[Coco] Anyone else collect other old computers/game consoles beside the Coco?

[Joel Ewy]

On 08/27/2011 05:23 AM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>> could save them as a native CLUT .IFF that loaded much faster.  What I'd
>> really love to see now is a DriveWire client for OS-9/68K...
>>
> If I ever manage to find OS9/68k and a machine that can run it, you
> can be sure a DW client will soon follow!
> Or, if anyone who has such a treasure wants to work on a client, I am
> happy to assist in any way that I can.
>

My 68000 assembler skills are limited to having read a book, and done a 
few exercises for a Computer Systems class 20 years ago or so, assembled 
ironically on a 68000 simulator that ran on an NCR Tower with a real 
68000 processor under AT&T System V UNIX.  From what I gather, the DW 
client code is pretty tricky, timing-wise.  Granted, a 16MHz '68K 
machine is a little faster than the CoCo, but I believe 115K+ is still 
outside the documented capabilities of the MM/1's UARTs.

Speaking of which, there are a number of UARTs to choose from, not to 
mention bit-banging over one of the parallel ports.  The Signetics 68070 
has a serial port, which (off the top of my head) I think may ordinarily 
be used for the mouse.  Then there is a 68901 on the motherboard (I 
think) which has another UART.  The I/O board has a second 68901, and a 
68681 dual UART.  I think that makes a total of 5 possible UART serial 
ports.  There's also an i2c bus interface in the 68070 which never got 
used for anything.  I guess it would be useful to take a survey of the 
other hobbyist-oriented '68K machines that were out there, and see what 
kinds of serial interfaces they had.  If there was any common 
denominator, that would be the thing to develop.

So how would you feel about being loaned an MM/1 for a while?  I'm not 
doing anything with it at the moment.  I would have to dig up a working 
SCSI hard drive, but if worse came to worst, one of the Macs would have 
to donate to a good cause.  I could probably be without the MM/1 for, 
say, up to a year, if it meant a Drivewire client would come out of it.  
I'm more than half serious.

JCE

> -Aaron
>
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