rpiguy9907

As a kid the first time I downloaded an "inappropriate" image on my Amiga from the local BBS (finally a good use for HAM mode!) The picture quality was stunning. When I was older it was probably playing Dark Forces. Managed to be both immersive and technologically a huge leap over anything I'd played on the Amiga.

Finally my Transwarp GS cards have arrived from Reactive Micro. Of course I am super busy right now. Grrrr. I can report that boards have been sent. I will update when I get five minutes to test them!

SOLD!

Let us know how it goes. I wonder if they still require you to mail in a printed order with a check.

Ordered from them once. They are friendly and I have no reason to think they would run a scam, but they are very slow to reply and to ship. Just getting a shipping quote can take some time, particularly if you are buying hardware.

Does pin 2 on the user port get +5 volts as expected? That is an easy way to see if power is getting through your board. The 5V line supplied power to most of the computer the higher voltages are for the SID, which the machine can boot without I think. If there is no voltage then you have a short somewhere. If you are getting +5v power on the user port, do you have any ROM carts you can test with? Even a game cart? Common cause of black screen is the Kernal ROM. If it boots with a game cartridge plugged in, but does not boot without a cartridge in, then it points to a dead Kernal. Once you've gone through the above it sort of becomes a deduction game. Feeling around if any chips get hot, etc. You can try swapping out PLAs then CIAs if you have spares, etc.

The fuse is good?

I think the CoCo line suffered from Radio Shack distribution. At first it was a huge plus, but over time you had to actually go to a Radio Shack to get CoCo software (or user group). As a kid, I could only drag my parents into one electronics store, and between Radio Shack and Electronics Boutique (and later Babbages) I would always go for for the latter as they had the latest games. I didn't even know the CoCo 3 existed until I was an adult 20 years after I could have owned one. I bought one and was not pleasantly surprised. The upgrades are super impressive, but it didn't suck me in like other retro systems do. I think it just a subjective thing, because I have no rational reason not to like it.

Being an Amiga user I felt the same about all the PCs of the day. I now own a Tandy TL/2 and those TGA graphics are actually pretty good. Plus the whole thing feels snappier than the Amiga. Definitely under appreciated machines.

Really? Is it just the BASIC 4.0 or something else?

Every now and then, we all buy things on impulse, and it is often a disappointment, but every once in awhile you get something that you had low expectations for, but ended up really liking. What retro computer did you pickup not expecting much, only to be pleasantly surprised? I always derided the VIC-20, and still find it to be very limited, but perhaps because of low expectations I was very happy with an almost free unit that I picked up from a junk store. Some of the games are actually fun, it has a bright color palette, and is a nice window into how Commodore computers evolved. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was a 286 Tandy TL/2 that I picked up awhile back. I guess you could say this applies to all retro PCs of the era, but I had always derided them. As a Commodore 64 and Amiga owner, I always looked down on the PCs of the 80s, but man do I love the directness of the architecture. Banging directly on registers, you can almost feel the interrupts. Plus they are brilliant to type on and great for productivity. I thought I would hate it but actually I love exploring old applications on the Tandy.

I added a hard drive and 2mb of Fast Ram to my Amiga 500. It was ridiculously wide on my desk with the Ram expander and Hard Drive chained together. The difference in productivity was astounding. Like many others I started with a Commodore 64, which came with everything I needed at the time.

I had the same "entry barrier" that you have had. I got my IIgs and had no idea how to operate it. Once you drop to AppleSoft you can at least type in some games :-)

I have two Commodore4ever units from eBay and they are great!

After considerable research I found out that Abacus basically took an existing Tiny Pascal implementation called KMMM Pascal and rebranded it. You can easily find images of KMMM Pascal for the PET, etc. with a Google search.

Should run on a GIMIX system as well!

Sort of a neat rarity if you have an Amiga 500: Vintage Amiga Kolff Computer Supplies Power PC Card, V2. Rare Amiga 500 board that turns your Amiga 500 into an IBM compatible. It also expands your ram! There are many videos of this on YouTube, check them out! This is the V2 version, which included hard drive support and faster CGA emulation. Read the full specs here: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/powerpc https://www.ebay.com/itm/Kolff-Power-PC-Emulator-and-1mb-Ram-Expansion-for-the-Commodore-Amiga-500/192673539452

I agree completely that an end-user would have not known the difference, and the 68K wasn't very slower, I was not implying that a great PC could not have been built around 68K, only saying that the all of the hype around the 68K and its elegant architecture didn't really translate into a speed advantage for the user and it would have definitely been several times faster than an 8088 PC with an 8-bit bus.

Does this work with 3.5" disks? I have a Softcard, but only have a 3.5" disk drive and after looking around I have never found a boot disk to boot CP/M from the 3.5" media.

Very True. However the 68020 held almost no advantage over the 80386 speedwise. Byte magazine and others were shocked when the two faced off in what was essentially a dead heat in terms of speed. The major advantage of the 68020 was that existing apps could run and take advantage of the speed and memory, whereas legacy x86 apps forced the 386 into real mode, or had to be virtualized.

But I wasnt saying that at all. I wasnt saying x86 won because of speed, only that the architectural advantages of 68K did not equate into speed. There were indeed many factors.

The price of x86 chips were much lower, particularly around the time that IBM was shopping for a processor for their PC. I was pointing out that x86 has higher IPC than 68K and outperforms in most cases that do not involve 32-bit math. You don't have to look at an AT to get comparable performance to a 68000, which ran even with a 8086. The 68K was also far slower than than 8086/8087 on floating point. Since the 68K had no available FPU the x86 ran the killer app of the 80s (the spreadsheet) much faster. For all its elegant architecture, the 68K did not offer much to the end-user. It was much more attractive to the programer of course, but the person cranking away on a spreadsheet doesn't care about a flat memory space if the spreadsheets runs slower because you don't have an FPU.

It was faster and cheaper, which I was arguing was more important than elegance. This mirrors VHS as well, where cheap won the day.

As I get older I definitely agree with this. I did not appreciate the Apple // or the Atari ST when I was younger, but I really admire their simple, elegant architectures. The Apple // in particular is stunning with what it achieved using off the shelf components.

I used to be an adamant defender of the 68000 architecture and as a kid could rattle off all the ways in which it was superior, but now that I am much older I see that it lacked something potentially more important - speed. The 68000 had just terrible IPC with long instructions that took several cycles to load over the 16-bit bus and most instructions taking 8 cycles or more to complete. It did not have to be this way, Motorola could have figured out a more efficient way to encode instructions. Yes it was much faster than the 8088, but on 16-bit code it was barely the same speed as an 8086, and consistently fell behind the 286. Yes the 286 was five years newer and had twice the transistors, but the 68000 was just picking up steam when the 286 came out and they competed directly. It was even worse for the 68000 if you needed floating point, as there was no official FPU until the 68881. You would think the 68000 would always win on 32-bit integer math, but the 286 had a hardware multiplier and divider that negated that advantage often by a lot. I get it, the 68000 was elegant to the programmer, but the end-user didn't get all that much from it unless they were running a narrow set of applications that favor the 68000. I guess that was a lot of words to say I bought into a lot of hype and marketing material when I was a kid and it used to puzzle me how anyone could prefer "dogs" like the 8086 and 286, never knowing that they were as fast or faster than my super elegant 16/32-bit 68000.