[Coco] I love VCC + wish list

[Frank Swygert]

There should be a way to use the PC RS-232 port -- on those that still have them. Maybe support for a PCI card w/RS-232? Supporting a USB to RS-232 adapter might be tough. 

It would be difficult to output to a PDF file. It shouldn't be difficult, however, to output to a simple ASCII text file. I think CoCo printers (or files?) automatically send a "line feed" signal after every "carriage return", and a PC doesn't (or do I have that backwards?), but that would be easy to overcome. If output to a text file something simple like the DOS "Edit" command could be used to display and print it. 

The best thing about VCC is it runs under DOS in my opinion. Don't have to have all that Windows overhead! To simplify disk/file conversions and such why not write a simple batch file (remember those?) menu. Boot the computer into that, then have the first selection to run VCC, others for disk/file conversion and other CoCo related tasks. I tried setting up an older laptop I had with DOS and VCC to be a portable CoCo3, but that particular laptop (an old HP Omnibook 6000) had some peculiar display chips/drivers that VCC wouldn't work with. Had problems with the disk chip too. 

Now I have an old IBM Thinkpad 600E that's now "surplus" to my needs. Have it up for sale at $100 (complete outfit with case, internal CD burner/DVD player combo drive, external floppy, two batteries, and a few extras), but no takers. The only problem with it is the track-point pointer is bad, so you have to use a PS/2 mouse with it. To fix the track-point the whole keyboard must be replaced. Easy and cheap enough, but I prefer a mouse anyway. It would display an error that you had to manually go around, but I fixed that by editing a bit or two in the BIOS to ignore the track-point error. Boots right up. I don't really play with emulators of the CoCo much any more, anyone interested in the laptop drop me a line! It's old but robust, why I kept it so long! PII 366 with maxed out memory (over 500MB, forget exact amount). 

----------
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 19:05:48 -0400
From: "Paul Fitch" <pfitchjr at bellsouth.net>
Subject: [Coco] I love VCC + wish list

3) It needs serial port (rs-232 pak) and Bit-banger / printer support.  

On the printer side, I would be happy if it output'd to a PDF file that I
could then send to my laser printer.    Even if the output looked like an
old style DMP dot matrix printer or my old "Gorilla Bananna". 

-- 
Frank Swygert
Publisher, "American Motors Cars" 
Magazine (AMC)
For all AMC enthusiasts
http://farna.home.att.net/AMC.html
(free download available!)