[Coco] [Color Computer] Older site.

[Dan Olson]

> Nice.  I finally found an A500 system with a hard drive and WB 2.0.
> (And this one will boot from the HD.)  I just use it for playing around,
> running DigiPaint, looking at pictures in HAM, and so on.

I'm trying to play with mine a little more... actually I'm writing this on 
the A500 right now, but that's about all the more use I give it.  I have 
an A500 with 2.x kickstart but the keyboard is shot, I need to get it 
going again.

> I've always wanted an Atari ST and never been able to find one for sale
> locally.  There was a hobby store in Wichita that used a 520ST with some
> kind of POS program at the register as recently as a couple years ago.

Wish I would have known, we got rid of our first Atari ages ago but a year 
or so back I had one that I finally ended up selling to a local re-seller 
as I wasn't too interested in it.  I like the 8-bit series much better 
hardware-wise and think the Amiga is a much neater 60k machine.

> They may still.  I've played around with Debian M68k on old Macs (IICi,
> Quadra 630s, 700s, 840AVs) but I've always wanted to run it on an Atari
> or Amiga.  The hardware is better supported.  But Ataris and Amigas with
> appropriate CPUs don't come cheap, whereas I have found tons of
> appropriately equipped 68K Macs for free.  Maybe someday.  My Amigas
> still have 68000s, though the 500 with the HD has a 16MHz 68000 accelerator.

You know, I've thought about getting Linux going on a 68k, on one hand 
it'd really be neat, but on the other hand, it wouldn't do anything 
different than Linux on an old X86 machine.  Like you said, for the 
Amiga/Atari world, the right hardware isn't cheap either.

> I've never been aware of one.  I just used DOS formatted disks with MSH
> on the Amiga and PCDOS on the CoCo.  It wasn't the most convenient
> arrangement, but it worked, and was slightly less irritating than
> unhooking the modem from the Amiga, plugging a null-modem cable in, and
> using sz/rz.

I guess that'd work too.  I'm told the Amiga is a great platform for 
writing unusual disk formats, but I guess in the CoCo's case, a PC should 
have no trouble (because they didn't support single density mainly).

 	Dan