[Coco] [Color Computer] Older site.

[Joel Ewy]

Dan Olson wrote:
>> Nice.  I finally found an A500 system with a hard drive and WB 2.0.
>> (And this one will boot from the HD.)  I just use it for playing around,
>> running DigiPaint, looking at pictures in HAM, and so on.
>>     
>
> I'm trying to play with mine a little more... actually I'm writing this on 
> the A500 right now, but that's about all the more use I give it.  I have 
> an A500 with 2.x kickstart but the keyboard is shot, I need to get it 
> going again.
>
>   
>> I've always wanted an Atari ST and never been able to find one for sale
>> locally.  There was a hobby store in Wichita that used a 520ST with some
>> kind of POS program at the register as recently as a couple years ago.
>>     
>
> Wish I would have known, we got rid of our first Atari ages ago but a year 
> or so back I had one that I finally ended up selling to a local re-seller 
> as I wasn't too interested in it.  I like the 8-bit series much better 
> hardware-wise and think the Amiga is a much neater 60k machine.
>   
I don't think I've ever even seen an 8-bit Atari in person more than
once or twice (except the game consoles of course).  I agree that the
Amiga has a high cool factor.
>> They may still.  I've played around with Debian M68k on old Macs (IICi,
>> Quadra 630s, 700s, 840AVs) but I've always wanted to run it on an Atari
>> or Amiga.  The hardware is better supported.  But Ataris and Amigas with
>> appropriate CPUs don't come cheap, whereas I have found tons of
>> appropriately equipped 68K Macs for free.  Maybe someday.  My Amigas
>> still have 68000s, though the 500 with the HD has a 16MHz 68000 accelerator.
>>     
>
> You know, I've thought about getting Linux going on a 68k, on one hand 
> it'd really be neat, but on the other hand, it wouldn't do anything 
> different than Linux on an old X86 machine.  Like you said, for the 
> Amiga/Atari world, the right hardware isn't cheap either.
>   
Well, 75% of it is just the fun of being able to say that I've installed
Linux on a 68k machine, and see the expression on people's face.  It's
also fun to pick out applications that run well on older hardware and
just see what those older machines can do.  I have an interest in
refurbishing and repurposing old PCs and giving them away to and through
some local nonprofits.  If a program runs reasonably well on a 33MHz
68040 with 64M of RAM, it should do just fine on a Pentium 166 with
128M.  But I also have a perverse interest in designing my own hardware
and hooking unapproved devices up to unsuspecting computers.  I would
someday like to learn to write (or at least modify) Linux device
drivers.  In doing so, one might accidentally come into contact with
assembly language.  If that ever became a necessity, I would much rather
be using a 68k machine.  Everything's already been done in the x86
world, except for stuff that I know is way beyond my capabilities.  But
there's at least the possibility that I could someday actually
contribute something useful to Linux/m68k.
I just find that the Macs are too closed.  The nice thing about the
Atari is that hardware-wise it is eminently hackable.  There are some
custom chips in there, but there's also a lot of off-the-shelf hardware
that one could dig into if one were so inclined.  Even the Amiga, which
is far better documented than the Mac, is a bit esoteric in comparison
with the Atari ST machines.
I think it would be interesting to use a 68k Mac as an X terminal for a
hacked Atari or Amiga running a stripped-down Debian with homebrew
interface cards wedged in.  Splitting up the display processing and the
application processing is a halfway decent way to get more mileage out
of old computers.

And an Atari ST would round out my collection nicely.
>> I've never been aware of one.  I just used DOS formatted disks with MSH
>> on the Amiga and PCDOS on the CoCo.  It wasn't the most convenient
>> arrangement, but it worked, and was slightly less irritating than
>> unhooking the modem from the Amiga, plugging a null-modem cable in, and
>> using sz/rz.
>>     
>
> I guess that'd work too.  I'm told the Amiga is a great platform for 
> writing unusual disk formats, but I guess in the CoCo's case, a PC should 
> have no trouble (because they didn't support single density mainly).
>
>  	Dan
>
>   
I suspect that most Amiga users who were likely to write a disk format
manipulator had come from Commodore 64 land and confused the CoCo with
the TRS-80 Model I, if they had heard of the CoCo at all.

JCE