[Coco] RiBBS

[Joel Ewy]

Ron Bihler wrote:
> Ok,
> So I have been sucked back into the Coco Community.  After doing some
> research I can't beleive the following is as strong as it is.  Lot's
> of passon and opionons make it very interesting.
>
That's one way to look at it!  :)
> So can someone update me, when I left the MM1 was being intoduced and
> only a few of the first editions where being released.  Much of my
> interest is in what happened to RiBBS, sorry to hear Warren Hrach has
> passed as he was such a big help to me.  The best testing I even had. 
> Funny I can still here the Phone calls, Ron ! you know that last
> update ! Not so good !  and then he would detail what was wrong.  He
> didn't have programming backround, but he was the best with the details.
>
> I had passed all the code to a person in Canada for an MM1 port, all
> these details are lost.  I did look at the coco about 8 years back,
> and the HD was dead and many of the floppies I used had so many errors
> that they would not work.  All my work was lost - in more way than one.
>
> Anyway, how long did the MM1 continue?
I assembled some memory and I/O boards for the MM/1 under contract from
its second owner, Blackhawk Enterprises.  This was in the time period of
1995-1999.  '97-2000 I was living in Elkhart, IN. and I got to go to a
couple of the ":Last Annual CoCo Fests" in Chicago.  There were problems
with the Version 2 I/O board, which means we didn't sell many of those. 
I put together maybe 6-10 memory boards during that period though.  I
still have bare memory boards, I/O boards (there may actually have been
a fix for the SCSI problem right at the end there), and parts to build a
few more if there was any need.  At one of those CoCo Fests, probably
1999 or 2000, I met David Graham of Blackhawk Enterprises in person for
the first time, and I haven't seen or heard from him since.

I still have my MM/1, and it works, as of a couple months ago.  I did a
little programming on it, mostly modifications of Andrzej Kotanski's
JPEG viewer program.  I added Joel Hegberg's clipboard library to it,
and wrote a program that would save an image from the clipboard as an
IFF.  So you could decode a JPEG, copy it into the clipboard, and then
save it as a much faster-loading CLUT IFF file.  I think I lost my
source code for the modifications I did to the JPEG viewer, but there
wasn't much to that.  I think I recently found my SAVEIFF code.  I had
even forgotten that I wrote it until I looked at the source file.  Duh. 
That's what 10 years will do to you.
> Does anyone have RiBBS code, might try to see it again on Emulation? 
> Most of the information was on Compuserve - how things have changed.
Did it ever get posted on ftp.rtsi.com?  That's still around.
> Can anyone recall the person involved with the MM1 doing the port -
> not sure if it even was finished.  He was located in Canada.
> How well does OS9 or Nitro9 what I gather the new update work under
> emulation?
>
6809 (Nitr)OS-9 works great on a CoCo emulator. 

To the best of my knowledge, there is no emulator that will run
OS-9/68K.  I tried to boot Personal OS-9 for the Atari ST on several
different Atari emulators, but no joy.  Even ARANYM, which runs
Debian-m68K won't boot it.  Bob Devries (I think) says that Atari OS-9
actually makes use of the Atari ROM code, which one would think would
insulate it further from the underlying hardware and make it even less
machine-dependent.  Maybe I'm just not using the proper ROM images.

Somebody has made a CD-i emulator for MS-Windows, but it only runs some
of the games (last time I tried it) and is cripple-ware.
> Anyway I am a bit older, might be smarter, but have way less time :)
>
Sounds all too familiar.
> Too bad the Hero 2000 was not a 6809 as that would make it more fun :)
>
The Hero, or the 6809? 

JCE

> Ron Bihler
>
>
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