John_L

Well, I for one absolutely thinks that definitely belongs in the forum, maybe even in it's own category. I love all these ardunio, rasberry pi, beagle bone devices coming down the pike, there's lots of competing companies out there making various products, some more general purpose, others, like this one, more geared towards a specific task. This is where the modern tinkerer goes to these days... That unit looks like it does some cool stuff, especially for $45 bucks, it's cheap enough for anyone interested in this sort of thing. Thanks for turning me on to it... I'll be looking into it for sure.

OK, yeah, I get what you're saying... and that's a completely correct statement, but that's the entire point behind the iPad. It's also shows the genius of Steve Jobs. Tablets and such area designed specifically to be what they are. In other words, Steve Jobs looked at the average computer user, with heavy emphasis on average. Your typical user browses the web, sends and receives email and messages, plays games, and consumes multimedia audio/video. When the iPad came out, people like us, who are hobbyists, looked at it and see it as a closed, sandboxed environment not conducive to development (locally, on the device), but your typical end user looks at it as a viable replacement for their computer because it covers all the uses they want/need. When the iPad came out, the industry, that has that same old school "this sucks for the developer so it'll never sell" mindset that mirrors the attitude you're talking about, and they predicted that Apple would sell less that 1 million iPads the first year... they sold 15 million, and in the 5 years it's been around, sales are over 200 million units... an overall average of 40 million units per year since it's release in 2010. This more than proves what Jobs was thinking was correct. Old school users who programmed home computers are but a niche of a larger market. It all started with us... we were the ones who were the early adopters, the ones interested in programming, the ones who pushed the industry into what it is today, but Jobs never took his eye off the ball, with the ball being a device that anyone can use, not just us early adopters. In the early days, vintage computers were wide open systems where the user had full control of the hardware, but in a bid to make machines more powerful, there's been a long slow drift away from allowing control of the bare metal with ever increasing layers of obfuscation between the hardware and the end user software. However, iPads are easily jailbroken, which gives the end users root access to the device, and with that, you "own" the machine at the hardware level and and full control over anything one would want to do, including the hobbyist. So, for those who want that sort of control over the device, it's easily obtainable.

Brrraaaapp... tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.... Yeah, it's amazing how you look at things depending on what angle you're looking from. When cassette tape storage was I had, the idea of having (a very expensive) disk drive was all one wished for. Eventually, I saved up enough pennies to get a couple of drives. Once you had drive(s) for a while, and you had several disk cases full of floppies, and floppies strewn about everywhere, All of a sudden the massive amount of storage didn't seem so massive (why do I have hundreds of disks!), and the disk drive which was much more reliable and speedy didn't seem so reliable and speedy anymore, and you begin to want for a hard drive. Now we're at the point where hard drives are fast and hold massive amounts of data, my data drive was $135 bucks and hold 3TB of data. However, hard drives are now becoming the weak link in the chain, so along comes solid state drives. I have a 250 GB SSD for my system drive and BOY is it FAST!!! My computer boots from scratch in 9 seconds, and I typically just put my computer to "sleep" which just dumps a RAM image to disk and then restores the RAM image when I wake it up, which takes about 3 seconds!!!! One of the nice things about vintage computers is that since they booted from ROM into a simple 8 or 16k basic interpreter, boot times were a few miliseconds... "instant on". As systems progressed, boot times got longer and longer, but now with A) improved versions of Windows, and B), my SSD, the days of near instant on boot are nearly back. Now as time goes by, the SSDs will become cheaper and cheaper, and the storage space will get bigger and bigger, I can't wait for the day when 3 TB SSDs cost $150 bucks or less... Personally, I paid $185 bucks for my 250 GB SSD, and $135 for my 3 TB "regular" HD. Look at the cost per Gigabyte... HD 3 TB - $135 or 4.5 cents per Gig SSD 250 GB - $185 or 74 cents per Gig I once paid a buddy $100 bucks for a 100 Meg hard drive, that's a buck / Meg or $1000 per Gig!!! At that price, my 3 TB HD that I paid $0.045 cents per Gig would have ran $3 million dollars !!!!

I remember the Pop Sci adds, and I remember wanting one back then, then the ZX81 assembled unit was released, and about that time, the deal with Timex was announced, but by then I was into the CoCo and went that route instead, also I had picked up a Model I 16k unit w/o the expansion interface, so I never did get into the Sinclair. I pic I posted was done just for fun, but in a few responses it's produced alot of info about it I didn't know about such as the keyboard mods carlsson mentioned. I think the idea of adding the RAM internally would have been a cool while doing the keyboard mods, especially if it was able to be done while leaving the expansion slot open. I've been playing around with the BASIC interpreter through the MESS emulator, and I think one of the things that held it back from doing better was the goofy non-standard implementation of BASIC, but I think overall the internal design was pretty good considering the price, and the poor BASIC wouldn't be a drawback to the serious hobbyist, but for the average user, it would have been difficult to work with. Thanks to everyone for sharing all the info!

