My family and I dug our old Tandy 1000 out of the basement a while ago, and after firing it up we found that its battery conked out, and now requires the startup disks for Deskmate. Unfortunately we misplaced them. Anyone have advice on what we should do?
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Deskmate for Tandy 1000 RL
- Thread starter Mister_Al
- Start date
commodorejohn
Veteran Member
This was a big pain for me to figure out when I got one from a recycle center! You can get disk images of the system disks here; use another computer to write DM1.DSK to a 720KB floppy and you can boot into DeskMate. Then run RLSETUP.PDM, and you'll be able to edit the configuration settings and set it to boot from the hard drive or ROM DOS. (You'll want to copy SETUPRL.COM from MSDOS.DSK to the hard drive so you can make changes more easily in the future.)
(It's actually not a battery-backed configuration on the RL, by the way - it's an EEPROM.)
(It's actually not a battery-backed configuration on the RL, by the way - it's an EEPROM.)
DOS lives on!!
Veteran Member
Ah, but that's exactly how you get vintage computers to run right if they need certain software to work or to make diagnostic disks to fix a problem.Though I am a bit leery about copying stuff from a modern day computer to a vintage one.
Not if you run an antivirus scanner aginst the disk images.Can't malware be transferred?
commodorejohn
Veteran Member
The disk images are virus-free, so as long as nothing's resident on the PC you use to write them to disk, you should be good to go. Besides, you'd have to go pretty far out of your way to contract something an 8086 DOS machine would be vulnerable to in this day and age, I think.
dr.zeissler
Experienced Member
I have a 1000RL/HD, can I use an older Deskmate as the 3.04 ?
I have seen that there are older Text-Based Versions with nicer Colors and perhaps faster then the GUI Version I currently use.
Is there a guide how to customize the Deskmate-Stuff. Currently I do not use it, I use GEM1.4 and Win1x/2x but I am not satisfied with Windows because I only can use 4 of the possible 16 Colors.
Doc
I have seen that there are older Text-Based Versions with nicer Colors and perhaps faster then the GUI Version I currently use.
Is there a guide how to customize the Deskmate-Stuff. Currently I do not use it, I use GEM1.4 and Win1x/2x but I am not satisfied with Windows because I only can use 4 of the possible 16 Colors.
Doc