What are the requirements for classifying software as spyware/malware?

toast0 said:
My Tandy 1000 TL/2 could run dos 3.3 from rom, close enough to a SSD.
Click to expand...
Can any of these machines that are working still do this? Sounds like an awesome plug and play retro gaming setup.
 
SamirD said:
Yep, in a way. You have to format the drive with 4k sectors and then partition it in 2TB partitions for 8x logical drives and format them FAT32 and use the msdos.sys and system.sys (I think those are the names--been a bit rusty) from win 98 for your 'DOS' base, and there you go!
Click to expand...
I guess so. But I'm going to pass up the opportunity to experiment with this one. It was just a "thought experiment," like how many 3.5" floppy drives would be needed to load Win 10 Pro 64. I don't know exactly how many, but it would sure take a long time to do the install.
 
toast0 said:
No, it had a 20mb hard drive, in the end we ran dos 6 with disk compression and had about 20mb of space because the bad sectors ate half, and compression gave it back. Also, we ended up with only a 5.25" double density floppy, it came with a 3.25" double density floppy, and we added the 5.25", but when my dad tried to fiddle with getting high density working, he broke a pin in the connector and we ended up worse off than where we were.
Click to expand...
Ah, the good old days of stacker and disk compression--what a fad that was for a few years!

I'm actually surprised a pin on the floppy cable/controller dealt with the density--I always thought it was just a sensor in the drive. Because our IBM PS/2 30-286 didn't have this sensor so even 720k disks could be formatted 1.44MB, but could only be read in the PS/2 this way. IBM did this on purpose as other PS/2s were the same.
 
philb2 said:
I guess so. But I'm going to pass up the opportunity to experiment with this one. It was just a "thought experiment," like how many 3.5" floppy drives would be needed to load Win 10 Pro 64. I don't know exactly how many, but it would sure take a long time to do the install.
Click to expand...
I've done almost all of it besides setting the drive to boot and booting. I was on 98se for a long time and basically still had a DOS boot before it went into windows, just like how we had set up our win3.1 machines.

The problem with almost any modern software installation is that if it doesn't find the file it is looking for, the installation stops. Back in the day it would tell you to insert the right disk, and you even had the 'Abort, Retry, Fail' options beyond that.
 
SamirD said:
Can any of these machines that are working still do this? Sounds like an awesome plug and play retro gaming setup.
Click to expand...

Well, mine is long dead, so I'm not too sure. The hard drive was near death for many years, and I think the power supply went quickly when we gave it to my cousin under the theory that a shitty old computer was better than none.

As I recall there was a utility to rewrite the config eeprom (no bios menu) and you could set it to boot from that rom drive or not. I can't remember if deskmate was on the rom or just the hard disk. I'm pretty sure I remember that deskmate would only run on 'tandy dos', but I think tandy dos was just ms-dos with a branding patch.
 
toast0 said:
Well, mine is long dead, so I'm not too sure. The hard drive was near death for many years, and I think the power supply went quickly when we gave it to my cousin under the theory that a shitty old computer was better than none.

As I recall there was a utility to rewrite the config eeprom (no bios menu) and you could set it to boot from that rom drive or not. I can't remember if deskmate was on the rom or just the hard disk. I'm pretty sure I remember that deskmate would only run on 'tandy dos', but I think tandy dos was just ms-dos with a branding patch.
Click to expand...
My memory is very rusty on this (and was even back in the era), so forgive me if I'm wrong, but I somehow remember there were two different Tandys--the one that ran its own (cp/m?) and the ones that ran the rebranded MSDOS. But they where two totally different machines.
 
SamirD said:
My memory is very rusty on this (and was even back in the era), so forgive me if I'm wrong, but I somehow remember there were two different Tandys--the one that ran its own (cp/m?) and the ones that ran the rebranded MSDOS. But they where two totally different machines.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah. The cp/m one was the TRS-80? This one was the "100% pc compatible" one. Had a 286, but limited to 8-bit expansion. 16-color video, but not EGA compatible, was CGA compatible at least. Better than pc speaker audio (three voice?), but not that much better when we got an 8-bit mono sound blaster, that was lots better. Pretty much ran everything other than things that needed newer dos than we had, or more ram or ega/vga. Lots of games supported tandy graphics and tandy sound, and if not, cga and pc speaker was like ok enough.
 
toast0 said:
Oh yeah. The cp/m one was the TRS-80? This one was the "100% pc compatible" one. Had a 286, but limited to 8-bit expansion. 16-color video, but not EGA compatible, was CGA compatible at least. Better than pc speaker audio (three voice?), but not that much better when we got an 8-bit mono sound blaster, that was lots better. Pretty much ran everything other than things that needed newer dos than we had, or more ram or ega/vga. Lots of games supported tandy graphics and tandy sound, and if not, cga and pc speaker was like ok enough.
Click to expand...
Yep, that's what I remember with more details I never knew! We had a TRS-80 at the back of the classroom in 6th grade and 2 people at a time in some sort of rotation got to play all day on the computer during class when it was their turn. I was one of the few people that knew what to do when you exited out of a game and got to a prompt--press the reset button to make it boot again. :D

I remember the Tandy compatibility on a lot of games aka 'Tandy version'. It was pretty popular until ega and vga came along with the soundblaster. That and Leisure Suit Larry and King's Quest, lol.
 
SamirD said:
Yep, that's what I remember with more details I never knew! We had a TRS-80 at the back of the classroom in 6th grade and 2 people at a time in some sort of rotation got to play all day on the computer during class when it was their turn. I was one of the few people that knew what to do when you exited out of a game and got to a prompt--press the reset button to make it boot again. :D

I remember the Tandy compatibility on a lot of games aka 'Tandy version'. It was pretty popular until ega and vga came along with the soundblaster. That and Leisure Suit Larry and King's Quest, lol.
Click to expand...

Ah Leisure Suit Larry and King's Quest, now those bring back memories.
 
Deadjasper said:
Ah Leisure Suit Larry and King's Quest, now those bring back memories.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it even hit me because I never could afford the games or the hardware to play them, but a friend of mine had a 386 and had Leisure Suit. Leisure Suit Larry--the most successful confluence of teenagers and computers in history, lol.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top