[Coco] TC-9

[L. Curtis Boyle]

On Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:56:27 -0600, Mark Marlette <mark at cloud9tech.com>  
wrote:

> Curtis,
>
> I don't recall what mods I made to your TC-9 but the design was terrible.
>
> After I got done mod'ing your machine it was running way better. That  
> was a long time ago and don't recall the details. I have them written  
> down somewhere in my files.
>
> The Kbus crap that was in there or whatever they called it was a lot of  
> the problem. Never was a Puppo keyboard fan either.... Sorry.
I never had a Puppo keyboard adaptor either... I hated the way that XT  
keyboards could only toggle the light settings, but had no idea if they  
were on or not in the first place (if you had a crash and rebooted, your  
lights could be backwards to what they were supposed to be). I just  
mentioned it because that ist he product that Bob was most associated with.
    The K-Bus was the 16 bit bus system that was supposed to allow a  
68000/68020/68030, and other 16 bit cards, to interface with the TC-9  
(which would become a fancy I/O card with it's own CPU, 512K or 1MB of  
RAM, etc., controlled by the 680x0 running OS-9 68K. While some IRQ lines  
were tied into spots to help do that, I never saw such a configuration  
running, and never had any of the cards (or K-Bus itself). It was a good  
idea (use the TC-9 portion as it's own, improved Coco 3 clone, and then  
use it as either a co-processing I/O card with a 680x0 later, or allow  
OS-9K to have multiple TC-9's running as separate mini computers all under  
the OSK roof), but would have required a lot of development. Bill & I had  
to pay full retail for our TC-9's; as developers, we weren't given any  
discounts. We did get the original source code for the TC-9 specific  
modules, and accidentally got a few pieces of level 2 upgrade (without  
docs, and years before the rest of it came out), but event that was  
incomplete (and not supposed to be there; Bruce sheepishly admitted that  
he had forgotten that his development system included the Level 2 upgrade  
(he was one of the developers), and when he made the TC-9 boot disks for  
distribution, several upgrade modules went with it).
>
> Your Xtal mod all you had to do is adjust the horz. osc. on the monitor  
> to get it to lock. Some monitors would not shift that far.
My Magnavox did, but barely. I blew a cap out of it trying to push it  
further (computer worked fine, monitor blew up).
>
> Still all a GREAT piece of history to have. :)

Yes. Eventually, I hope to try and fire it up again, and see if it still  
works.
>
> Mark
>
>
> Quoting "L. Curtis Boyle" <curtisboyle at sasktel.net>:
>
>> On Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:23:19 -0600, Frank Swygert <farna at att.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I recall the TC-9 using the GIME. The reason was for 100% OS-9  Level  
>>> II compatibility, and there was hope for some DECB 2.1  compatibility  
>>> (CoCo 3 only). The later never occurred, too many  hardware  
>>> differences I think. Easy enough to tweak an OS-9 driver  for minor  
>>> differences, DECB was harder to patch.
>> Yes, it used the GIME, and a standard 28.xx MHz clock (I overclocked
>> mine with a 32MHz crystal). If you bought the TC-9 prepackaged (like
>> Bill Nobel & did), it came with a cable that switched the weird
>> inverted connector to a standard cartridge port connector (your choice
>> if you got a single or Y cable one, but if you were using the Y cable,
>> you had to make sure that you're floppy controller was fully decoded).
>> I ran mine with the stock Tandy floppy controller and a B&B hard drive
>> (60MB) for years. Ran it with the 1MB RAM daughter board as well. Bill
>> & I completely redid the keyboard/mouse/sound driver (TC9IO, which
>> replaced CC3IO), from the original version by Bruce Isted. We added
>> support for Numlock/Caps lock controllable by each window (instead of
>> system wide), 8 bit sound support, and a bunch of keyboard updates,
>> from what I remember.
>>     The RSDOS first version ROM (a replacement, larger ROM image than
>> the original version it shipped with) was done, and was written by
>> Chris Burke, but I could never get it running stably on my system
>> (whether this was due to the overclock or not, I never did dig in deep
>> enough to find out). We did some minor tweaks to the Serial port driver
>> (dual port 6552, capable of up to 38400), but we did modify the mouse
>> routines somewhat (3 button support was started for Logitech mice, I
>> believe). It did boot a few times enough for me to type in a small
>> BASIC program, but it always crash on me. There was also boot rom
>> versions that booted from the Eliminator or B&B hard drive systems, as
>> well as the floppy. I did mine off of floppy because of development
>> (always had a stable floppy complete boot to reboot from is something
>> went horribly wrong).
>>
>>>
>>> There's an interview with Frank Hogg and I think a pic of a TC-9 in  
>>>  "Tandy's Little Wonder", downloadable from the maltedmedia site   
>>> (ftp://maltedmedia.com/coco/Farna/Tandy's%20Little%20Wonder/Cocobook-TLW2.pdf).  
>>> I recorded a conversation with Frank Hogg about his CoCo involvement  
>>> and wrote the article from that interview tape. Wish I still had the  
>>> original  cassette!
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --L. Curtis Boyle
>>
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>
>
>
>
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-- 
L. Curtis Boyle