[Coco] IT"S ALIVE!!!

[Bill Pierce]

Wow.... It finally came back to life!
To fill in the details, a couple of months before fest time this year, my Coco 3 got bumped and the keyboard stopped working. I have an Eagle AT Keyboard interface instlled and no backup Coco 3 keyboard. The ribbon connector on the interface has "pins" that slide into the ribbon socket. Very easily dislodged. I figured this was the problem (it's happened before) so I proceeded to reset the ribbon connector. In doing so, I noticed the rom chip on the keyboard interface was a little dusty so I decided to clean it while I had the computer open. I took out the chip (carefully) and proceeded to clean it with some alcohol and qtip when the bottom half of one of the pins fell off. Of course now it would not work at all. The rom in the interface on the Eagle runs a "Boot" program on startup that allows you to select 5 different keyboard configurations, OS-9 L1 keys, OS-9 L2 keys, Coco 3 BASIC keys, OS-9 RUN"*" (for OS-9 L1 1.0) and Basic RUN"*" for old games. Without the rom, this would not come up and there are no keys. I've had no Coco 3 since then.

After thinking about this the past few months.... I had decided I would one day get brave enough to try to solder an extension on the rom pin... tricky I know. So today it finally got to me. I had to have my Coco 3 running. I opened the case and procedded to tinker. The first thing that happened was the wire going from board one to board 2 (power?) of my Disto 1 meg upgrade had come loose from the board. I proceeded to solder it back in place. With that success I got brave and pulled the keyboard rom. I looked around trying to find something to extend the broken pin with when I spied something... well... different. I cut of a very short length of guitar string (3rd, G-string). I then reseated the rom, stuck the piece of g-string down into the socket and let it spring back and hit the broken pin. Perfect. For those of you who don't know, guitar strings are nickle/steel high tinsel spring wire. Piano wire to be exact. Very springy... I decided hmmmm... it's making good contact without solder... let's see if it fires up. I hit the power strip that fires up the Disk, MPI, Coco3 and CM-8 and when the monitor warmed up.... The Coco 3 was listing the Keyboard choices!!!! IT'S ALIVE!!! After 10 seconds, it will autoboot OS-9 L2 (in my case, DOS is set to load HDBDOS for DW), and the disk started spinning.... and spinning... then I/O ERROR!
My drive's been setting inactive so long I've got to go through and clean all the MPI, Controller, and drive contacts as well as the heads.
But the Coco LIVES, I can load HDBDOS from cassette if the drive won't load so I'll have DW4 back rolling by tomorrow.
I know this is a temp fix, and I probably need to solder that wire.... but it "just works" and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
And untill I boot Nitros9, I don't know if the 1-meg is working. I may have to run the 1-meg memory test to make sure it's working right.
I still need to get another Coco 3 as this one has seen better days and one bump sends it off into the wild green yonder... I don't think the  1 meg upgrade will last much longer and I have no idea how to reverse engineer it back to 512k

Sooo.... I guess I have the only Coco wearing a G-String :-)

Bill Pierce
My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Co-Webmaster of The TRS-80 Color Computer Archive
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E-Mail: ooogalapasooo at aol.com