[Coco] Dusting off the CoCo

[Allen Huffman]

Yesterday I hooked up some of my old gear. My CoCo 3, full sized white multipak, floppy drives and a SyQuest EZ135 SCSI hard drive. Everything seems to work but I have not tested all the sectors on the EZ135 disks. My RS-DOS stuff seems blank, so I may have more disks somewhere else.

OS-9 crashes from all the disks I have tried. There may be some MPI slot issues or something. The Cloud-9 boot floppy disk for the SuperIDE drivers boots fine.

I seem to have three KenTon hard drive controllers. I will be testing them, and selling off the extras. Actually, once I know I have all my SyQuest and ZIP disks backed up, I will get rid of it all.

I am using my old 720p HDTV via composite video. 80 columns is unreadable, which is odd since my ancient 13" TV set looked horrible but I used it for 80 columns until I got my first green screen monitor, then later a CM-8. I would use them both at my CoCoFEST booth so I could see the green screen to use the computer, and face the CM-8 out to the attendees.

I need to find a TV set with VGA input so I can still use it on the older CoCos (once they have composite video mods done), and to get artifact colors.

I can barely type on the keyboard. My first project is to write a program that will let me type a disk name (for the disk image) and brief description. It will then back the floppy up to a disk image, and write the name and description to a text database on another image. Looks like I may be digging out my old BASIC manuals soon.

I also have my Raspberry Pi going. Last year, they did an update which made it no longer boot from my Sandisk SD card. I tried the December release and it now boots so I can use it again. I used "cvs" to get the sourceforge DriveWire 4 stuff, and will be looking at how to make that run soon. It will be my first time using DriveWire.

I am hoping to use DW as a bridge so I can FTP files to the Pi, and get them moved over to CoCoSDC rather than having to power down and swap the SD card in to my Mac all the time.

I will also take a look at LogiCall. So much to relearn!

     Allen