[Coco] Back to the COCO

[Bill Gunshannon]

I have finally had the chance to get back to my COCO's
again.  I joined the mailing list again but haven't got
the patience to wait for it to get approved.  :-)

Why, you say?  Because After setting up a couple of COCO's
that worked fine the last time I had them out, I find that
all of them have problems.  Right now I have a COCO3 and a
COCO2 on the desk.  I have tried two different floppy controllers,
one of the originals and FD 502.  I have tried them with
DECB, HDB-DOS and NitrOS9.  I have tried 2 real COCO drive
boxes (2 thinline floppies horizontally  mounted), one original
floppy (vertical mount, no built in cable) and a TEAC 55GFR
that I have used successfully on many old systems.  Oh yeah,
I even tried a 720K 3.5" drive.  Nothing.  Can't get a DIR
from anything.  Can't DSKINI anything.  I also have Glenside
IDE cards.  Can't get them to DSKINI either.  Have a Cloud9
SCSI.  Same story. I have tried all the normal stuff (cleaning
edge connectors, multiple different cables) and nothing seems
to work.  Well, except Drivewire.  But that only seems to work
from the COCO3.  All attempts from the COCO2 get "protocol errors"
in the log.

Any suggestions?

Just as a point of reference, these are not the only old systems
the seem to have failed all on their own over time while sitting
on the shelf.  I also have TRS80 Model 3 and 4 systems and all
of my FRE-HD modules seem to have stopped working after sitting
on the shelf for a couple years. :-(

Looking forward to getting this stuff going as I have a couple
of COCO projects others my also find interesting if I can make
them work again.


bill