DeskMate Checkmate
Mar. 14th, 2024 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAmong the never-ceasing reports of new and updated software packages from Homebrew, an elaboration on Dosbox, the long-established utility for running certain old programs, stood out among other names clever-cute or just obscure. I installed it, if not through Homebrew. Working through its tutorial, I noticed a reference to “Tandy sound,” and that got me thinking.
My family’s old computer magazines did make me familiar with the Tandy 1000 and its graphics and sound, cloned from the IBM PCjr. When I’d used Dosbox before, I’d got not just a few old games with “Tandy modes” running, but also GW-BASIC to try out some type-in programs from the mid-to-late 1980s. There was one more Tandy 1000 program that I was thinking about now, though.
The Tandy 1000 had come with a program called DeskMate, a “simple integrated package” or a “software sampler” depending on how generous you’re feeling. A few months ago I’d typed screenfuls of text into an assortment of antique word processors running in an assortment of emulators just to get a certain slight sense of what “productivity” once meant. Now, I had it in my head to see if I could track down DeskMate as well and run it in “Tandy mode.”
To be brief, I did find a disk image of DeskMate. It’s actually easier to get files off an MS-DOS image than with most other old images, and I started the new Dosbox only to find most of the opening menu that kept showing up in Radio Shack catalogs flashing. It turned out I’d been editing the configuration file for a game I’d got running before as part of the tutorial, but I did get things sorted out. The program now looked better, but it didn’t take long before I’d realised I could get into the DeskMate text editor module, but couldn’t get back out.
A bit of searching turned up that you pressed the F12 key in those days of “unstandardised interfaces” to back out of a module. The Tandy 1000 keyboard had twelve function keys back when the IBM PC just had ten, but that meant the extra keys didn’t send the same codes as a modern keyboard.
For a little while I did tell myself I could just shrug this off and move on, but I then got thinking of MAME, which sometimes seems my “emulator of last resort” with its functional but aesthetically displeasing interface. In any case I did get an early Tandy 1000 model running in it (for some reason it only offered one disk drive, but this didn’t require the disk-swapping agonies an early Macintosh might have put you in), and this time the F12 key worked. I was even able to type drafts of this post in DeskMate and get them off the disk image.
As ever the pointlessness of this seemed the point, but I could also think a bit of how I’d found a newspaper clipping in one of my family’s old 80 Micro issues. The clipping had been of a Radio Shack ad for the Tandy 1000. Nothing more came of this than of the piece of paper I’d found in an earlier issue that looked to have been costing out a TRS-80 Model III system. However, if we had moved up from our much more economical Color Computers (before the “CoCo 3” had offered graphics a bit more colourful than the Tandy 1000’s, although its sound was simpler) and perhaps made a little use of DeskMate then, I can only speculate just what assumptions I’d compute with these days. I suppose I would have played some of the games I’ve got running in Dosbox now without having had to go to the homes of friends, anyway.
My family’s old computer magazines did make me familiar with the Tandy 1000 and its graphics and sound, cloned from the IBM PCjr. When I’d used Dosbox before, I’d got not just a few old games with “Tandy modes” running, but also GW-BASIC to try out some type-in programs from the mid-to-late 1980s. There was one more Tandy 1000 program that I was thinking about now, though.
The Tandy 1000 had come with a program called DeskMate, a “simple integrated package” or a “software sampler” depending on how generous you’re feeling. A few months ago I’d typed screenfuls of text into an assortment of antique word processors running in an assortment of emulators just to get a certain slight sense of what “productivity” once meant. Now, I had it in my head to see if I could track down DeskMate as well and run it in “Tandy mode.”
To be brief, I did find a disk image of DeskMate. It’s actually easier to get files off an MS-DOS image than with most other old images, and I started the new Dosbox only to find most of the opening menu that kept showing up in Radio Shack catalogs flashing. It turned out I’d been editing the configuration file for a game I’d got running before as part of the tutorial, but I did get things sorted out. The program now looked better, but it didn’t take long before I’d realised I could get into the DeskMate text editor module, but couldn’t get back out.
A bit of searching turned up that you pressed the F12 key in those days of “unstandardised interfaces” to back out of a module. The Tandy 1000 keyboard had twelve function keys back when the IBM PC just had ten, but that meant the extra keys didn’t send the same codes as a modern keyboard.
For a little while I did tell myself I could just shrug this off and move on, but I then got thinking of MAME, which sometimes seems my “emulator of last resort” with its functional but aesthetically displeasing interface. In any case I did get an early Tandy 1000 model running in it (for some reason it only offered one disk drive, but this didn’t require the disk-swapping agonies an early Macintosh might have put you in), and this time the F12 key worked. I was even able to type drafts of this post in DeskMate and get them off the disk image.
As ever the pointlessness of this seemed the point, but I could also think a bit of how I’d found a newspaper clipping in one of my family’s old 80 Micro issues. The clipping had been of a Radio Shack ad for the Tandy 1000. Nothing more came of this than of the piece of paper I’d found in an earlier issue that looked to have been costing out a TRS-80 Model III system. However, if we had moved up from our much more economical Color Computers (before the “CoCo 3” had offered graphics a bit more colourful than the Tandy 1000’s, although its sound was simpler) and perhaps made a little use of DeskMate then, I can only speculate just what assumptions I’d compute with these days. I suppose I would have played some of the games I’ve got running in Dosbox now without having had to go to the homes of friends, anyway.