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

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 31 December 2012 20:56:11 john.bielak did opine:

> 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.
> 
Works just fine.

> 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:
> 
For that, do one more thing while you have the covers off the MPI. Remove 3 
of the 4 resistors along the front edge of the board which are connected to 
the 4 sockets pin 8's, then solder a bridge wire to make all socket pin 8's 
common.  Otherwise the IRQ's from either pack will not reliably get thru to 
the cpu, and comm programs will fail miserably.

> 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!
> 
> 
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up!
My views 
<http://www.armchairpatriot.com/What%20Has%20America%20Become.shtml>
Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers.
		-- Pablo Picasso
I was taught to respect my elders, but its getting 
harder and harder to find any...