[Coco] Introduction, cartridge slot proto boards, J&M controllers, and EDTASM pak.

[Mark J. Blair]

On Aug 22, 2013, at 06:36 , Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote:
> Hi Mark, and welcme back to the Coco Community. As you will see, there are stil quite a few of us still around and quite a few innovations  to our beloved Coco. "We've come a long way baby". If you remember where that quote came from, you're old enough to fit right in here :-)

Argh, please don't remind me how ancient I am! LOL

I've found most of the links you shared already. I'm surprised by how much is online for the CoCo! I'm also having a tough time remembering how we did things back in the dark pre-internet days. I can only assume that it must have involved pants-wetting and frequent crying.

I do plan to play with OS-9 and/or NitrOS-9. I never used OS-9 back in the day, but I was always curious about it. I just never managed to play with it before I moved on to other machines.

Speaking of other machines, I'm reminded of when I outgrew my Amiga 1000, mostly because of its graphic resolution being shackled to NTSC-derived resolution. I moved on to a Sun 3/60 workstation with a 19" CRT display that weighed about as much as a small car. I installed an accelerated framebuffer board from one of the rack-mounted Sun 3 machines, and then waited multiple days for X11R5 to recompile with the graphics accelerator support. That hardware combination was never marketed, but the 3/60 supported that framebuffer with its final ROM revision. Good times, good times...

I don't like the Windows platform much, so rather than just using cocodrive.exe, I hacked out a python script to convert .cas files to .wav files on my Mac. Yeah, I have to do everything the hard way!


-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/