[Coco] storm damage

[gene heskett]

On Thursday, September 08, 2011 03:41:09 PM John Odom did opine:

> Monday night the remains of tropical storm Lee brought down a huge oak
> tree

That is no doubt furniture grade osk, I hope you have a local sawmill.  
T'would be a shame to use that for firewood.

> which destroyed half of my shop building.

Yikes!

> Among items destroyed
> were:
> 
> i CoCo II with added RGB circuit.
> Dual disk drives and controller
> CM8 monitor 
> Large RGB off-brand monitor
> LX 80 printer. 
> RS tape machine.
> 
> All were usable before the storm. I need to assign reasonable insurance
> value to these items. 
> John L. Odom
> Chemist/Microscopist

I think I would be trolling ebay to see what the replacements were going 
for.  Some of us here are less than amused at the prices this stuff is 
achieving, but we don't normally think of it as old enough to warrant real 
antique prices.  But face it, as it approaches 30 years old, it really is 
antique.

Some things, such as the NTSC capable monitors are now made out of pure 
unobtainium, so a scan convertor driving a modern LCD monitor is almost a 
given for replacing those.  Ditto the LX80 printer.  I send what I need to 
print from my coco's out the bitbanger port as normal text, which is hooked 
to a usb-serial convertor where I capture it on this linux box, run it 
through cups to make a page raster image, and send it back down the same 
usb cable & hub, where a B&W Brother Laser printer (about 110$ at staples) 
can spit it back out at 22 ppm.  There are other solutions of course, but 
that is what I have been doing for about 3 years now.  The only problem is 
that the serial-usb stuff is quite speed sensitive, so 'tuneport' with a 
tweak value might be needed in your startup to hit 9600 baud close enough 
to work 100%.  With a 6309 in mine, the default of nominally 13 is way too 
fast so I have to slow it down to about 29 or 30.

Cheers, gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://204.111.66.235:85/gene/>
"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."
-- Bernard Berenson