G'day
This month there is a special event called septandy!
A month where a number of youtubers focus their content on tandy computers of all types.
Search the hashtag #septandy to find other creators content.
The main experience I've had personally with Tandy computers was playing with those that
my cousin had, mostly the tandy 1000.
Today I thought I'd combine my interest in BASIC programming and the Tandy 1000 to investigate
what the GWBasic interpreter could do on these systems.
We'll try out some tandy specific Basic software.
So what could a Tandy 1000 do?
It was essentially a clone of the PC jr, which is mostly compatible with a standard PC with
CGA graphics with some important differences.
There were a number of enhanced graphics modes supporting higher resolutions or more colours
than the standard CGA modes.
Two in particular were commonly used in games.
160 by 200 with 16 colours was commonly used in early Sierra games, and 320 by 200 with
16 colours was used in many others.
In addition to the extended graphics there is enhanced sound.
Most Tandy machines have a Texas Instruments SN76496, a chip which provides three square
wave voices as well as a noise channel.
Later tandy machines would add a DAC for digitised audio.
So how many of these features does GWBasic support?
It turns out quite a lot.
The BASIC that comes with the Tandy licensed versions of MS-DOS was enhanced to support
the extra graphics and sound.
I think the only thing I didn't see in the manual is support for the DAC.
I found a bunch of BASIC software made for the Tandy 1000, but unfortunately I don't
own one.
As sad as that is there are some emulation options we can use to try out programs intended
for it.
There are three I'm trying today, PC-Basic, 86Box and Dosbox.
PC-Basic is a modern interpreter for old basic programs as opposed to an emulator.
It supports the tandy specific features of BASIC, but you'll need to set it to tandy
mode either by command line or configuration file.
It is very compatible, running most programs quite well with a few caveats.
Firstly the performance doesn't match original hardware.
For some software that's not a problem at all, but many of the games I've tried simply
run too fast.
Here's a few examples.
The graphics appear quite blurry in the lower resolution modes.
Something that doesn't happen in the other emulation options.
Lastly the joystick support doesn't seem to work well with games that support it.
I think this may be because I am using a gamepad, also tandy joysticks are analog so perhaps
there's an associated compatibility issue.
The other two options are emulation, so a copy of the Tandy Basic interpreter is required.
I downloaded three different versions of the Tandy interpreter from oldskool.org.
There seems to be some minor differences between the different interpreters, so some programs
my require a particular one to work well.
I did find the later interpreters were faster.
Using these interpreters with 86Box I set up a virtual machine to be a Tandy SL/2.
For the most part it worked, but there were some problems that put me off using it.
Firstly 86Box doesn't seem to handle the keyboard correctly, often the keys get "stuck" or don't
work, particularly the arrow keys, and I had the same issue with the joystick support as
I did before.
Otherwise the emulations worked quite well.
I was able to get around the keyboard issue with some games by using the numeric keypad
arrow keys instead of the normal ones.
I set up Dosbox in a similar manner, but targetting a slower machine instead.
The Basic interpeters don't seem to like Dosbox so much, some commands like CLS seem to require
BIOS calls that don't seem to be implemented.
I did find some programs that worked, but this is where the most problems with the interpreters
surfaced.
Having checked out all the different emulation options lets check out some of the games that
were made for GWBasic on the tandy.
Since there isn't really an ideal solution for running these games I will note what I
think is perhaps the best emulation option.
I've downloaded this software from TVDogs website and Rob Hagemans hoard of GWBasic.
Links included in the description.
First up I found this menu program from a magazine called One Thousand.
It seems to be linked with a particular issue of the magazine as each program seems to have
a page number associated with it.
The software here seems to take advantage of the tandy sound, but not so much the graphics.
I played this gambler game for a little while.
It's kind of strange, with what sounds like random sounds and pretty much random gameplay.
It might be a little fun with a few people, but is kind of boring by yourself.
Nerm of Bemer is a strange name for what is essentially a snake game.
