[Coco] CoCo Stuff I've created.

[John Eric]

Since recently getting involved in the coco I have spent many hours developing some products and acquiring parts and things.

Some of what I am working on:

*An 8-Slot Multi-Pak replacement. This was done as two boards - a plug in buffer cart and a slot select 8 slot card that connects to the buffer cart with a short 40 wire ribbon. I have ordered some initial prototype PCB's for the buffer cart from PCB Pool. Once it is completely debugged (actually it should be fully functional), I will layout and order the slot board prototypes. Eventually, If I put it into production, I will probably use a CPLD to house all of the circuitry. I feel very good about the outcome of this project and once completed, I will make the plans available as a free download. If I can get say 7 to 10 orders, I'll produce this thing, but I need to see what the cost is going to be before I really consider this. Also, it uses an ATX power supply to power the 8-Slot board. I'll put up a webpage soon with the details.

*A flexible EPROM cartridge. This was originally designed as simply a cartridge that you could plug say an RS-232 Pak into and disable it's internal rom without need of taking apart the rs-232 pak - I figured this would be useful for folks not wanting to damage the labels on their vintage equipment. This has, however, evolved into a cartridge that can accept a 2764, 27128 or 27256 Eprom. Jumpers allow setting the device to disable the ROM of any cartridge plugged into this board, allows this boards eprom to replace the rom of any cart plugged into it, allows any cart plugged into it to appear to be completely romless, allows disabling of cart autostart and various other minor features. I'm proud of this one.

*Dual RS-232 Pak that is mapped to the addresses of the Deluxe RS-232 Pak and the DC-Modem Pak - this allows it to function with pretty much any available CoCo software. Schematics are done, but I've not laid out the PCB yet.

*Floppy Disk Controller - this, I haven't designed yet. I have stocked up on WD1773 and MB8877 Fujitsu Floppy Controller I.C.'s, but I've not yet decided on what features to include or which chipset to use. I am considering a controller that has integrated parallel, serial and RTC at the least, and will probably make them Disto compatible since the drivers already exist. Anyone having suggestions for this controller, send them my way. I have enough components on hand to produce a 25 board run, but it's more likely that I'll only do ten of them.

*26-3124 Satellite Board - I have recreated the satellite board that upgrades the 26-3124 MPI for the CoCo 3. I modified Radio Shacks Design by including a jumper for CoCo 1/2 or CoCo 3 selection. It is installed the same way as the original Radio Shack board. I plan to make at least 25 of these available if there is sufficient interest.

*I am working on a plethora of minor projects. All of this mainly as a distraction from the daily grind, and I'm enjoying it. Anyone interested in seeing any of the schematics and board layouts, contact me offlist and I'll email them to you as an attachment, as soon as I get all of the PCB Layouts done.

Some stuff I have stocked up on include the WD1773, MB8877 and HD63B09E and I can make some of these available to those interested. I would like to hear from anyone interested in any of my projects, and really would appreciate suggestions for hardware projects.

Does anyone have the mapping info of any of the MIDI cards that were available for the CoCo? I would like to design a single card that would be compatible with all of the CoCo MIDI cards that may have existed. These appear to have been little more than a memory decode circuit for a 6850 ACIA, a clocking circuit and an opto-isolator. I am certainly going to develop one of these. May even include the Orchestra 90 and Stereo Composer along with any other music hardware that I can find info on - it could be the "ultimate" CoCo Sound Card.

 Hopefully, there will be some interest in my projects - anyone who would like to help debug the schematics as I design them are welcome to join my "design" team :) I do make lots of mistakes and I'm hoping that by making my work available, others can detect errors and help me debug the products.

I am not doing this for profit. It would actually be difficult to just break even on any of this, but that's what I am shooting for.

Send me ideas and suggestions...please.

Thanks to all - Jeric