[Coco] TC-9

[Chuck Youse]

On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 10:06 -0500, Joel Ewy wrote:
> I have a TC-9, Chuck.  I have to say I've never been able to put it to
> very good use.  It (mine at least) was always a bit flaky in operation. 
> One of the main problems I had with it was that I could never get a hard
> drive hooked up to it.  For some reason, it was incompatible with the
> Disto SCII, which I already had.  So no no-halt floppy, and no 4-in-1
> for RTC and SCSI.  Before I got that figured out, I bought an MM/1, and
> the Tomcat sat mostly unused.

Man, I'm a tad bit jealous - I want! I want!  :)  And btw, building a
hard-drive interface for the thing would mostly likely be a piece of
cake.. it doesn't get much easier than an IDE interface.

Does it have any custom chips on it that you're aware of?  One big
problem with making a Coco 3 clone is the GIME.  If the TC-9 did most of
the naughty in PAL/GALs and discrete logic, then I might try to
resurrect it..  The Coco 3 is a nice machine, but for 'serious' work it
has some limitations, the poor keyboard, case, RS-DOS/Coco2
compatibility stuff ...

My ideal NitrOS-9 machine would have no bells and whistles on-board, and
just lots of expansion slots.  I'm debating using a 63C09 and creating a
custom MMU (which would cause problems with NitrOS-9, because I'd use a
simpler mechanism than the GIME) or putting these handfuls 68008s or
68000/68010s to use and making NitrOS/68000.. I'm leaning towards the
latter, if only because that eliminates the need for a DAT, and OS-9
lost a lot of its elegance when the MMU was introduced (Level 1 -> 2).

But if I had schematics for a TC-9, well then .. I might steal the
design.. wonder if Mr. Puppo would mind.

C.