Co-power 88 (ATR8000) Boards for trade

[+Larry]

I've been fooling around trying to get a 3.5" drive working with my ATR8000. But while I have my ATR stuff out, I thought I'd see if anyone was interested in the (MS-Dos) Co-power 88 stuff that I have. I have the boards and the hard drive adapter with 50-pin connector. I also have the docs and pretty sure that I also have the setup/dos disks. It's not especially heavy, but when you add the manuals, etc., the postage will likely be in the $30 or so range, so keep that in mind ("winner" pays postage). What would I like to have? I don't know maybe a MyIDE-II -- something small, since I'm trying to downsize a bit. I'll answer any replies. If no takers, it "goes away" on June 6th.

 

-Larry

[+SoulBuster]

I Am interested in taking it off of your hands.

[Justin Payne]

What does, "Goes away" mean?

So, from what I can tell, this card goes into an ATR8000 and gives you the power of a 16-bit processor. Seems kinda cool. Too bad I don't have an ATR8000.

[+Larry]

What does, "Goes away" mean?

So, from what I can tell, this card goes into an ATR8000 and gives you the power of a 16-bit processor. Seems kinda cool. Too bad I don't have an ATR8000.

 

Tox-Away Day.

 

It actually appears to be a KayPro board that SWP adapted. Plugs into the Z80 cpu socket, and the Z-Tek Hard Drive board sits on top of the ATR main board and the KayPro board is bolted to the bottom of the ATR8000 case. Years ago, I did boot MS Dos 2.0? on it. But that was probably 15 years ago.

 

-Larry

[tschak909]

I need to point out, the CoPower-88 board (which I had an ATR8000 fitted with one, BITD), provided a bare minimum 8088 computer design, not even an 8259 I/O controller. It runs MS-DOS, yes. and basically can be retrofitted to ANY Z-80 machine to do the same, it is _NOT_ IBM compatible (none of the bare supporting hardware is even there.), it is MS-DOS compatible... What does this mean? Any software which assumes hardware at certain memory locations will not work on this board. The software in question must only use the MS-DOS INT calls. (and no, not the BIOS calls, this basically means INT 21h only)...

 

-Thom

[Justin Payne]

Ok. So, very limited functionality. Good to know. Probably something to keep as a collectors item that has little use, like, say a Timex Sinclair.

[+Larry]

I seriously doubt it will run Windows... :>)

Anyway, appears someone wants it. Color it gone.

And yes, pretty much just an appeal to hardware collectors and "tinkerers." I would say it it has about the same value as being able to run CP/M. I'm always surprised to see how many folks are interested on running it with their Indus.

 

Larry

[tschak909]

at least CP/M has a huge software library that can consistently run on a lot of machines... MS-DOS wasn't so lucky.

 

-Thom

[ricortes]

I may still have a MS DOS 1.1 disk for the Sanyo MBC550.

 

I think the MS DOS level of compatibility layer lasted a year or three at most. As much as I can remember, there were a fair amount of word processor type applications that had made some inroads in business on the CP/M platform. Most of the early stuff was just a straight port so if you were used to running Wordstar on a CP/M box, you could now run it on an IBM.

 

BUT Wordstar kind of sucked. It was light years ahead of a pencil and paper plus it allowed you to give your rough files/disk to a secretary to clean up and print. I think it was Word Perfect that dethroned it much in the same way Lotus 123 knocked off Visicalc.

 

I imagine there's a lot of stuff that would work, just not a lot of reason to do it that way other then nostalgia. I still have a LISP interpreter that runs under vanilla MS DOS but I don't use LISP and if I did I would probably grab something a little more current. There were a lot of simple games like Adventure, data bases, and cross compilers that would probably work.

 

I may have to make a trip to my basement. I still have a AT&T 6300 with monitor and an original IBM PC but haven't booted either in the last 10 years. Probably time to recycle them. Pretty sure they and my H89 have decayed by now. The 360k floppies are probably worth a small fortune!

[ricortes]

While trying to refresh my memory I came across this. One of those 'Oh yeah!' moments when I saw you could could run CPM86 with the co-power

http://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-12/1983_12_BYTE_08-12_Easy_Software_djvu.txt

[TXG/MNX]

Iam interested in such board if you still got it.