[Coco] [Color Computer] Questions, Questions, Questions...

[john.bielak]

Hi!

I've recently been dusting off my old CoCo's and as I've been out of it for the longest time I had a bunch of Quasi-Newbie questions :)

I was considering putting in the alternative PAL chip on a Multi Pak Interface, so I could use it with a CoCo 3, but was wondering if anyone knew if it would cause problems using with a CoCo 1/2 afterwards.

Any suggestions about using A CoCo with a modern Monitor/TV?  I've got a Composite to VGA converter that works moderately well (though not spectacularly) with some other retro equipment... and one brilliant little mod board that makes a TS-1000 look amazing on LCD/Plasma display. I'm going to drop in the Composite mod for the CoCo2, and there's I have an RGB to VGA converter I want to try with the CoCo 3 once I wire together cables... but does anyone have any suggestions based on their experiences?

I recently picked up a Coco3.com Drive Pak and Wireless RS-232 Pak in a bundled eBay auction and was wondering:

How does the Drive Pak compared to the SuperIDE interface?  I not really interested in which is faster, but rather they're overall usability. 

With the Drive Pak, and the CoConet 1.27 firmware, on a CoCo 2/3 I've found it easy to use and like the way mounting drives and partitions are handled.  I'm not happy about the lack of SDHC support, and I'm definitely not fond of the proprietary format used on the SD card.  The three other Retro SD drive replacements I have at the moment (Commodore, Timex-Sinclair ZX81, Atari) use one of the DOS/Windows FAT or NTFS file systems which makes loading and transferring things a breeze.  The CoCoPak utility make life WAY easier but I'm not seeing it as an ideal solution in the future (See: Windows 8 and beyond)

Cloud 9's SuperIDE looks very interesting, but the documentation I could find the site doesn't talk much, if at all really, about the actual usage on a CoCo under normal Disk Basic/RSDOS. Nothing about how, or if you can at all, mount disk images or move through sub directories... or if primary meant for higher end OS's like OS9.

Does anyone had any experience with the Wireless RS-232 Pak?  It's without a ROM which from what I gather, on what's left of CoCo3.com's forums, is not necessarily a bad thing as the original RS-232 where fairly unless and a number of apps and OS's just access the hardware directly.  Question is, rubbish or not, can anyone point me in the direction of the 115k bps RS-232 ROM?  I gather that you can burn a EPROM with CoConet and use it as a Wireless DrivePak?  Has anyone used on in conjunction with a DrivePak? 

>From a bit of Googling,I know "what happened to CoCo3.com?" has been asked and somewhat answered, but... and forgive me if this those "community sensitive spots" (See: Maurice Randall + Commodore)... but for a while it looked like someone else was picking it up.  Did that fizzle out or is just one of those slow, back burner, things?

Thanks!