Frankencoco 4g

FrankenCoco 4g

The Ongoing Tale of a Coco 3 gone "Bad To The Bone"

NOTE:

As of October 2018, this entire collection was lost due to the flooding of Hurricane Florence. Not only did I lose my beloved Coco collection, but my home and recording studio as well. I hope to recover some of this gear, but it's becoming doubtful as I now live over 2 hours away from my old flooded home and my health is keeping me from recovering what is left of my 60 years as a musician and 30 years as a Coco enthusiast. Maybe some day...

FrankenCoco 2 days after receiving it.

Coco 3 w/Disto 1-meg upgrade & cooling fan

Eagle AT Keyboard interface w/Eagle Keyboard

Tandy Multipak Interface

Tandy Power Distribution

Tandy CM-8 RGB Monitor

J&M No Halt Disk Controller

5.25 DSDD 40trk 360k Floppy

5.24 DSHD 80trk 720k Floppy

2 x 3.5 DSDD 80trk 720k Floppies

Burke & Burke CocoXT Hard Drive Interface

2x Seagate ST-225 20-meg (behind MPI)

Tandy Deluxe Color Mouse (2 button)

Glenside MIDIpak

Back in the 1980s, I started out with a Tandy Color Computer 2 w/16k, Color Basic, an Orchestra 90 pak, and a cassette recorder for program storage. I started learning the Orchestra 90 music system and also started learning BASIC from the included "Getting Started with Color Basic" user's manual. After buying a couple of casstte based games like "Raakatu", "Bedlam" and "Pyramid", my interest turned to learning machine language programming. I then purchased the "Audio Spectrum Analyzer" program pack and that sealed the deal. I had to learn assembly programming.

The next step was asking my favorite Radio Shack sales person (who was also District Manager) about assembly programming, he proceeded to tell me about "EDTASM" and about the "Rainbow Color Computer Magazine" where I could find a lot of information on programming. He also mentioned something else... something about a "BBS". Never having owned a computer, I had no idea what a BBS was and asked Mark (the salesman) about it. He took the time to explain what a BBS was and what I needed to connect to one. It took me a couple of months, but I squirreled back enough money to get a 300 baud modem and simple program on cassette called "Telecomm". Mark also explained that he also ran his own BBS and that it had a "Coco Sig" and that there were quite a few users there who would be glad to help me learn my machine. So it was that I first connected to the "Wilmington-80 BBS", a 2 line system with a rather large user base.

The first thing I learned was that my software was only able to download small ASCII files (remember? 16k), and that I needed something better. Asking on the BBS, everyone said I needed "MikeyTerm", which was available on the BBS. Checking out the download, I found it was too big for my software's small buffer and a binary file to boot. I was out of luck. After responding to the messages that I couldn't download MikeTerm because I was using Telecomm, one of the other users replied that he had it on cassette and would gladly make me a copy, all I had to do was drop by and pick it up. After getting his phone number and calling to get directions, I dopped by to pick up "MikeyTerm". In doing so, I met what was to become a lifelong friend... Mike Gautier. Mike and I downloaded, traded, and programmed anything we could find for the Coco. I was progressing in my assembly programming rapidly (once I got EDTASM) and Mike wanted me to teach him what I was learning. He offered to buy a new 64k Coco 2 and give me his old one (also 64k) as he wanted the latest model with the new VDG chip that could do true lower case. I was estatic to say the least. I now had a 64k Coco 2 w/Extended Color Basic... A whole new world of programming opened up.

I continued with this cassette based system from late '84 until the 1986 tax refund time, in which I was able to afford my first disk drive. I also purchased "Lyra" from "Speech Systems" and bought a small MIDI keyboard, a Kiwai MS-710 w/mid-sized keys. Now another whole avenue of the Coco world opened as I discovered OS-9 Level 1. It didn't take long to find that OS-9 L1 was best suited for more than one drive, but I learned a lot of tricks with that single drive system that I still use today. The following August issue of Rainbow announced the arrival of the Coco 3 and it's enhanced abilities and I knew I had to have one. I had to wait until the 1987 tax refund before my dream was realized and not only did I purchase my first Coco 3, but also purchased a 512k upgrade (ordered the same day I bought the Coco 3). In a period of one year, I went from a cassette based Color Computer 2 64k, to a single drive Color Computer 3 with 512k memory! What a change that was. I had spent the year of time between getting my drive and getting the Coco 3 transferring all my cassette software to disk as well as downloading disk utilities from Wilmington-80 and typing in new programs from Rainbow.

