[Coco] TC-9

[Mark Marlette]

Curtis,

I don't recall what mods I made to your TC-9 but the design was terrible.

After I got done mod'ing your machine it was running way better. That  
was a long time ago and don't recall the details. I have them written  
down somewhere in my files.

The Kbus crap that was in there or whatever they called it was a lot  
of the problem. Never was a Puppo keyboard fan either.... Sorry.

Your Xtal mod all you had to do is adjust the horz. osc. on the  
monitor to get it to lock. Some monitors would not shift that far.

Still all a GREAT piece of history to have. :)

Mark


Quoting "L. Curtis Boyle" <curtisboyle at sasktel.net>:

> On Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:23:19 -0600, Frank Swygert <farna at att.net> wrote:
>
>> I recall the TC-9 using the GIME. The reason was for 100% OS-9   
>> Level II compatibility, and there was hope for some DECB 2.1   
>> compatibility (CoCo 3 only). The later never occurred, too many   
>> hardware differences I think. Easy enough to tweak an OS-9 driver   
>> for minor differences, DECB was harder to patch.
> Yes, it used the GIME, and a standard 28.xx MHz clock (I overclocked
> mine with a 32MHz crystal). If you bought the TC-9 prepackaged (like
> Bill Nobel & did), it came with a cable that switched the weird
> inverted connector to a standard cartridge port connector (your choice
> if you got a single or Y cable one, but if you were using the Y cable,
> you had to make sure that you're floppy controller was fully decoded).
> I ran mine with the stock Tandy floppy controller and a B&B hard drive
> (60MB) for years. Ran it with the 1MB RAM daughter board as well. Bill
> & I completely redid the keyboard/mouse/sound driver (TC9IO, which
> replaced CC3IO), from the original version by Bruce Isted. We added
> support for Numlock/Caps lock controllable by each window (instead of
> system wide), 8 bit sound support, and a bunch of keyboard updates,
> from what I remember.
>     The RSDOS first version ROM (a replacement, larger ROM image than
> the original version it shipped with) was done, and was written by
> Chris Burke, but I could never get it running stably on my system
> (whether this was due to the overclock or not, I never did dig in deep
> enough to find out). We did some minor tweaks to the Serial port driver
> (dual port 6552, capable of up to 38400), but we did modify the mouse
> routines somewhat (3 button support was started for Logitech mice, I
> believe). It did boot a few times enough for me to type in a small
> BASIC program, but it always crash on me. There was also boot rom
> versions that booted from the Eliminator or B&B hard drive systems, as
> well as the floppy. I did mine off of floppy because of development
> (always had a stable floppy complete boot to reboot from is something
> went horribly wrong).
>
>>
>> There's an interview with Frank Hogg and I think a pic of a TC-9 in  
>>  "Tandy's Little Wonder", downloadable from the maltedmedia site   
>> (ftp://maltedmedia.com/coco/Farna/Tandy's%20Little%20Wonder/Cocobook-TLW2.pdf). I recorded a conversation with Frank Hogg about his CoCo involvement and wrote the article from that interview tape. Wish I still had the original   
>> cassette!
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> L. Curtis Boyle
>
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco