[Coco] Re: Purchase of Cloud-9 Superboard deposit

[RJRTTY at aol.com]

Torsten and everybody,


      Yes.   I should have posted earlier.     I am currently
assembling the beta test board I will be sending you.    I
have been experimenting with a different varactor
diode and adjustable coil combination for the
main oscillator.   I have the board working fairly good
now but I wanted to make it good enough for actuall
everyday use on all monitor types before I send it to
you.      I found an appropiate  diode about a week
ago on the net.    The main problem I had using it
was it's size.    This thing is so small an ant coulld
pick it up and take off with it!     I had to use my
binocular microscope to mount it on a surface
mount chip carrierr board before I could use it.
The reason I didn't use a through the hole component
was that they dont make them.   Through hole
components are dissapearing in favor of small surface
mount components because thier use results in
lower assembly costs for manufactures.   Anyway,
I successfully mounted it and it made a big
difference in performance and noise suppresion in
the final image.     So,  it wont be long before I send it out
to you.  (Maybe two weeks at most,  probably sooner).

          I have also got the monitor cable based I2C com
link between the coco3 and the Averlogic chips working
reliably.      It makes such a difference eliminating the
cassette port cable to the "clean and simple" look of
the converter.    So, you did good.    I wish I had
thought of it :)  

           I have the software to program the video chips
ready for use.     There was a minor set back there
because the emulator I was using ( David Kiel's) ate
it half way through development and I had to start
over.     His coco3 emulator MUST be set for double
speed operation or else disk access is unreliable.
I knew this but I didn't notice that when you do a
reset it goes back to single speed operation.  :((

        I was going to post this soon anyway but I
wanted to make a downloadable line diagram of
the new converter's internal systems to present
for public comment first.    I will do that soon.
I will say for now I have settled on the controller
I plan to use.     I managed to implement the
I2C protocol in under 500 bytes of machine code
on the coco3.    The 2 kbytes of code space
in the controller should be more than enough
to do everything we need it to do.

Roy