[Coco] New CoCo'er, Some Q's and looking for hardware

[Barry Nelson]

For a video adapter you could also try this: https://hackaday.io/project/7366-coco-3-rgb-to-scart-to-hdmi-cable

VIDEO ADAPTER DESCRIPTION
This project will describe how to create a SCART video cable for a Tandy Color Computer 3. SCART is a European video interface standard. In my case I use a SCART to HDMI interface to allow my Color Computer 3 to display on my modern wide screen TV.

Another good item to pickup is a CoCo SDC: http://cocosdc.blogspot.com
I believe it can be obtained from: Zippster <zippster278 at gmail.com>

This is VCC, is very nice CoCo 3 emulator: https://github.com/VCCE/VCC/releases
This is a virtual hard disk image for VCC: http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Virtual%20Hard%20Drives/NitrOS-9%20L2%20V3.3.0/ 

This site also has a ton of other software and documentation for the Color Computer: http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/

Welcome to the list and good luck with your CoCo 3. When you get 512k of ram, try out the Donkey Kong port that was recently done, it's pretty awesome. If you have any young relatives, show them the machine when you get it setup, they should enjoy it, and they'll learn something about computer history.

> admin at kd8cgo.com admin at kd8cgo.com 
> Wed Feb 24 15:09:00 EST 2016
> 
> Hello All,
> 
> I'm a proud owner of a never-used CoCo3 that I received from a friend in 
> the mid 90's - I had never even heard of a CoCo up to that point.  I had 
> some minor experience with a C64, and started out on a XT clone when I 
> was a kid.  Never used the CoCo myself either, as I had no software for 
> it.  I just plugged it into a TV to test it, ran a few "Hello, World!" 
> programs I keyed in and that was it.  Anyway, I was going through the 
> basement cleaning and stumbled across it this week.
> 
> I have no hardware or cartridges for it, so I assumed it was destined 
> for the scrap heap along with a lot of my other old PC junk.  Did a 
> quick search and found a *very* surprising level of interest and support 
> for these here on the list archives and elsewhere.  I started tinkering 
> with it, got Drivewire4 fired up on a old laptop with a serial port, and 
> loaded the first program to ever grace this CoCo - HDB-DOS and then 
> NitrOS9.  I can't read the screen when booted into NitrOS9, so that will 
> have to wait, but I have been working through the Tandy Color Extended 
> Basic book in HDB-DOS so I can save my .BAS files for later.
> 
> I'd like to do the Cloud-9 memory upgrade to 512K and get some proper 
> cables to replace these cobbled together jumpers I made to load the .WAV 
> file and the serial port cable. It seems like they do not have a order 
> shopping cart though, just an email address, is that normal?  I thought 
> they might be out of business or closed for now, given the lack of a 
> normal purchasing order form.
> 
> I am also looking for some sort of VGA monitor adapter, I've found some 
> references to a Roy Justus adapter, there is some PCB available on 
> Amazon that says it will convert RGB, and also I found another 15Khz one 
> on http://www.ambery.com/rgbcgatovgac.html that looks like it could be 
> coaxed into working.  I also found some mention of a run of RGB2VGA 
> boards that will hook up to something called a DE0 Nano in the archives 
> here on pair.net, but I didn't find out much about that or the Roy 
> Justus thing, or if you can even get them anywhere.  Advice here 
> appreciated.
> 
> Basically I'd like to get this up and running and be able to do some 
> BASIC programming, experiment with the NitrOS9 software, maybe load a 
> few ROMs.  I'm trying to figure out how to convert a normal image file 
> JPG/GIF/PNG/BMP into something I can use in a BASIC program on the 
> system, but so far no luck solving that problem.  I might be able to use 
> NitrOS9 if I could figure out how to change the screen colors - I can 
> (barely) read the screen on WIDTH 80 if I use PALETTE 0,0:PALETTE 8,16 
> in HDB-DOS or Color Basic.  Eventually it would be cool to connect the 
> CoCo to the outside world, but I think I'll need NitrOS9 running with 
> DW4 for that.  Sounds like BASIC09 might have some advantages over Color 
> Basic, too...
> 
> Sorry for the long first post & TIA!
> 
> --John, kd8cgo