[Coco] Y Cable

[mmarlett at isd.net]

I personally have a couple of them for a historical sense. I don't care for
them. The CoCo's address bus is not buffered unless you are running a
Pro-Tector or Pro-Tector+ from Cloud-9. With that piece of hardware then
the address bus becomes capable of having enough drive to drive several
cards. The other issue is the mirroring or reversing of the connector's
pins. Watch out for this, pin 1 will be pin 2 on the other end of the
cable. Keep it short, less than 6" and that is probably too long. If you
get it looking like it works make sure you write some test software if it
is going to do storage to make sure that corruption is not occurring. Data
loss is a bad thing and highly likely. The CoCo's timing is touchy and the
added capacitance to the unbuffered uP is a bad mixture......

My $0.02....

Good luck,

Mark
Cloud-9

>I was wondering what precautions I should take when building a Y-Cable
>for use with the CoCo bus. I'm (vaguely) aware of the addressing issue
>with some of the floppy controllers. I'm also aware that I should keep
>the run as short as possible and add a ground wire between each signal
>wire. But I was wondering how many devices I can add to the bus, and
>if there are other precautions (other than not unplugging things while
>power is applied) I should take.
>
>
>-- 
>Rod Barnhart aka Wintermute
>
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