The next year brought the biggest change of all. OS-9 Level 2 had been released and Mike Knudsen released "Ultimuse 3" for OS-9 L2. I made an OS-9 L2 boot from"Rogue" and "King's Quest 3" and bought "Ultimuse3". I also purchased a larger MIDI keyboard, a Yamaha PSR-500 w/fullsized, touch sensitive keys which I used for many years. I felt like I had a Coco super system... Color Computer 3, 512k of memory, a disk drive, OS9-Level 2, and MIDI throught the serial port. I used this Coco 3 setup up until about 1993 or 1994 before I ended up with several drives including a 3.5 720k 80 track drive along with a Coco 3 and several Coco 2s, all from a friend who was moving on to a bigger system. Then in 1999, my studio where the Coco system called home, was flooded in Hurricane Floyd and the roof caved in which poored water onto a plugged in (and running) Coco system. Between that and power spikes caused by lines going down and the electrical storms, my Coco system was lost. I made several attempts in the next few years to revive the system, but it was no-go. In 1995 I had also purchased a Packard Bell computer with a 486-DX4 100mhz and 1-meg of memory, so I moved on to bigger pastures like many others had. The one thing I did do before my Coco died was that I had purchased Jeff Vavsour's Coco 3 emultaor and had copied quite a bit of my vast software collection to the PC. For the next few years, I would often run the emulator and mess with the old Coco stuff. I had discovered the various Coco websites on the internet and eventually, other Coco emulators came about, David Keil's Coco 2 & Coco 3 emulators, and mainly Joseph Forgeone's VCC Coco 3 Emulator, which became my "goto" emulator of choice. I would still ocassionally work on some of my projects and was active on all the forums and mail lists until 2011....

In December 2011, I was emailing Mike Knudsen about information for his "UBox3" software, a "jukebox" player for Ultimuse 3 files. I was asking about the sources for this program when Mike offered his Coco 3 system to a new home... I immediatly jumped on the opportunity and after many emails and arrangements, I received 3 huge boxes on December 28th, 2011. It was like having Christmas twice in one year!! The 3 boxes contained:

My 2011 Christmas Present

(yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus)

Color Computer 3 with:

Disto 1-meg upgrade

Eagle AT Keyboard interface

Eagle Keyboard

Internal Cooling fan (for the mem upgrade)

Tandy Multipak Interface (gray)

FD-502 Disk Controller

J&M Disk Controller

5.25 DSDD 40 track 360k drive

5.25 DSHD 80 track 720k drive

3.5 DSDD 80 track 720k drive

2 dual drive cases

Burke and Burke XT hard drive interface

2 Seagate ST-225 Hard Drives w/case (20meg each)

Orchestra 90 program pak

Glenside MIDI interface pak

PBJ Parallel Printer interface w/buffer

RS-232 3-way switch box

Tandy Joysticks (2-black single button)

2 Button Tandy Deluxe Color Mouse

Tandy Power Distribution (the big one that servers as a monitor stand)

Tandy CM-8 RGB Monitor

about 7 or 8 boxes of disks loaded with Mike's software

and 1 "I Love My Coco" bumper sticker (unused).

Needless to say... I was in heaven!! This was the Color Computer system I had dreamed about in the 80s. But the system didn't come without it's pitfalls...

First, the system wouldn't boot into OS-9 L2 because Mike had forgotten to include his boot disk for booting with the B&B hard drives. Then after finally making a boot disk for the drives, I found the drives wouldn't spin up. I eventually found that a loose screw in the hard drive case had gotten tossed around during shipping and had lodged itself in the power supply. Needless to say, when I turned on the drives, the power supply died. After finding a large enough PSU in my old computer graveyard, I finally got the drives spinning, but drive 1 would not pass the spinup test and drive 0 would only read/write for about 15 minutes before overheating. The system then had to cool for a day before it would spin up again. After 2 weeks of this operation, I finally got most of the data off the drive (including the complete Ultimuse3 source set), and then the drive died completely.

I had already installed DriveWire4 so the loss of the hard drives was not so bad. I had most of the data I wanted off them. Then the second problem arose... The keyboard started acting up... some keys would not work. After tearing the keyboard down, I found that the keys had a felt pad with a foil strip on the bottom for the contacts. Over time, the felt had started to deteriorate and was falling apart. Looking around all my "stuff" in the studio, I noticed an old "stiff" rubber mouse pad that was about the right thickness, so I cut small, round pads and attatched the to the keys, then re-attatched the foil contacts. This is how it stands today. I need to go back in and redo some of the pads as they seem to be a little "sticky" but it works.

Now I had the Coco 3 running with the latest NitrOS9 (3.2.9 at the time), and DriveWire4 connected on the serial port. What a system, until.... The Coco's power supply died. After spending most of a day tracking the problem down, I finally pulled the supply and replaced it with one of my old Coco 3 supplies from the "flooded" Coco 3... hoping it would work... and it did!!

