally had back in 1990 though. That exact model we sold when I got a 386. ORIGINALLY I had a Tandy 1000RL (with the HD/hard drive) designation, which came with 512KB ram and ran on floppies. DOS was included in ROM on these systems nonetheless so they booted up really fast. Before we sold it, it got upgraded to RLHD specs, 768KB ram, though we put a 40MB hard drive in my original Tandy.

[Jtrim1]

wow, this is great! I am a huge fan of retro gaming. My thing back in the day was the Commodore Amiga. I've got an old amiga 500 and an amiga 3000 machine set up, and there's just something about the sound of the disks loading, and the feel of the old boxy mouse that you just can't beat! I'd love to see more of your old gaming videos. this is great!