Great, can't wait to hear the results. Those cleaning kits work pretty well, but we generally would just soak a Q-Tip in the supplied cleaner and do it manually, but I imagine using the disk might work. The Format command in RS-DOS is DSKINI drivenumber. You should be able to run that command as long as verify is off, which it is by default, and it will move the head from track 0 to track 35.

Exactly, when you look at the keyboard/cpu portion of the computer, you can tell how they used the same gray color overall, and designed the black bezel to match the black portion of the TV.

Yeah, i think it's place in history has got to be that it was the first sub $100 computer, which was quite an accomplishment. Unfortunately, to get there, they had to cut out so much, it wound up not being a competitive unit, and within a year or two, C64's and Color Computers were breaking $200, which people were more than willing to spend to get so much more computer. Same thing killed Radio Shack's MC-10, which was a direct response to the Sinclair. I thought the photo was funny because the actual size and shape of the unit lends itself to actually work quite well as a doorstop. What makes it so ironic that useless equipment is often referred to as a doorstop! I don't know much about the innards of the unit, but I do know it had a Z80, which is a great, very powerful chip. As a matter of fact, modern x86 chips have more in common with a Z80 than they do with the intel -8080 and 8088 chips. In other words, Intel took a que from the Z80 as their development line continued. Other than that, I don't know much about the internal hardware. I do seem to remember reading that it had but 5 chips in it, which was few compared to the typical 50 or so on other systems. I think it's biggest drawback was the keyboard, or lack there of. I imagine someone out there somewhere down the link has hacked a proper keyboard onto the unit... if not, it would be cool to do. Of course, an emulator will do that... If there's one thing I've learned about the 2600 it's that often times less can be more. Might be interesting to see what possible if one were to learn the system inside and out and see what sort of hacks to improve the system could be done.

After an exhausting search, I've finally found a best case use scenario for this vintage computer...

One of the biggest complaints I remember hearing about TRS-80 computers back in the day was the awful "Battleship Gray" color. Tandy Gray was the official designation the company gave the color. Despite Tandy laying claim to that particular shade of gray... well, no one liked it. Even those of us who loved the computer could see it was a bit of a, well, bland color. What most people don't know is how that color came to be, and it's a pretty interesting story. Back in the day, the TRS-80 was the first personal computer that was wired, tested, UL listed, and ready to use out of the box. Prior to that, kits were available, but there's a big difference between a hobbyist's kit and an "appliance" that anyone would potentially buy. Therefore, there weren't really computer monitors makers out there, and previous computers used VT100 terminals, and those monitors were basically a composite monitor... a TV without the receiver/decoder. So when Tandy went to build there computer, they needed a TV without the electronics, just a 12" black and white TV with no circuitry, just a chassis and CRT, and a case, not even a power supply, Tandy sourced that elsewhere. Tandy struck a deal with RCA for a 12" B&W cased monitor/chassis, that was part of a 12" B&W TV that RCA currently marketed. The thing is, it was only available in one color.. Gray. To keep costs down, Tandy decided to make the entire system that color so they wouldn't have to paint the monitor cases, so because they liked the deal, they just lived with the color. Here's a picture of one of those TVs... although RCA probably figured out that the bland gray color sucked and changed it, so this particular TV is white... In this picture the TV is sitting on top of a Model I expansion interface, and if you compare it to the other image, you can see it's identical to the Tandy monitor, and.. you now understand why the TRS-80 monitor has that big 3D cover just below the power switch to hide the holes in the case where the UHF/VHF tuner nobs sat. As a matter of fact, if you look from the back in through vent holes, you can see the two tuner cut outs quite easily. Another interesting note is that the RCA TV had front knobs to adjust contrast, brightness and vertical hold. Tandy only needed contrast and brightness controls, but the also needed an opening to accommodate the monitor to computer cable connector, so they used the vertical hold hole for that, and if you look at the closeup, there's a V, which technically worked, because it meant "video" instead of vertical hold, so you knew to connect it to the video connector on the computer ! Yet another interesting tidbit is that you can see in the picture on the left that the vent holes line up and match perfectly with the television, and the vent holes on the cpu/keyboard unit did as well, so it's obvious how much the design of the TV worked it's way into the final product.

