New to Vintage Computers - Original CoCo

[Trapani]

Greetings everyone!
I recently got into messing around with vintage computers after picking up a Panasonic Electrotune and original CoCo 1
Almost identical paint scheme by the way... I really like the aesthetic even though people apparently hated silver cocos.
I think it's a beautiful piece of history

It's missing the joysticks which I ordered originals of but I'm also kind of clueless as to whether these games and software can be played without peripherals.
My guess is no and a lot of the software and games require additional components.

It came with the manuals on the software and manuals for the TRS but I'm kind of shocked how non descriptive some of this material was.

I've got
Quasar commander - needs joystick (on the way originals)
Videotex - needs modem (can you still connect to BBS's in the US?)
Color Term Plus - I think the same although I'm not entirely sure what this even does yet. I know it does something online
Audio Spectrum Analyzer (believe I need a datasette with audio in)
Football - looks like same on the joystick
Chess - Joystick?

It's wild to see what computers were back then and I must say that I find the whole cartridge thing strange to look back upon. Why a cartridge and not a cassette or a floppy?
I came from an original Compaq employee family and played on the portable II as a young kid but these were just a wee bit before I was around
If anyone has some sage knowledge they can drop on me, things to check for, must haves, etc would greatly appreciate as I'm new

Anyways, I will be lurking until I know more about this beast.

 

[ajacocks]

Welcome to the forum @Trapani !

I can't answer many of your questions, not being a Radio Shack/Tandy/CoCo expert, but I can explain why cartridges and not disks or tapes. The first is that, particularly early in the life of home computers, disk drives were something of a rarity, as they were very expensive. When my mother bought our family a Commodore 64, in 1982, she also purchased a Commodore 1541 floppy and 1525 printer. The floppy drive was as expensive as the C64, itself. Additionally, floppy disk media wasn't particularly cheap, either. Cassette tapes were a somewhat cheaper removable (and writable) storage option, compared to disks, but were very slow, and often unreliable. They were very popular in Europe, though. The advantage of a cartridge, from the user perspective, is that it loads instantly. From a sales perspective, it is much more difficult to pirate software distributed on cartridge, though it did happen. The negatives for cartridges were that they were more expensive to manufacture than disks or cassettes, and had a limited storage capacity. And, home users couldn't write to them, so they weren't good for saving programs.

Hope that helps a bit.

- Alex

 

[krebizfan]

If you haven't seen it already, look at https://colorcomputerarchive.com/ for a good selection of manuals and other useful information.

One major advantage of cartridges is that because the program is stored on ROM, a lot less RAM is needed. The floppy disk cartridge and the attached 5.25" floppy drive cost $600 while increasing the memory to 32K would cost another $200. One would have to buy a lot of games to save money buying disk copies instead of cartridges. Cassettes were cheaper but few games could squeeze in the original 4K starting RAM and the upgrade cost to run larger games still might have been daunting. It looks like yours has a 32K badge so most 80s CoCo programs should work on it.

One minor point, the CoCo cassette port uses the same cable as the TRS-80 Models I, III, 4 and Model 100/102/200 plus IBM PC and some other systems. Makes finding a compatible cable easy.

 

[dhau]

Welcome to CoCo club!

First, join the main and very active CoCo and MC-10 community in discord: https://discord.gg/mBT9Fsp3

Second, upgrade your memory from 16KB or 32KB to 64KB

Third, buy CoCoSDC. It's an invaluable modern mass storage solution for CoCo, a de-facto standard, but required 64KB on CoCo 1 and 2
It is sold out on main store: https://thezippsterzone.com/2020/06/25/the-coco-sdc/
But it looks like it's available from another builder: https://retrorewind.ca/coco-sdc

Fourth, you may want to:
- add Enhanced Color Basic 1.1;
- replace RF out with composite or s-video output
- upgrade Motorola 6809E with Hitachi 63C09E. Hitachi runs a lot cooler, runs a bit faster and has additional instructions. This is very useful for NitrOS-9

There are plenty youtube videos with instructions

 

[Trapani]

Welcome to CoCo club!

First, join the main and very active CoCo and MC-10 community in discord: https://discord.gg/mBT9Fsp3

Second, upgrade your memory from 16KB or 32KB to 64KB

Third, buy CoCoSDC. It's an invaluable modern mass storage solution for CoCo, a de-facto standard, but required 64KB on CoCo 1 and 2
It is sold out on main store: https://thezippsterzone.com/2020/06/25/the-coco-sdc/
But it looks like it's available from another builder: https://retrorewind.ca/coco-sdc

Fourth, you may want to:
- add Enhanced Color Basic 1.1;
- replace RF out with composite or s-video output
- upgrade Motorola 6809E with Hitachi 63C09E. Hitachi runs a lot cooler, runs a bit faster and has additional instructions. This is very useful for NitrOS-9

There are plenty youtube videos with instructions

So I can put NitrOS-9 on this?
From the little I've read so far that OS is a huge upgrade from the MS BASIC Extended 1.0 that it came running on.

I cracked her open the other night too and it appears I have at least one mod that I don't know about. What is that lifted pin on the multiplexer chip doing ran over to that small IC. Doesn't look original but it's good soldering work.

 

[dhau]

Looks like you got extended color basic already in, very nice. Bodge wire is pretty standard I think for computers that age. I don't know if you got board revision E or F, some of them had fixes made right at the factory. If you replace those memory chips with 4164, you'll get the full 64KB RAM in it.