Phonomenal! PC Junior / Tandy 1000 (1983) IBM PCJr - (c) www.old-computers.com Since a certain success gradually appeared in matters of IBM's PC, IBM took itself courage and tried to compete with established home computers like the C64. They recognized the limitations of the PC in matters of video and sound, however what they created, was despite all not really outstanding. The PCJr didn't know expansions in form of plug-in cards, and instead one had to put expansion adapters at the front - a new expansion was connected to the old one. That could turn into a true rat tail, if you wanted to extend actually more! Anyway, main problem of this machine was the keyboard which ran via infrared, instead of the promised several meters only the quite near sitting in front was possible, and so so it was practically free of sense. But the best nevertheless was the sound at that time: using a chip by Texas Instruments, it was possible for the machine to pass 3 sound channels and one noise channel with 16 volumes each! Looking at these specs today, this doesn't sound much better than the capabilities of the first Gameboy, but for the PC-world, it was a real enrichment! Meanwhile, also Tandy developed a clone, which they wanted to praise as "PCJr compatible". However IBM withdrew its model at this time, because although the second version admittedly had no more the deficiencies of the first one, only few were sold because of the bad expandability. So Tandy only titled its model "MS-DOS compatible. In contrast to the PCJr however, this model could spread quite far, and so the music playback is supported by not only few games on these systems. A later expansion in the Tandy TL/SL made moreover even the direct playback of digitized samples possible with simultaneous utilization of the synthesizer! Samples Monkey Island 1 [OGG] [MP3] Almost like speaker version, uses hardware rather bad Space Quest 3 [OGG] [MP3] Not overwhelming Silpheed [OGG] [MP3] 4D Boxing [OGG] [MP3] Playback in PCJr/Tandy mode 4D Boxing [OGG] [MP3] Played on Tandy TL with digital samples Wibarm [OGG] [MP3] Zeliard [OGG] [MP3] Great sound; rather untypical Links old-computers.com The IBM PC Junior Mobygames Games supporting PCJr/Tandy Mobygames Games supporting Tandy TL/SL Next Index Introduction Continuing 1981 - PC Speaker 1983 - PCJr / Tandy 1986 - Covox Speech Thing 1987 - The real sound... 1988 - Game Blaster and LAPC-1 1989,1991 - The first Sound Blasters 1991 - Competition! 1992 - 16 Bit by market leader, SCC-1 1993 - The AWE32 1995 - End of an era: GUS PnP Conclusion and links Background Glossary Discuss article Print version