[Coco] CoCo 3

[Frank Swygert]

Download "Tandy's Little Wonder". Well, it's in English, but it has a lot of repair info if you can read English.

The keyboard has a mylar cable. Open the computer case and look at that cable. The traces may have breaks in them. Some have repaired that with a paint on "solder". Not sure if you can find such a substance there. A straight pin header connector will push into the keyboard connector on the motherboard. That will help if you fins an older model keyboard. Someone may have a spare keyboard they would be willing to sell and ship to you.

Cloud9 sells the Super IDE controller which has a CF card slot (can be used with SD cards with an adapter) and of course controls IDE hard drives. The Drive Pak is no longer available. If you don't want to use a second computer as a server the Super IDE is the only choice.

Your best bet is probably Drivewire, but that requires a PC computer to work as a host. An older low power Pentium computer would work fine, running Windows or Linux. I recommend Linux Mint 9 for a Pentium single core machine. Newer versions run better with more power. I think Drivewire will work with MS-DOS too, but I'm not positive. Something as small as the Raspberry PI will work well as a Drivewire server with a small Linux installation (something like Puppy Linux). The Linux that comes with the Raspberry Pi works well.

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Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2012 12:39:28 +0000 (UTC)
From: Gustavo Ranaur<ranaur2010 at ranaur.net>

I have a CoCo 2 with many cartridges (Floppy Controller, RS-232 interface, 2
floppy drives), and many games. Yesterday I tried to "ressurect" it but I got
no luck. It turns on nicely, but there are many keys failing on the keyboard
(that makes it uselesss).

So my questions are:

1) Where can I buy a refurbished CoCo 3? I live in Brazil, so it must be
someone that ships internationally (none in ebay does :-()

It was my long childhood dream to have a CoCo 3 (I have only a CoCo 2).

I triedhttp://www.cloud9tech.com/  but noone answers in more than a week :'-(

2) If not, can I fix the keyboard it? Well, maybe making an USB Keyboard to
CoCo keyboard interface (with Arduino maybe?)

3) Is there a place where I can buy some kind of cartridge to emulate a drive
from an SD Card? I googled a little bit and found many projects. Which are
still working? DrivePak, SuperIDE, DriveWire4. Which one is best/works? (If
there is a FAQ about this I couldn't find. Point me and I'll RTFM

-- 
Frank Swygert
Editor - American Motors Cars Magazine
www.amc-mag.com