Why am I like this? (Full Chat and Image generation on a 286 Tandy 1000 TL/3)
40 year tech gap? No problem! The Tandy runs DeskMind, a native DOS program. It talks over WiFi (a PicoMEM 2 card with mTCP) to a small Python server on my PC. That server drives Qwen3.8-27B (NInfer on a 5090) and Krea 2 (ComfyUI on a 4090). The 286 never sees JSON, base64 or a PNG. It gets plain text lines and pictures that are ready to copy into video memory.
Drawing from chat without tool calling. The system prompt tells Qwen to wrap a picture request in \<draw>...</draw>\. The server catches the tag mid-stream, runs Krea 2, dithers the result, and streams a \picture ready\ line. "Draw me a 286 AI logo" takes about 9 s from Enter to a thumbnail in the chat.
Qwen Vision sees what the Tandy sees. When you ask about a picture, Qwen gets the original and the 16-colour dithered version, so "why does the sky look striped?" has context. The latest picture stays in context for follow-ups.
The model knows where it lives. The system prompt knows it's talking IN a 286 with 80 columns and 16 colors. It keeps answers short and plain ASCII, and when asked about games it suggests Wolfenstein 3D or Commander Keen.
Streaming cleanup for a 1990 screen. Reasoning is stripped, Markdown is removed on the fly, Unicode becomes code page 437 (bullets turn into the CP437 block character), and tiny tokens are merged into \~48-character lines so the 286 isn't redrawing for every token.
Per-request reasoning effort: low for chat (replies start in \~2 s), medium for rewriting image prompts.
Prompt "enhancement" tuned for dithering: bold shapes, strong contrast, simple backgrounds. The rewrite shows up in an edit box on the Tandy before drawing, and the rules themselves can be edited from the Tandy.
\- \*\*A Dither Lab\*\* in the server GUI: Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson, Bayer, Yliluoma and more, previewed at the Tandy's real aspect ratio.
Numbers: Krea 2 at 1024x768 in \~10 s 8 steps, the target is 640x200). About 1 s to send a 64,000-byte picture over the PicoMEM WiFi (56-79 KB/s).
Code (GPLv3): https://github.com/RowanUnderwood/DeskMind
added image gallery https://imgur.com/a/wysqoM1