Yeah, I think there were 6 revisions to the original CoCo design culminating in the final "F" board revision. The CoCo was young, and alot of minor issues cropped up that were soon fixed, and the vast majority of CoCo 1s out there sport the "F" revision board. By then even the CoCo 1 could handle the high speed poke. @krslam... you're complaining about the paint and you didn't mention the color !!!!

The games weren't buried for a tax deduction. They were buried to avoid paying taxes on them. When you own a business, you have to pay taxes on the value of your inventory every 3 months. That's why modern manufacturing has adopted "Just In Time" business practices so inventories don't linger and cost you money. Bear in mind, Atari themselves set the value of the carts at $50 bucks a piece on average, so with a glut of nearly 800,000 carts times $50 bucks per cart works out to a nearly $4,000,000 tax bill every 3 months. If you sell the carts, you don't have them, hence you don't pay any taxes on them (although you pay taxes on the money you received for them). If you throw them out, then you don't have them, hence you don't have to pay the taxes on them. Therefore, no, you can't bury your stuff and dig it up 30 years later for a tax deduction. This is also why you see seasonal sales, spring summer, fall and winter. Companies are trying to deplete inventories as much as possible and devalue the inventory they have remaining, so if they sell a widget at retail for $10 bucks, and it's not moving, just prior to inventory they'll drop the price to $8 bucks, saving them the taxes on the $2.00 per widget at tax time, plus, the lower price causes inventory to move quicker, thus reducing the tax hit by even more. A good way to spot a discontinued, devalued item is the price. Full price items typically end in $x.99, i.e. $3.99, $4.99, $199.99, etc. first round devaluing drops to $x.98, 2nd round, $0.97, etc. So if you're in the store, and you see something priced at $19.97, it's probably discontinued and the price has been reduced twice. Once for each inventory it's had to pass through. It's not uncommon for items that have passed though 2 inventories to be devalued to nothing. At that point ,the retailer is free to sell the item at any price, typically a low one to move the item. I've seen some stuff sit so long the manager will just try to give it away to a staff member, or if no one wanted it, just throw it out.

Have you tried cleaning the read/write head. It's not too difficult. You can do it with a screwdriver and some isopropyl alcohol. Remove the 4 or so screws holding the case on and lift it up off the drive, then turn the drive on it's side and make sure the drive door is OPEN. You should be able to easily see and reach the head with a Q-tip whetted down with alcohol. A few swipes on the head will clean it up, and considering that drive sat for years, maybe even decades, it's might just need a cleaning. Take a look at the photo I uploaded and I highlighted the head with a red box to show specifically what it looks like, but you should be able to figure it out just by looking. Give it a good cleaning first, and you might just get lucky.... Good luck!

A bug in the program (GW-BASIC) called it. When you code, at least old school non event driven code, you have to account for every possibility. I don't know the code you're speaking about, but, being a basic game, it had 3 choices for reading the keyboard, INKEY$, or some rom call, or it's own routine reading the keyboard matrix. For a game that let you control some character, choice 3 was probably what was being used because you don't have to consider the repeat key function which prints a character, delays, then starts repeating. By writing their own code, or calling a BIOS routine, they could react to the input and loop back around to the keyboard routine. What probably happened was the coder was using his own routine to read the keyboard matrix registers directly, and through some fault of GW BASIC's code, the Numpad 5 key caused the GW-BASIC code to not have had a check for that key, so at that level of code (machine code), it likely "fell through" to the routine below it. That routine below it might have been a subroutine that was called, and when you call a subroutine, at the end of the routine you return from it with an RTS opcode. Since the routine that GW-BASIC fell through to wasn't ever called, when it hit the RTS, it returned from the last call it had, which was the invoking of GW-BASIC, so DOS took it as a que to return to DOS. I'm not saying that's what happened, but it's one possible explanation for why that happened. Usually when a program dumps you to a DOS prompt, that's what happened, the program got off track and encountered a return without a call which would return you to DOS. There's probably 100 other explanations as to why it was happening, but without disassembling GW-BASIC, I couldn't say for sure.

I seem to recall that as far as disk systems went most were all about the same with the exception of C64 with it's lame serial interface. Those were horrible. TRS-80 Model I & 3 both had HD controllers and hard drives you could buy if you could afford to pay the price of a good used car for it. James has a good point about the CoCo. A CoCo with a Super IDE cartridge can store on SD cards, which is a very modern storage medium.

