Welcome back to part 13 of my SepTandy Spectacular 3. In the last post we took a look at an MC-10 clone with the Matra Alice. In this post we're taking a look at a unique card for the PCs that can give them some features of the Tandy 1000, The Lo-tech Tandy Compatible Sound Adapter.
Released in 2018, The Lo-tech Tandy Compatible Sound Adapter is a homebrew ISA soundcard that allows any IBM PC or Compatible using it to have Tandy 3 Voice sound capability.
Yes I know Im kinda stretching this as its a sound card and not a clone, but since it allows any computer using it to run some Tandy specific software, I'm gonna count it.
Lo-tech is a small one man shop in the UK. It got its start in 2012, making cards for the IBM PC and TRS-80. Their mostly well known for producing the CF to ISA adapter cards, to use Compact Flash cards in place of hard drives.
In 2017, Lo-tech entered the sound card field by doing what was though to be impossible, create a sound card that can produce Tandy 3 voice sound on any IBM compatible pc with an ISA slot. The problem wasn't so much designing the card its trying to make sure games can address the card properly. Nevertheless, There was a way to make it possible and it went on sale in July of 2017, for £4.95 pounds.
Now unlike the previous machines we've look at this card was designed to come in a kit that the user would have to assemble themselves with the kit containing the board and instructions and the other components were to be from other sources.
Once the card is assembled you just insert it into an empty ISA slot and turn the computer on. For demonstration of what this would look and sound like I'll simulate the experience on an IBM PC AT 5170 from 1984.
Powering up the machine is pretty much the same as it would be if the card was uninstalled, except all 3 audio channels on the SN76489 will be on all at once. The reason is because the Tandy 1000 had a small routine in the BIOS which would turn the sound chip off and shut off the registers, but since its being used in a regular PC or a clone it doesnt have the routines in the BIOS. However there is a utility you can download called Soundoff that can shut the sound off as soon as the AUTOEXEC file is run. Other than that it will still run like normal and I can do my HELLO WORLD! test.
Where things start to differ is on the card itself which can cause a few compatibility problems with software. for one thing, early games will have difficulty due to the fact that when they searched for sound hardware, they would do so by looking to see if the word "Tandy" was in the BIOS to make sure its running on a Tandy 1000. Games from companies like Sierra and LucasArts and anything from 1987 to around 1994 will have better luck due to the fact those programs started to include proper set up menus to allow for different computer configurations. Ill have Kevin from fellow one man hobby shop TexElec explain further:
So yeah, clearly there's some issues, but at least it's better than the PC Speaker and with some further improvements and modification can work much better.
This card was sold for about a year before being discontinued in 2018. But other hobbyists have build on the idea and even made versions that plug into the parallel port so they could be used on laptops. However they still suffer from compatibility problems and will requires some patches.
So how do I rate the The Lo-tech Tandy Compatible Sound Adapter on compatibility? The The Lo-tech Tandy Compatible Sound Adapter ranks as Semi Compatible due to using the patches required for most software to work and software that will work natively is scarce at best.
This concludes Part 13 of my third Septandy Spectacular, join me next time as we wrap up this years spectacular by taking a look at some miscellaneous clones I didn't cover.
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