[Coco] Adventures in resetting up...

[Frederick D Provoncha]

On Sat, 23 Apr 2005 16:55:27 -0600 William Astle <lost at l-w.ca> writes:
> Finally, after a couple of years of having my CoCo system sitting in 
> boxes in the corner for lack of anywhere to set it up, I've got it 
> online with the new goodies I acquired from Cloud9 at the 'fest. So 
> now, 
> I've got a working system with the following:
> 
> Coco3 with 6309 processor
> 512K RAM
> MPI
> FD502 floppy controller and drive
> SuperIDE with a 128MB flash card and an 85MB IDE drive attached
> CM8 monitor
> AT Keyboard interface
> Drivewire interface
> 
> Now I wish I had all that stuff back in the day. :)

Congratulations! My current Coco setup is similar to yours. Hey, just be
grateful you have all this stuff now. I never even thought I'd ever get
my system set up again, let alone with a fast hard drive! It's such a
thrill. A lifelong dream, really.

> So I've managed to get all of it working together sanely. First I 
> got 
> HDB-DOS installed into the SuperIDE. Now that's cool. Then I figured 
> I 
> needed Nitros9 so I downloaded that and set it up so it was 
> available 
> via drivewire and got that going. After some poking around, I 
> finally 
> managed to get my brain to click and I got a functional Nitros9 boot 
> 
> with both the Drivewire and IDE interfaces active. Now that's cool.
> 
> Nitros9, Drivewire, HDB-DOS, the SuperIDE, and the AT keyboard 
> interface 
> are really cool items.
> 
> One thing I discovered as I was poking around is that you can easily 
> get 
> the SuperIDE and the floppy controller to both work without having 
> to 
> switch any switches on the MPI by putting POKE&HFF7F,255 in the 
> AUTOEXEC.BAS file (assuming your floppy controller is in slot 4), at 
> 
> least on my MPI.
> 
> Now all I need is another 360K floppy drive to put into my PC. (The 
> BIOS 
> on my motherboard seems to think it supports 360K 5.25" drives. I 
> wonder 
> if it's telling the truth.) But that's a problem for another day.
> 
> -- 
> William Astle
> finger lost at l-w.ca for further information

Have you thought about installing Curtis Boyle's upgraded Multi-Vue on
your hard drive? It really sings on a hard drive under NitrOS-9. Greatly
improved performance, like night and day. I use it all the time. It's
great. You can even put a 'gshell <>>>/w&' line in your startup file and
have it run automatically when you boot up. Very nice. ( actually, a
couple other lines in addition to that one are required to get it to work
right). If you're interested, I can help you get Multi-Vue set up on the
hard drive. There are a few steps involved. Let me know.

Fred Provoncha
Stansbury Park, UT