1.4 mb floppy on tandy TX question

[CompositeGamer]

i read somewhere from a post or document information about the tandy 1000 floppy controller needing do be disabled with a program if you install a 1.4 mb floppy drive on the systems by using rom based isa cards.

i did download the nofloppy program for it but have not tested because this is a future upgrade that i want to add and dont want spend the $ on a card if its not a worthy upgrade.

i have some games that ensist on being on a floppy and take more space than 720k.

my questions are will the 1.4 mb drive become the bootable drive if you have to disable the onboard floppy controller after the system boots?will it still try to access original tandy low density drive or will it use the 1.4mb drive at bootup?

any help will be welcome

 

[CompositeGamer]

i am also curious about external floppy drives that use the parallel port or work through an expansion card.

are there any 1.2mb and 1.4mb external floppy drives that use a card or use a printer port that work on old computers like my tandy 1000 TX with standard parallel card installed?

i have seen some ibm drives with expansion cards but i believe the ones i saw were low density 5 1/4 drives.

i also know that some laptops have parallel drives.are these drives specially made for the specific laptop or will these drives work on any old/new computers parallel port?

also do external floppy drive become bootable?

thanks

 

[Anonymous Coward]

Tandy 1000 is a strange machine. Do you know for a fact that high density floppy controllers with BIOS designed for regular PCs can work properly in the Tandy? In the case of a regular PC, being able to boot from the 1.44meg drive will depend on the controller. Many of the high density cards with BIOS will allow you to boot from the 1.44meg drive, but I have heard that others will not.

Booting from an external drive is probably possible if you use the external port on the floppy controller, but most of the high density controllers do not have this port. Those IBM drives you saw were probably using the 37-pin floppy connector, and am pretty sure they are all low density drives. Booting from the parallel port is not possible. But, if all you need to do is read 1.44meg disks, a parallel port based drive is probably the easiest path to take (if you can find one).

 

[CompositeGamer]

i seen a site where someone indeed had an internal 1.4 floppy drive working on a tandy 1000 TL or tandy SX.it had an 8 bit isa floppy controller with a bios(bios is requiered) and saying they had to disable onboard floppy with the nofloppy program.

im sure i would have to use an expansion card of some kind as the tandy TX doesn't have an external floppy port.

if i go the external route i wont have to go through the effort of installing a new drive internally

 

[CompositeGamer]

well i have doing some searching for an external floppy drives and discovered scsi floppy drives.probably a good way to go,although they are quite expensive unless i find a used old style drive.dont know if the newer drives models will support dos 3.3

 

[Anonymous Coward]

SCSI floppy drives are cheap if you are patient enough. I got about five of them for $10 a few years ago. Actually, the drives themselves are just regular MFM floppy drives. They are hooked up to a removable adapter called the "TEAC FC 1".

Like I've said in other posts though, this method isn't really desireable unless you are desperate to get the 1.44meg drive on an older system. This is because the SCSI floppy adapter needs to be specifically supported by software drivers. I was unable to get the SCSI floppy drive going with my Future Domain controller, though COREL SCSI might have drivers to make it work. (haven't been able to find a copy of that yet)

So far I have only been able to get the drive going with my Trantor T128 controller. However, it eats a lot of conventional memory. I can't remember how much exactly as it has been a few years. Additionally, you can't boot from the drive using this method.

For most 808x systems I recommend a 16-bit multi i/o in an 8-bit slot using the 1.44meg TSR that comes with 2M V3.0.