[Coco] Speech Systems Precision Time Module and Colin Stearman's Cooking with CoCo

[Tom Wilhelm]

Related to rietveld’s Nov 18 post about SuperIDE’s real time clock;  I’ve got a Speech Systems Precision Time Module (which is a RTC-only cartridge). It’s powered with a NiCd battery which I replaced recently and was pleasantly surprised when I found that the RTC is still working. I hadn’t used it in 30 years or so. The original battery was still attached but it hadn’t leaked or corroded the cartridge’s board in any way.

One of my SDC flash slots holds Colin Stearman’s “Cooking with CoCo” RSDOS mods (Rainbow Magazine July ’84 - Feb ’85) which among other things, modifies the RSDOS “dir” and “ldir” commands to include a date stamp (using a new variable - date$). I’m looking through my old disk images now to remember how I auto set Stearman’s ‘date$’ variable using the date returned from the RTC. I haven’t spent too much time with it, but I’m sure it’s there somewhere.

The Stearman mod also included adding an optional hardware mod which adds a parallel port and associated print commands. After fixing a couple of cold solder joints and reseating-of-ICs, I got that to work too. I still have a working Epson FX-80. 

I’d like to blame, uh I mean… ‘thank' you guys on this list for getting me fired up about the CoCo again. This is fun stuff!

Tom