[Coco] TC-9

[Joel Ewy]

Chuck Youse wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 10:06 -0500, Joel Ewy wrote:
>   
>> I have a TC-9, Chuck.  I have to say I've never been able to put it to
>> very good use.  It (mine at least) was always a bit flaky in operation. 
>> One of the main problems I had with it was that I could never get a hard
>> drive hooked up to it.  For some reason, it was incompatible with the
>> Disto SCII, which I already had.  So no no-halt floppy, and no 4-in-1
>> for RTC and SCSI.  Before I got that figured out, I bought an MM/1, and
>> the Tomcat sat mostly unused.
>>     
>
> Man, I'm a tad bit jealous - I want! I want!  :)  And btw, building a
> hard-drive interface for the thing would mostly likely be a piece of
> cake.. it doesn't get much easier than an IDE interface.
>
>   
I have a Glenside IDE interface that I have sometimes thought of trying.
> Does it have any custom chips on it that you're aware of?  One big
> problem with making a Coco 3 clone is the GIME.  If the TC-9 did most of
> the naughty in PAL/GALs and discrete logic, then I might try to
> resurrect it..  The Coco 3 is a nice machine, but for 'serious' work it
> has some limitations, the poor keyboard, case, RS-DOS/Coco2
> compatibility stuff ...
>   
It uses a GIME, some TTL chips, and the DAT board from a Disto 1M
upgrade.  A cursory glance reveals no PALs or GALs.
> My ideal NitrOS-9 machine would have no bells and whistles on-board, and
> just lots of expansion slots.  I'm debating using a 63C09 and creating a
> custom MMU (which would cause problems with NitrOS-9, because I'd use a
> simpler mechanism than the GIME) or putting these handfuls 68008s or
> 68000/68010s to use and making NitrOS/68000.. I'm leaning towards the
> latter, if only because that eliminates the need for a DAT, and OS-9
> lost a lot of its elegance when the MMU was introduced (Level 1 -> 2).
>
> But if I had schematics for a TC-9, well then .. I might steal the
> design.. wonder if Mr. Puppo would mind.
>
>   
I also have a couple of Motorola 6809 (not 6809E) EXORBUS boards, which
are essentially SBCs that can be plugged into a bus to hook up to other
stuff.  I haven't done much with them yet, but I have looked into what
it would take to run OS-9 from ROMs.  They have a bunch of sockets that
can be jumpered to accept (EP)ROMs of various capacities or SRAM chips. 
No MMU or DRAM controller, but those things could be added on an
external board.  I do have full schematics for these boards in the
Motorola docs.  I told somebody on this list (Willard Goosey?) that I
would scan the docs sometime.  I haven't done it yet, but haven't
forgotten either.  So maybe it's time to do a bunch of scanning...

JCE
> C.
>
>
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