Everything went well for a few months.. then the Coco would boot and it seemed to not be recognizing the Eagle AT keyboard interface. This interface has a rom that runs on startup that configures the keyboard for OS-9 or Basic, so I figured the rom pins needed reseating. I pulled the rom (carefully) and cleaned them with a pencil eraser and alchohol. But when I went to reinsert the rom, 2 of the legs fell off leaving the part coming out of the rom down to where the legs get smaller to fit into the socket. Not to be without a Coco again, I looked around the studio once more. The best thing I could find, was guitar strings. The thing to remember about guitar strings is they are nickle plated spring steel... very strong, but flexible. They also come in many gauges. I found the plain (unwound) 'G' string to be about the right size I wanted. After inserting the rom chip, I stuck a small piece of a 'G' string down into the socket so that it rests against the broken pin. After doing both broken pins this way, I powered up the Coco... The Eagle logon screen came up with it's menu for selecting the operating system. Now I have the only Coco 3 wearing a 'G' String... !!!

The Coco 3 has been performing well now for almost a year since the G-string incident and I couldn't ask for a better system. Then a friend from the Coco mailing list offered me a Glenside IDE hard drive interface that he wasn't using. Since I missed the chance at having my dream hard drive system when the B&B drives failed and I really wanted to not be dependant on DW4 all the time, so the IDE interface would be perfect.

After receiving the interface in the mail, I proceeded to read the docs for the Super Driver and the IDE interface to see how hard this would be. After running a single drive system for so many years, I had learned many tricks in making boot disks and had expanded that knowledge in learning to make boot disks for DW4 and the Becker Port. The hardest thing about setting up the IDE interface was making the drive descriptors. Since IDE drives come in many types and sizes, certain things need to be set first before you can format and use the drives. After doing a little research as well as asking on the list, I finally found the settings I needed and proceeded to setup my IDE drive. Since I couldn't find any of my old smaller drives, I was stuck with a 40 gig drive which would waste about 80% of the drive on the Coco. Since I no longer use IDE drives on my PC (my PC has SATA drives), I didn't really mind wasting the space or the drive. I now have NitrOS-9 accessing the IDE drive at 2 x 4 gig partitions. I know some people seem to think that anything over 80 or so meg is overkill, but they've never seen my OS9 archives either. On my PC, I have over 80- gig of Coco related archives. Of course, a lot of this is manuals in PDF format and text files, but there is still a very large software archive buried in these directories and I want access to ALL of them from my Coco even when I'm not connected to DW4.

After all the things I've gone through to keep my Coco 3 going in the past 2 years, I've adopted a nickname for my Coco 3 system...

FrankenCoco. And now with the 4 gig partitions on the IDE drives, I decided to paraphrase the cellphone commercials and officially name it the "FrankenCoco 4g". The FrankenCoco 4g is currently set up as:

The Coco Desk:

Tandy Color Computer 3

Disto 1-meg memory upgrade

Eagle AT keyboard interface

Eagle Custom Keyboard (AT style with number pad and 24 programmable function keys)

Internal cooling fan

Tandy Multipak interface (gray, PAL fixed and interrupts strapped)

FD-502 Disk Controller w/HDBDOS rom (no drives)

Glenside IDE hard drive interface

IDE hard drive w/2x 4-gig OS9 partitions and 2x 256-disk RSDOS partitions

Orchestra 90 pak for stereo sound

Glenside MIDI pak

Tandy Power Distribution unit

Tandy CM-8 RGB Color Monitor

Tandy Deluxe Color Mouse (2-button) w/Tandy Hi-Res Interface (left)

Tandy Joystick (single button, black) (right)

In the middle of the desk is my keyboard and monitor (above the Coco 3) for my Gateway AMD quadcore PC,

hosting multiple instances of DriveWire4 and running the Coco emulators.

And to the far right is my 64k Coco 1 w/"Chicklet" keyboard & 13" portable color TV

The FrankenCoco 4g is running "HDBDOS v1.4 DW" which auto-boots "NitrOS-9_dw v3.3.0". Most times you will find me in NitrOS-9 but I do ocassionally run in HDBDOS to use old RSDOS software. NitrOS-9 is where DriveWire4 and the IDE interface really shine. Having that much drive space can be addictive. I was recently copying a bunch of files over to a floppy disk image when I got a "Disk Full" error... I thought "What?...", then I remembered I was on a floppy... :-)

Soon, I hope to be receiving one of Roy's "RGB to VGA" adapter so I can retire the CM-8 (or use it on another Coco 3). The VGA adapter probably would not fit in the Coco 3 case along with everything else that's already in there, so that leads to the one last addition I would like to make to the "FrankenCoco 4g" is to do a "repack" and repack my entire Coco system in a PC case. I have a "graveyard" of old PCs with many styles of cases, from towers, to horizontal desktops, to an old 3.5 foot tall IBM server case. That thing is massive, but would hold all my Coco stuff with room to spare. I'll probably go with one of the smaller towers or one other thought I had was to make a "rack mount" Coco. Those of you who have never been around pro music gear could relate to these as the racks they use in professional server systems. I have several "road racks" for music gear and thought of making a complete rack Coco system, including the monitor. I could use the RasPI as a DW4 server and keep it all compact.

If I decide to do the Coco "repack", I of course will document that here as well.

Until then... Keep on Cocoing... :-)

B.P.