[Coco] Laptop Saga, 512K Basic

[Kip Koon]

Hi Guys,

I have some good news to report about my poor little laptop that got zapped
by lightning.  I found that the Secondary 1TB hard drive I was using for all
my storage of everything coco related has survived!  Whew!  I still need to
buy a new motherboard for it, but since one hard drive is good, chances are
that the other hard drive is good.  I'm hoping that the two memory modules
are good as well as the CPU chip.  If so, all I'll need to do is buy the
motherboard as soon as I can.  Anyone have any warnings about using CPUs and
memory modules from a zapped motherboard of a laptop in a brand new
motherboard?  Should I go ahead and buy a new and memory cards?

I have a document called "512Basic.doc" for a program that will enable the
coco 3 basic to address and use all 512KB of ram for basic programs,
however, I can't find a program to go along with it.  I've perused
ftp.maltedmedia.com, but I have not found it.  Does anyone have this program
or knows where it is stored?  I want to see how the author enabled Basic to
use all of the 512KB upgrade.  Thank you in advance for your help.

Even though the development of my 6809 computer is stunted for the moment, I
have installed KiCAD to develop the schematic for the 6809 computer.  I have
found a Motorola library for KiCAD and now I'm in the middle of entering the
four pages of schematics that I had already entered into ExpressPCB.  It
will take a little while, but I hope to have it entered soon, then I can
continue with development.  I've got the CPU and 5 buffer chips entered
already.  Just a few more pins on the buffer chips and I'll be able to
continue on with a Xilinix chip to do all the address decoding.  The XC9500
series is such a big chip.  I can't possibly use all the pins in my project.
al-williams.com has a little board that can plug one side into a breadboard.
The other three sides have to be wired manually to the breadboard.  I'd like
to find some type of quad to dip adapter to use for breadboarding purposes.
Does anyone know of such an adapter I can use to plug all pins of the XC95xx
chip directly into my breadboard?

I also have been looking for a text only 6809 Single Board Computer emulator
and have found several that compile and run on Linux, but since I use
Windows 7, I thought I'd try MingW.  It is a neat little setup.  I've tried
compiling a couple of things, but a .h file that comes with Linux, does not
seems to be present in MingW.  I installed all options, parts of MingW to be
sure I had everything I needed.  I'll recompile those two emulators and see
what the missing file was.  If I remember correctly, the two emulators I
tried was 6809 and sbc09.  Both were needing the same .h file in order to
properly compile.  Was able to compile something else, but I'll have to
retrieve the other hard drive from my laptop before I can see what it was.

My head doesn't feel good at the moment, so I'm going to go for now.  Happy
'09ing!

Kip