Tandy 1000 RL with a PicoMem

jasa1063

Tinkerer
May 30, 2022
74
54
18
I have always had one issue with the Tandy 1000 RL, with only one expansion slot causing a lack of expandability. The introduction of the PicoMem changes all of that. I finally picked up a Tandy 1000 RL/HD with 768K of ram and decided to to see how well a PicoMem would work. The one down side is the PicoMem BIOS indicates the last part of the Dxxx ROM segment is used, so EMS will not work. I set the PicoMem BIOS to D800 and managed to get C000-D7FF working as 96K of upper memory using the fast memory of the PicoW. I set the IRQ to 3 and was able to use the NE2000 packet driver with the following command line NE2000 0x60 0x3 0x300 for use with MTCP. I have a 2GB HDD image running MS-DOS 6.22. I get 629K of usable MS-DOS memory using USE!UMBS and DOSMax. I am overall very happy with the results. This makes the Tandy 1000 RL a much more usable computer that I would have thought just a couple of years ago.