"I'm sorry dear, let's raincheck brunch, I'm flashing DOS 5 images to diskette for the Tandy, the one I need operational to demonstrate the niche game project I've been working on instead of fall cleanup. You understand."
When your marriage survives this, it survives anything.
That began as tongue in cheek, but when I got out the Aptiva to troubleshoot the CF to IDE situation, I was given a 10 minute countdown. But behold, we have geometry, so pancakes may commence.
I had to run it off a diskette as I need a smaller CF card to play well with the BIOS, which exposed some areas of performance improvement, and the monitor is missing blue ruining the space ocean vibe, how-the-ever, I just beat the first level of my little game on a real 386sx/20 for the first time, and that's cool. Also this means I can put "Hard Drive optional" on the Itch page.
Briefly redeemed for color and a better shot, DOS jam effort on a Tandy 386sx/20 currently without a hard drive. Runs very reasonably off diskette. Very satisfying!
For those following for Tandy restoration purposes, the CF to IDE interface technically works in it with a 2gb card, but the BIOS doesn't support > 1024 cylinders. Setting lower cyl got fairly far treating it like a ~500mb drive, but DOS 5 badly misbehaved once installed. Based on research, I think it's getting confused with the bogus geometry (which is entirely reasonable...), so I've got a 128MB CF card on the way. For reference, the original hard drive was 80MB.
Hollis