[Coco] [Color Computer] Older site.

[Dan Olson]

> I don't think I've ever even seen an 8-bit Atari in person more than
> once or twice (except the game consoles of course).  I agree that the

Really?  I'm still typing away on the A500 in the "computer room", there's 
currently a 130XE sitting on the table next to me, a 1200XL, 600XL, and 
XEGS on the floor not far away.  They made the 8 bits from the late 70s up 
until the late 80s or earily 90s, so they're not all that rare.  There's 
also a CoCo II here too :)

> Well, 75% of it is just the fun of being able to say that I've installed
> Linux on a 68k machine, and see the expression on people's face.  It's
> also fun to pick out applications that run well on older hardware and
> just see what those older machines can do.  I have an interest in
> refurbishing and repurposing old PCs and giving them away to and through
> some local nonprofits.

I'm the same way, only in my case I've got a couple 386s that I've used as 
Xterminals, here and there.  I finally gave up on the idea due to lack of 
space (if the number of Ataris wasn't a clue...).  I still have a couple 
origional IBM PCs and XTs that have ethernet card and packet drivers that 
I use from time to time too :)

   If a program runs reasonably well on a 33MHz
> 68040 with 64M of RAM, it should do just fine on a Pentium 166 with
> 128M.  But I also have a perverse interest in designing my own hardware
> and hooking unapproved devices up to unsuspecting computers.  I would
> someday like to learn to write (or at least modify) Linux device
> drivers.  In doing so, one might accidentally come into contact with
> assembly language.  If that ever became a necessity, I would much rather
> be using a 68k machine.  Everything's already been done in the x86
> world, except for stuff that I know is way beyond my capabilities.  But
> there's at least the possibility that I could someday actually
> contribute something useful to Linux/m68k.

Yea, I've had great dreams of the same, but they never come to be most of 
the time.  I was going to build a large memory expansion for the A1000, 
just because the 68k had plenty of address space, and because I could. 
It never got too far though :(.

  > I just find that the Macs are too closed.  The nice thing 
about the
> Atari is that hardware-wise it is eminently hackable.  There are some
> custom chips in there, but there's also a lot of off-the-shelf hardware
> that one could dig into if one were so inclined.  Even the Amiga, which
> is far better documented than the Mac, is a bit esoteric in comparison
> with the Atari ST machines.

That's true, I lost interest in the STs because the expansion hardware is 
so weird (the strange DINs and the lack of a true expansion bus) but the 
hardware is rather simple, really.

> I think it would be interesting to use a 68k Mac as an X terminal for a
> hacked Atari or Amiga running a stripped-down Debian with homebrew
> interface cards wedged in.  Splitting up the display processing and the
> application processing is a halfway decent way to get more mileage out
> of old computers.

True, it works well with the old 386s :)  They're still sluggish to update 
the screen and such, but not too bad.

> I suspect that most Amiga users who were likely to write a disk format
> manipulator had come from Commodore 64 land and confused the CoCo with
> the TRS-80 Model I, if they had heard of the CoCo at all.

I think you're right, I think the Amiga was somewhat unique in that it 
could read/write the GCR C64 disks that were unreadable on most other 
systems.

 	Dan