[Coco] Deal to first 3 responders

[Bill Barnes]

That's bean counters for you. Even $.02 ruins the price point for them, so they shut-down what could have been a quality booster, and instead invest even more money for warranties, etc, than would have been needed for that extra little bit spent improving reliability and quality. IT boils down to corporate greed, or in this case, a lack of caring about details in their little machine.

-Later!   -WB-    -- BABIC Computer Consulting.

--- On Tue, 8/25/09, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote:

From: Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: [Coco] Deal to first 3 responders
To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Date: Tuesday, August 25, 2009, 4:08 PM

On Tuesday 25 August 2009, Christian Lesage wrote:
>I've been looking for doing something similar, but I
>was thinking about putting the 6551 inside the Multi-Pak interface
>instead. Yes, it would imply doing address decoding and RS-232 level
>translation, while this mod merely uses one additional chip. And yes, I
>know Roger sells RS-232 paks, but my goal is to free an additional slot
>on the Multi-Pak interface.

That we could use.  But far more utility would be made by simply doing full decoding of the i/o ports used .  Wasting a $20 wide chip enable on a 4 address wide i/o port, and doing it 4 times if you count the disk controller is inexcusable, and IMO purposely hamstrung the machine.  Whoever did that ought to have been water boarded, repeatedly, until he got religion.  Yes, it could be fixed, but it would be an individual fix to every coco that wanted its Achilles tendons whole.  On the mobo, at the design stage, cost might have been a quarter dollar!  I boil over every time I think about it.