[Coco] Dusting off the CoCo

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 28 December 2014 18:15:15 Allen Huffman did opine
And Gene did reply:
> Yesterday I hooked up some of my old gear. My CoCo 3, full sized white
> multipak, floppy drives and a SyQuest EZ135 SCSI hard drive.
> Everything seems to work but I have not tested all the sectors on the
> EZ135 disks. My RS-DOS stuff seems blank, so I may have more disks
> somewhere else.
> 
> OS-9 crashes from all the disks I have tried. There may be some MPI
> slot issues or something. The Cloud-9 boot floppy disk for the
> SuperIDE drivers boots fine.
> 
Your multipak has not been upgraded.
> I seem to have three KenTon hard drive controllers. I will be testing
> them, and selling off the extras. Actually, once I know I have all my
> SyQuest and ZIP disks backed up, I will get rid of it all.
> 
> I am using my old 720p HDTV via composite video. 80 columns is
> unreadable, which is odd since my ancient 13" TV set looked horrible
> but I used it for 80 columns until I got my first green screen
> monitor, then later a CM-8. I would use them both at my CoCoFEST booth
> so I could see the green screen to use the computer, and face the CM-8
> out to the attendees.
> 
> I need to find a TV set with VGA input so I can still use it on the
> older CoCos (once they have composite video mods done), and to get
> artifact colors.
> 
> I can barely type on the keyboard. My first project is to write a
> program that will let me type a disk name (for the disk image) and
> brief description. It will then back the floppy up to a disk image,
> and write the name and description to a text database on another
> image. Looks like I may be digging out my old BASIC manuals soon.
> 
> I also have my Raspberry Pi going. Last year, they did an update which
> made it no longer boot from my Sandisk SD card. I tried the December
> release and it now boots so I can use it again. I used "cvs" to get
> the sourceforge DriveWire 4 stuff, and will be looking at how to make
> that run soon. It will be my first time using DriveWire.
> 
> I am hoping to use DW as a bridge so I can FTP files to the Pi, and get
> them moved over to CoCoSDC rather than having to power down and swap
> the SD card in to my Mac all the time.
> 
> I will also take a look at LogiCall. So much to relearn!
> 
>      Allen


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS
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