[Coco] Re: Coco Digest, Vol 12, Issue 12

[Andrew]

Thanks to all for the welcomes!

I have a couple of questions I am hoping someone here may be able to 
help me out with:

First off, regarding floppy drives - as noted, I have a dead original 
FD-501 drive (the actual drive - which I don't have handy - I have 
replaced it with a newer drive, and everything works - controller, power 
supply, etc - I just want to try to fix my original black-faceplate drive).

Mr. Gault - you mentioned to Diego to use a VOM, lubricate rails, check 
and set RPM, etc - how do you do all of this?

I mean, I know how to use a voltmeter, but where are the testpoints, and 
what should I be seeing? Furthermore, how do I check and set the RPM of 
the drive? Interestingly, the drive has a "strobe" pattern on the drive 
motor flywheel - marked 50 and 60 Hz - I imagine for some special kind 
of timing light or something? How do I do this? What about head 
cleaning, and alignment, etc? I remember back in the day there were 
"disk drive alignment floppies" and other such "kits" - do these still 
exist in some manner?

Second question: I am running David Keil's CoCo 2 emulator on a P133 DOS 
box (running Caldera OpenDOS currently) to play around with "Gates of 
Delerium" - it isn't powerful enough to run MESS 0.61b. This emulator 
doesn't have screen capture, so I have been playing around with a couple 
of screen grabber TSR programs. So far, both manage to grab the screen, 
but when I go to view the captures (in one, it can convert to a BMP, the 
other can convert to GIF), using GQView on my Linux box - the colors are 
incorrect. Both screen capture utilities display the same issue, so I 
don't think it is the capture util. I figure it could be the emulator, 
or the viewer - but I don't think it is the viewer because everything 
else I view with it has looked fine in the past. Only these capture 
images look wrong. Should I go ahead and rebuild the machine to run MESS 
(not what I really want to do) in order to capture the images properly, 
or is there something else I can try?

Thank you!

Andrew L. Ayers