[Coco] some questions and thoughts..... and a return to being a COCO nut... <G>

[Chris Ahrendt]

I am getting back into the COCO... my original coco was a battleship 
grey 64MB coco 1 with 2 disk drives and a 300 baud modem.
I should be receiving my coco 2 with 64MB and a FD-500 next week 
sometime. I have ordered the parts to do the drive wire cable.
I was very active in the coco scene in the Washington DC area and ended 
up stopping when I moved back to Germany...

Now with all of that said... here comes the old timer / newbie questions...

I have been going through all of the archives on the various magazines 
(Rainbow, Hot Coco, etc).

The model I am getting is:
26-3127B which I read has the newer video chip that has lower case.
The Floppy is a
26-3129 FD500
I won't know if the drive has one or two drives in it till I get it. My 
thought is to replace the drive(s) if they are SSDD with a DS/DD drive 
and then a 720k 31/2" drive in the second bay.

So here are the questions:

1. How do I turn on and keep the lower case on if indeed this model has 
the video chip with the lower case ability.
2. IF I want to use the drives as DS/DD  drives what needs to be done. I 
have read the drive tutorial and it is a bit confusing to me being an 
old timer. It used to be you had to have a new ROM burned or a non-Tandy 
drive controller.
3. One of the things I do remember liking was a friends setup (think it 
was a J&D) had the ability to hit the up arrow and repeat and edit the 
last command much like I do on Linux. and he was able to address the 
drives as single or double sided...  so would this just be a matter of 
getting the right prom and cable?
4.  I have read that the FD500's have issues with heat... is there 
anything that can be done to help that? any instructions?
5. Is there a way to set up the Coco so that I can used the drive wire 
and the floppy drives at the same time? IE use drive-wire as my gateway 
for printing / drives etc...
6. Is there anywhere that describes the drive-wire protocol?

I was looking at the archives here and one of the discussions was around 
a network controller for the Coco's why not instead use a Arduino with
either a hard wire Ethernet or WiFi? I assume that there is some sort of 
handshake between the server and client that goes on...
It would be real easy to pull a pin high from the arduino to let the 
coco know that a packet has been received.
The limiting factor would be the bit banger if you used that .. It may 
be faster to interface via the cart and have a splitter one going to the 
disk
controller and the other to the arduino connector.  The IP stack is 
built into the arduino so you would just need to write a simple arduino 
routine to talk to the drive wire client.
If this works the drive-wire server could use the IP connection it 
already has to talk to the client. Question is does the server support 
multiple connections?

7. I have seen several projects in the older coco's for 128k upgrade 
projects... is this worth it or should I just bite the bullet and buy a 
coco 3 for that?
8. If I install a board which does the inverted (light green on black (I 
prefer that)) would the characters still be lower case?
9. I have read also about the Hitachi upgrade to the coco... what would 
it buy me on a coco 2 or a coco 3? I am going to be using it for OS-9 
and some games.
10. If I do the composite  color mod and connected it up to a composite 
input on a LCD monitor would I get the artifact colors still?
11. Multi-pack.... I am thinking of getting one of these but have heard 
there is an issue with the PAL and the coco 3.
         There is a version A of the Multi-pack that works with the coco 
3, does it work with coco 2's?
         I get the pal fix from coco3.com and install the fix is it a 
one way trip and no longer useable by the coco 2?
12. Will an X-pad (the big grey slate) work with either coco2 / 3 if its 
used through the Multi-pack?
13. Is there anyone out there that would burn a eprom for a disk 
controller to add the HDB-Dos to the controller... or is it just as easy 
to boot off disk?
14. what are some of the gotchas that I need to check with a vintage coco?
15. What are some of the things I should probably buy/build/ find?
16.  Real Time clock... there was some talk of a plug in compatible 
(basically put it under the DOS prom) real time clock... does anyone 
have a instructable on this?
17. Is it worth building a high res joystick adapter to use or is it 
just limited to coco max use?

I am sure I will have more questions once she gets here.. thanks 
everyone....

Chris