[Coco] CoCo Progression...

[RJRTTY at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/25/04 12:52:57 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
theother_bob at yahoo.com writes:

<< And for the record, if I only had the one CoCo, I probably would NOT have
 repacked it. I have 5 CoCo3's: two originals, one for parts, one repacked and
 one made portable  >>

     That is pretty much my situation.  I have 5 or 6 coco3's.  Some work
and some don't, used for parts.  The main reason I did a repack of
the coco3 was a practical one.   Convienance.  I have 4 floppy drives
(2  5 1/4" DSDD and 2  3 1/2"  DSDD) 1 hard disk and a port for a scsi Zip
drive mounted on that box.  Add in joystick, printer and video cables and the
required power cables, can you imagine the mess I would  have if it were
all spread out the conventional way?  The PC box and it's power supply
let me have a neat and clean system that I can transport and configure
any way I want. If I need a 5 1/4" drive as drive A and a 3 1/2" as drive B,
I just open the side of the box and hook up the cabling accordingly.
 I have a system where I can write or test software in an easily
managed box. Another thing I tried to achieved when I did the repack
was to perform no irreversable modifications to the motherboard and
no desoldering.  I made cables for the joystick,serial, cassette and
video ports that plugged into these ports and brought the connections out
to panel mount sockets on the box. My goal was to have a repack
machine I could return to its original state if I wanted.  The only
modification I had to make to the motherboard was to cut in half 
the heat sink for the transistor on the power supply so it would fit in
the case, and like I said I have some nonworking coco3's for parts
like that if I need them.


Roy