It's very much like Nibbles that came much later, except you need to leave the screen
via small exits after eating all the mushrooms.
This one is CPU dependant for the game speed, so it goes way too fast on PC-Basic.
I noted this doesn't really take advantage of the capabilities of the tandy so it may
work on other PC's as well.
I found a collection of BASIC games made by Brookes DeForest in the late 80's.
From what I've seen he had to be one of the more prolific Basic programmers for Tandy
1000 computers.
He didn't just make alot of software, these were probably some of the best designed and
most enjoyable programs I found when looking for games made in basic.
Here's some I tried out.
First up is a text mode game called Air Attack.
It's a simple bomber game where you fly over a landscape or city of some sort.
You need to bomb the landscape enough that you don't collide with it as your altitude
lowers on each pass.
It's a fairly simple concept but was done reasonably well.
It includes a little bit of tandy sound.
Black jack is basically what it says on the tin, you play against a computer opponent
called max who is pretty good, so be thankful it's not for real money.
Tactile is a board game I haven't seen before, but is fairly interesting.
At first I didn't understand the rules and got thoroughly owned by the computer player,
after I figured out how it works I was able to win.
You can move any of your pieces one tile in any direction or take an opponents piece by
jumping over it.
If the moved piece makes contact with one of the opposition it may become infected or
infect the opposition.
The computer infects your pieces if they are in tiles diagonal to its, and you infect the
computers pieces if they touch vertically or horizontally.
Unfortunately for you the computer gets first go at infection, so you must be careful not
to give away pieces.
There's not alot of sound in this game, but it does make use of tandy graphics, although
I suspect this one could work on the standard PC with CGA with a little tweaking.
Gray Hound is at it's core a gambling game, where you bet on gray hound races.
What makes this more charming than the usual game based on this concept is the presentation.
It makes reasonable use of the tandy graphics and sound.
Even though it's mostly just crowd noise I swear I can hear the dogs barking.
Not a complex game by any means but surprisingly fun to watch the races.
Expo surprised me by how much the author managed to squeeze into a Basic game.
It's a top down maze game where you find keys and try to make it to the level exit within
a limited number of moves.
The levels are surprisingly large.
It's Fairly simple in concept, but well executed on the basic interpreter.
I found it played a bit slow on the equivalent of a 4.77Mhz tandy, but it worked quite well
when running it on a faster emulated machine (such as 8Mhz) or PC-Basic where it's high
performance works in your favour.
There were also a couple of games by Brookes Deforest that partially worked that I thought
worth mentioning.
I suspect these would work well on actual hardware but they had various flaws on emulation.
Fluf! is sorta like Qbert in that there is a play field that travel over to change it's
colour.
The level is complete once you change the colour of all the tiles.
Unfortunately this one doesn't work on any of the emulation options as it requires a
joystick to play, and that doesn't work on any of the options I tried.
Toad Road is a frogger clone, the only emulation it worked on was PC-Basic where it ran too
fast and the joystick controls didn't work.
It seems to be reasonably faithful, although there are fewer moving hazards such as cars
and logs.
This is probably because of performance on the slower tandy machines.
Break off is a breakout clone which has similar issues to toad road.
It seems to be feature complete for breakout, but doesn't implement any extra features like
power ups.
So that's an overview of the GWBasic Games made for the tandy.
You can see that whilst many don't take full advantage of what the tandy has to offer,
there are a few of them that make decent use of both graphics and sound.
Of course some of them didn't work as intended by their author.
The most common issue I faced seems to be games using the joystick which doesn't seem
to work with the emulation options I've tried.
Timing is another issue if you use PC-Basic as it tends to run the programs a little fast.
With a bit of tinkering with the code these probably could be fixed, perhaps that would
make a good septandy project for me next year, as I've certainly run out of time this month.
Lastly much of the software I found was actually just short animations with music.
I would include one of these musical programs but I can't due
to copyright reasons.
On that bit of a bummer we'll have to leave it there.
If you liked todays video please like and subscribe
Thanks for watching, and I'll catch you next time!