[Coco] some questions and thoughts..... and a return to being a COCO nut... <G>
Salvador Garcia
ssalvadorgarcia at netscape.net
Thu Jun 19 20:28:12 EDT 2014
Hi all, sorry for the blank posts. My email is blocked at work and the only way I can reply is by using my BlackBerry Bold, but I still have not figured out the issue as to why it send a blank message. I will continue testing, so apologies in advanced if future posts are blank.
6. Is there anywhere that describes the drive-wire protocol?
http://www.frontiernet.net/~mmarlette/Cloud-9/Support/DriveWire%203%20Specification.pdf
Regards, Salvador
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Ahrendt <chrisahrendt at bellsouth.net>
To: coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Thu, Jun 19, 2014 1:08 pm
Subject: [Coco] some questions and thoughts..... and a return to being a COCO nut... <G>
I am getting back into the COCO... my original coco was a battleship
grey 64MB coco 1 with 2 disk drives and a 300 baud modem.
I should be receiving my coco 2 with 64MB and a FD-500 next week
sometime. I have ordered the parts to do the drive wire cable.
I was very active in the coco scene in the Washington DC area and ended
up stopping when I moved back to Germany...
Now with all of that said... here comes the old timer / newbie questions...
I have been going through all of the archives on the various magazines
(Rainbow, Hot Coco, etc).
The model I am getting is:
26-3127B which I read has the newer video chip that has lower case.
The Floppy is a
26-3129 FD500
I won't know if the drive has one or two drives in it till I get it. My
thought is to replace the drive(s) if they are SSDD with a DS/DD drive
and then a 720k 31/2" drive in the second bay.
So here are the questions:
1. How do I turn on and keep the lower case on if indeed this model has
the video chip with the lower case ability.
2. IF I want to use the drives as DS/DD drives what needs to be done. I
have read the drive tutorial and it is a bit confusing to me being an
old timer. It used to be you had to have a new ROM burned or a non-Tandy
drive controller.
3. One of the things I do remember liking was a friends setup (think it
was a J&D) had the ability to hit the up arrow and repeat and edit the
last command much like I do on Linux. and he was able to address the
drives as single or double sided... so would this just be a matter of
getting the right prom and cable?
4. I have read that the FD500's have issues with heat... is there
anything that can be done to help that? any instructions?
5. Is there a way to set up the Coco so that I can used the drive wire
and the floppy drives at the same time? IE use drive-wire as my gateway
for printing / drives etc...
6. Is there anywhere that describes the drive-wire protocol?
I was looking at the archives here and one of the discussions was around
a network controller for the Coco's why not instead use a Arduino with
either a hard wire Ethernet or WiFi? I assume that there is some sort of
handshake between the server and client that goes on...
It would be real easy to pull a pin high from the arduino to let the
coco know that a packet has been received.
The limiting factor would be the bit banger if you used that .. It may
be faster to interface via the cart and have a splitter one going to the
disk
controller and the other to the arduino connector. The IP stack is
built into the arduino so you would just need to write a simple arduino
routine to talk to the drive wire client.
If this works the drive-wire server could use the IP connection it
already has to talk to the client. Question is does the server support
multiple connections?
7. I have seen several projects in the older coco's for 128k upgrade
projects... is this worth it or should I just bite the bullet and buy a
coco 3 for that?
8. If I install a board which does the inverted (light green on black (I
prefer that)) would the characters still be lower case?
9. I have read also about the Hitachi upgrade to the coco... what would
it buy me on a coco 2 or a coco 3? I am going to be using it for OS-9
and some games.
10. If I do the composite color mod and connected it up to a composite
input on a LCD monitor would I get the artifact colors still?
11. Multi-pack.... I am thinking of getting one of these but have heard
there is an issue with the PAL and the coco 3.
There is a version A of the Multi-pack that works with the coco
3, does it work with coco 2's?
I get the pal fix from coco3.com and install the fix is it a
one way trip and no longer useable by the coco 2?
12. Will an X-pad (the big grey slate) work with either coco2 / 3 if its
used through the Multi-pack?
13. Is there anyone out there that would burn a eprom for a disk
controller to add the HDB-Dos to the controller... or is it just as easy
to boot off disk?
14. what are some of the gotchas that I need to check with a vintage coco?
15. What are some of the things I should probably buy/build/ find?
16. Real Time clock... there was some talk of a plug in compatible
(basically put it under the DOS prom) real time clock... does anyone
have a instructable on this?
17. Is it worth building a high res joystick adapter to use or is it
just limited to coco max use?
I am sure I will have more questions once she gets here.. thanks
everyone....
Chris
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