[Coco] Coco-3 to the GBS-8220 upscaler interfacing

Kandur k at qdv.pw
Tue Jun 3 22:53:52 EDT 2014


Greetings, 
Dennis suggested, to send my intro to the list. It's fairly long,
so feel free to jump to the end, where my question is. :)

I bought a Tandy Coco-1 in '83, upgraded it to 64k ram, added direct video output for a Zenith monochrome monitor, two 5-1/4", 720k floppy drives and a Seagate ST-225 MFM HD in RLL mode, using an Adaptec ACB-4070 MFM to SCSI bridge board and an Okidata ML-92, 9-pin impact printer to print 4 part invoices.
I ran self-written business software, partly in Basic-O9, partly in Assembly for 10+ years on it.
At the same time I had dialup access via an acoustically coupled modem to an IBM 360 running MTS. I used the Coco as a CRT terminal. It was fast enough for a slow typist, like me. Spent countless nights exploring the Colossal Cave.:) Those were the pre-internet, Compuserve and BBS days. Later I designed a small 1200 baud modem board with a pair of XR chips, and sold them to programmers who wanted to work (or play) from home. In 1986 I bought a Coco-3 and a multipack.
We downsized in 1999 and moved from a house to a small condo, because of that I had to give away all my computers and electronics parts to friends. Unfortunately they  all died or moved or both, and their family threw out all those treasures, which included my 3 Cocos, multipack, 5-1/4" floppy and SCSI drives, etc. (:  Luckily I kept most of my cartridges.
http://qdv.pw/eng/_photos/Computers/my%20coco-1.jpg 
http://qdv.pw/eng/_photos/Computers/coco-3c-big.jpg 

Recently I got nostalgic and bought a Coco-3 on eBay, got it running and trying to run NirtOS-9 on it. I really have to start from scratch, I seem to have forgotten everything I knew about the Coco. At the moment I'm trying to interface my Coco-3 with an LCD VGA monitor, using the GBS-8220 upscaler board. I need to fix the sync somehow, to make the output more stable. 
I read a post here from Gene, he used a 74LS04 to combine the Coco's HSync and VSync outputs then connected them via 1n914 diodes to a 1800 ohm resistor, and to the S pin of the GBS-8220 board. He wrote:  '(see the schematic)', but I can't see it. (:   
Any help regarding the Coco-3 to the GBS-8220 board interfacing would be much appreciated.

Kandur


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