It would be interesting to see one of these units cracked open.... That one shot of the 3 way switch shows that the right side of the switch opening (which was for tv channel) was hand cut to expand the opening to accommodate a 3 way switch.

enable java

The Color Computer lived on long enough to see a 3rd version, by the time CoCo3 got there, alot of CoCo's issues that it had with the first models that rolled off the line were solved either by CoCo 2 or CoCo 3. CoCo 1 Had a difficult to use "chicklet" style keyboard Highest resolution 256x192 x 2 colors No Palette registers VDG didn't support CPU high speed mode, the machine would speed up, but you'd loose the display. Color synchronization would randomly sync to either the rising or falling ramp of the clock causing issues in the (never officially supported) 4 color hack for PMODE 4. No lower case characters. 32 column, 16 row text screen 9 colors 64k RAM OS9 Level I only CoCo 2 Had an improved keyboard, better but not great. Still technically a chicklet keyboard made to look more like a real one. This didn't last too long, and a full travel keyboard finally arrived. VDG was the same, but would not glitch out when high speed CPU mode was invoked. Color sync issue persists Character set could now be toggled between inverse video and true lower case characters text mode and colors the same, still no palette registers 64k RAM OS9 Level I only CoCo 3 Always had the best keyboard and also added Control, Alt, F1 and F2 keys. VDG, SAM were combined into one chip that emulated both chips, plus provided new higher resolution text and graphics modes and MMU management for support for up to 512k RAM and improved overall performance. Color Sync issue was resolved, machine would always boot to rising ramp, or if F1 was held during reset, falling ramp. Full 32,40,64, and 80 column text modes (although 64 was never supported, it was there in hardware) Higher resolution text modes (40 & 80 column) supported multi color, blink and underlined text. Displayable colors went from 9 to 16 out of a palette of 64 colors Higher resolution display modes 320x225x16 and 640x225x4, although resourceful coders have pushed the 320x225 mode to 256 colors (with no fancy page flipping or palette swapping) by playing tricks with the color sync. 512k RAM OS9 Level II support which brought a true, full, multi user, multitasking windowed environment with support for up to 4 simultaneously connected terminals. Yes a full blown Unix/Linux style OS. So you see, by the age of the CoCo 3, most of the issues that plagued earlier systems were ironed out by the 3rd version. However, this thread is about what it lacked... so if push came to shove.. although BASIC, and by BASIC I mean color basic, extended, color basic, super extended color basic and disk basic...whew was adequate. In recent times I've been studying the code, and they had alot of room for improvement, and microware blew 6k on a digital photo for their easter egg. If BASIC were optimized and the full amount of ROM space was used, it could have been a beast.

Those above are courtesy Simon Jonassen, he's quite good, and has some amazing stuff... I think some of the most impressive stuff is the Donkey Kong transcode that John Kowalski did. He took the Z80 code from Donkey Kong and rewrote it in 6809 for the CoCo 3. The results are amazing considering the 6809 is doing all the work the Z80 did, plus handling sound generation as well. Another impressive bit of work was done by John Linville, another CoCo guru with lots of CoCo smarts has a working video player...

Well, opposite to what is commonly believed, Apple will OK any app that follows a narrow set of rules, it must work as advertised, can't have hidden functionality, and obviously can't have any malware, but beyond that, there's nothing that says it can't suck. I've seen a few apps that are poorly written and have terrible graphics, but as long as it works, you can get it on the App Store. That's a pretty small percentage though, there's a ton of games and apps that are well written. The closer you follow Apple's coding guide, the smoother your App will run, but I'm sure alot of developers don't follow that rule. There have been alot of complaints that developers can't access other parts of the phone, but Apple has done alot to create "safe" API's that allow access to data outside the app (i.e. contacts), without compromising the phone or users privacy. There's been alot of complaints about how locked down the phone is for developers, but I can say I've never had any malware of phishing scams to worry about. Android has been plagued with that, and even Google has begun to end the free for all environment to curb the influx of malware and phishing scams.

