[Coco] Making the rounds: a home made 6809 portable

[farna at amc-mag.com]

Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 10:42:07 +0900
 From: Joel Rees

Sounds cool. No pics?

On Sun, Feb 7, 2021 at 1:58 AM Francis Swygert <farna at att.net> wrote:


     Reminds me very much of the CoCo3 I repackaged into a defunct 
KayproII case. Used it at several Chicago CoCoFests in the 90s for 
making copies of discs. The Kaypro monitor wasn't usable since it wasn't 
composite. I replaced it with a surplus open frame amber composite 
monitor of the same size from a mail order electronics surplus company. 
Used the CoCo3 keyboard with a ribbon cable and RS232 connector on 
front. Had two 5.25" double sided and one 720K 3.5" floppy. Had intended 
to use a short cable and put a Disto controller with a 4-n-1 at some 
point, but never did. The CoCo3 board JUST FIT with a shorty disc 
controller plugged in.

  -------------------------------------------

Alas, no pics handy! You might find one in Allen Huffman's CoCoFest 
archives, would be in the mid to late 90s, FARNA Systems booth.
My main CoCo3 was repackaged in a Tandy 2000 case with a pair of double 
sided 5.25" floppies (360K -- ditched the 1.2MB originals) and a 3.5" 
floppy that I cut a hole for near the center of the case. Also had a 
Disto no-halt floppy controller with 4-N-1 (got it on sale from Tony 
himself -- the parallel port wasn't working, bad trace or something) 
with a small SCSI hard drive, I think a 40MB. I never really got into 
OS-9, and hardly used the hard drive. I ended up selling both around 
98-99 as I had stopped using them, not too long after I stopped 
publishing "the world of 68' micros". Up to that point I'd been using my 
main one for e-mail, editing, and of course checking out programs sent 
in for the magazine. Used it with Delphi for years, but when they 
started going down hill as the Internet exploded, and e-mail started to 
contain so much graphics instead of plain text, it became harder to use 
the CoCo for e-mail. All magazine production was done on a PC clone 
using PageMaker 4 and a laser printer. I considered keeping at least one 
of them, but felt that someone still interested in giving a fair price 
for them (don't recall what they sold for) would get some more use and 
enjoyment out of them instead of languishing in a closet for years. I 
sometimes wish I hadn't, but the reality is I might pull it out and play 
a game or two on it once every now and then, and an emulator on my PC is 
just as good for that. I don't even have an emulator installed since I 
upgraded this past Christmas, hadn't messed with anything for a few 
years before...   Wish I remembered or thought to record who bought 
those things! I wonder if they are still around??