[Coco] Shell i=/t1& slowdown

[Chester Patterson]

Wow! Cool. I want to do those neato things!
I do have a RS232 Pak and it worked superbly when I did shell i=/t2&, no
noticeable slowdown at the Coco. Bye bye bit-banger, for now.
A serial mouse would be great. Have the mouse, need another RS232 Pak
however.
IIRC t2 and t3 don't conflict with each other when used simultaneously (MPI
slot1 & slot2 respectively), correct?
Thanks.

-----Original Message-----
From: Gene Heskett [mailto:gene.heskett at verizon.net]

On Thursday 06 September 2007, Willard Goosey wrote:
>>Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2007 17:26:26 -0600
>>From: "Chester A Patterson" <vchester at setec-cr.com>
>>
>>Boot NOS9-030206 Xmode /t1 9600-8-N-1 and all is well. Could send stuff to
WinTerm (eg. list startup >/t1)
>
>I'm amazed that works at all.  Shows just how much Boisy & crew have
improved on OS-9.  With stock OS-9 that *might* *maybe* work at 300 baud.
>
>>Then I did shell i=/t1& and got a nice terminal on WinTerm. BUT the Coco
slowed down horribly!
>
>As others have already said, the bit-banger port uses a lot of CPU time.
>
>>Suggestions?
>
>Get a real serial port?  If you can't scrounge up a serial pak, there's
info floating around on how to install a daughterboard with a 6551 on the
CoCo's motherboard.
>
>If your main concern is file transfer, DriveWire may be the best way to go.
If you really want to use your CoCo from a terminal, you
>really do want a real serial port.  If you want to use your CoCo as a
terminal, it sounds like you've pretty much got it.
>
>(And if you set up multiple serial ports, you can put a serial mouse on one
of them.  The Hi-Res mouse adaptor is another bit of hardware
>that uses way too much CPU time.)

And the serial mouse is the single biggest improvement you can make to using
a mouse on the coco.  All other mice, due to the a/d method, may, or more
likely may not, hit the pixel you clicked on because the act of clicking
screws with the voltages enough to cause a 1 or 2 pixel miss.  The serial
mouse hits the pixel you click in 100.00000000000% of the time and makes
icon editing fun instead of frustrating.  I used mine with a piggy-back 2
channel
conversion in my rs-232 pack.  That mini aztec supply in it died a rather
smoky death even before the conversion, so mine now gets all its power from
the mpi.  No more hot 232 pack here.

As for the driver for the mouse, that was part of a cc3io conversion and I
don't believe that code survived past about 1.17 of nitros9, a decade or
longer ago.

Likewise the incorporation of the co80 code so a 2nd monitor could be used
also seems to have fallen by the wayside.  Dennis Skala did that as 3
modules
originally a very long time back up the log, and I merged the main code so
only 2 extra descriptor modules were needed, but that code was excised also.

I used to have lots of fun impressing the visiting windows frogs with my
dual monitor setup and other toys they didn't have. :)