Yeah, that's not a typo... I didn't mean 5 MHz, I meant 5 Hz.... I watched a video recently on YouTube that showed how people alot smarter than me exposed and photographed all the layers of a 6502 with a microscope. Then, they feed these high resolution photos into a computer and wrote computer programs to generate polygons over the traces, and then they wrote software to recognize transistors and built a 3D model of the 6502 in the memory of the computer. They then wrote software that then operated the virtual 6502. This isn't an emulator, emulators simply mimic the functions of the processor through code. This is a true simulator, and one could even take the same simulation code and apply it to any 3D model, so they could dissect any chip and then simulate it. These simulators are more accurate than most emulators as they're mimicking the actual operation of the hardware, but running a simulator in a computer is pretty slow, but it lends itself to educational uses as well as reverse engineering the chip. The 6502 was done on paper back in the day, and the original circuit diagrams are oddly not available anymore. The folks who did this have a website, Visual6502.org where they have a java implementation of the simulator. In the advanced mode, you can type in your own opcodes and then either run the code at a blazing 3 to 5 hertz, or manually step, which is the cool part. I'm not huge on hand assembly... but I wrote a simple routine that I then punched in so I could step through it and watch the magic happen. There is a visualization of what lines are firing as you step through each instruction. My Code in 6502 Assembly: CLD Clears the decimal math function flag, state unknown at startup, so prudent to clear before adding... LDA #5 Load the A accumulator with the value of 5 STA $20 Store the 5 we loaded into a into memory location $20 LDA #3 Load the A accumulator with the value of 3 ADC $20 Add with carry the value in A (3) to the value stored in $20 (5) STA $30 Result is stored back into A, so store final result into memory location $30 JMP $00 Unconditional jump back to memory location 0. I started typing in my code at $0000 as that's where the simulator starts showing memory, and it lets me work in the Zero Page addressing mode for storing values, and the jump at t the end. I did the lookup for each opcode, and hand assembled the values that need to go into memory.... Here's the code: D8 CLD A9 05 LDA #5 85 20 STA $20 A9 03 LDA #3 65 20 ADC $20 85 30 STA $30 4C 00 JMP $00 As you step through the code, you can see the lines fire for the CLD, then for the LDA instruction, then you see it read the 5, and then it appears in A in the area above the code, and then you see the lines fire for the STA $20, and the highlighted area jumps to $20 and a 5 appears in that location, and so on... if I hit play and let it cycle, the simulator hits a whopping 5 Hz. If you're interested in assembly language, it's a really cool way to visual what goes on while code executes.

All iPhone/iPad/iPod touch Apps are developed on Macs, or at least systems running OS X as there are numerous "Hackintosh"es these days. Apple has a strict policy regarding programs running on iDevices. Those devices are locked down, and user developed application software runs in a "sandbox" that protects the system taken over by an App running, therefore implementing a development package for the devices would be exceedingly difficult. The OS X development package includes emulators for iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches, so developers can code in a desktop environment and test software without having to export the code to a real device. Although Python is available for iPhone/iPad...

Yeah, well, it's inevitable to happen, these units were well constructed, and alot of them have faired really well throughout the years. Cool thing is people have worked out FPGA's for CoCo, so regardless, CoCos can live on through programmable hardware

Then you're not looking in the right place. Try watching Apple's WWDC. 5000 people who paid $1599.00 plus 200 freebies Apple gave out to students to gain access to a weekend of talks and workshops where developers interact with hundreds of Apple engineers. Not to mention the thousands more who watch via the web, and develop on their own despite not being able to get tickets (Apple capped WWDC 2014 at 5000). Where do you think most of the 1.7 million apps on the App Store come from? If you don't see anyone creating anything, it's because your not looking. Because if you did, you wouldn't have to look far... https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/

Sorry to hear about the USB adapter not having a driver. That was one of the problems with the TI. TI seemed to concentrate on selling it as a useful appliance for everyone, which they all did, but they seemed to shun the home hobbyist crowd that in other circles produced alot of software and even hardware. From what I understand, technical specs weren't available until after the unit was discontinued. At Radio Shack, besides the users manuals that came with the unit, one could easily order a service manual, which had enough info to build the computer from scratch including masks for the circuit board(s), and complete troubleshooting information for techs, and a technical reference manual as well. The machine has pretty good specs hardware wise. I never even knew it had a 16 bit processor... a big selling point that they never advertised. Again, they were shooting for the non-tech crowd. Despite that, the internal software for it was horrible. For starters, it had that useless boot up screen. Why would I want to choose BASIC if I just inserted a cartridge. Obviously since it appeared in the menu, the machine detected cartridges in the system. So why wouldn't it just execute the cartridge if one was present like all other systems did. And the BASiC... ugh.. very non-standard version that was more difficult to use compared to Radio Shack or C64 or Atari. I think my biggest issue was the keyboard though... Why would you have a keyboard without such an important key as BACKSPACE !!!! The ASCII character set was terrible, and many of the characters were just blanks too... very odd indeed. In the end, it seems to me that they had a great computer with a terrible ROM BASIC and one of the crappiest keyboards ever. Even with it's crappy basic, if they would have made a better keyboard and supported the hobbyist community better it might have lasted longer. The thing that gets me is that despite it's fast 16 bit processor, it seems slower that the competing 8 bit systems of the day.