Tandy Coco unboxed!

[bettablue]

Just a comment:
I was finally able to look at the jumpers in the Coco. They are currently set to 16K. The only other setting is labeles 64K. My best friend actually had this same exact model previously, and did the memory upgrade on his by hemself when he has his years ago. When done, the computer had the full 64K of memory. That will be a nice upgrade, so we are thinking of performing that in the near future. Ed has the info on the chips, and is placing an order for the upgrades in the next week or two. When done, I'll have a 64K Tandy Coco 1. I trust him on this because the Coco 1 was also Ed's first computer. But where I went into programming and soft skills, He went into the technical side of things, and learned about the hardware. The Coco was his first test bed.
I'll post an update.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

EDIT: I guess you beat me to posting. It sounds like you have the F Board. So yeah, upgrade away. Don't forget to snip off the capacitors as specified in the PDF. (What is a power supply line when using 16k chips is an address line with 64k.)

I powered it up today to find out how much memory it has, and to see which version of BASIC it's running. There is a little over 8K of usable memory available to work with, and it is running Extended Color Basic. So that's something positive. However 8K of memory is only about half of what my old series 1 Coco had. 16K would be just about right for what I want to do with it now. Alas, there's nothing I can really do about that though except buy a Coco 3 later on. (Which I mayor may not do).

A little over 8K is what to expect for a 16K Extended Color Basic CoCo. Remember, by default it will reserve 6k for high-res graphics. If you don't need high-res for your program you can enter "PCLEAR 1" at the BASIC prompt and it will free up 4.5k of that memory. (Graphics memory is allocated in 1.5k chunks. Unfortunately CoCo Basic won't let you reserve *zero* pages.) A 32/64k upgrade will give you about 23k with high-res graphics, 28k without. (About 1k less if you add a disk controller)

One more thing, then I'll let it drop. I've gone through all of the technical manuals, the Tech Reference guides, ets, and I don't see anything about board revisions. Can you tell me how I can tell which board revision is installed in this thing? Once I know that, I'll know what I want to do with this little beastie.

If you enter "Tandy's Little Wonder" into Google's search box you'll find links to a .pdf that has all sorts of interesting, if somewhat randomly arranged, info about the CoCo. Somewhere around page 76 you'll find a discussion about RAM upgrades. The "letter designation" is based on the suffix of a revision number located in the right front corner of the motherboard. If there's an "E" or it says "NC" or no letter at all then it's upgradable according to the instructions in the PDF. (The procedure is just scary enough you might want to find someone who plays with soldering irons to do it for you.)

 

[bettablue]

Again, you're amazing. I have already downloaded the book, "Tandy's Little Wonder" and started reading it just a short while ago. I've already picked up a few small things. Too bad the "book" is so long though, or I would print and binder it to keep next to my machine. From everything I have learned about my little wonder today, I got a pretty damned good machine; certainly not bad for being a freebie. This machine is actually much better than my first Coco 1, which had 16 K of memory. But that was after being upgraded, and di not come loaded with extended BASIC for some reason or other.

As far as upgrading the memory on this particular machine is concerned, it's really not going to be a big deal at all. After reading the procedure, and following along in the Coco itself, I'm very confident in my abilities; however, my friend has already volunteered to take care of that for me. As I stated, he will be ordering the new memory chips in another week or two. The only issue I can see is where to locate them. But agaiin, since these are Motorola chips, it's very possible that Motorola will still have them in stock.

The video signal was still very bad when we started today, and transmitted a serious amount of noise to the TV, but by playing with the RF modulator in the Coco and switching the cable for a much better shielded one provided by the cable company, I was able to clean up the overall picture quality pretty well. There is still some herringbone pattern in the picture though, and the picture seems to "bleed" over to the right a bit, making for a somewhat unclear image. But it's nowhere near what it was prior to these changes.

As you can possibly guess, I'm very pleased with my latest acquisition. The news regarding the revision model of the main board is only one thing to be happy about. It's the entire package.

Thanks again for all of your help and insight...

EDIT: I guess you beat me to posting. It sounds like you have the F Board. So yeah, upgrade away. Don't forget to snip off the capacitors as specified in the PDF. (What is a power supply line when using 16k chips is an address line with 64k.)

A little over 8K is what to expect for a 16K Extended Color Basic CoCo. Remember, by default it will reserve 6k for high-res graphics. If you don't need high-res for your program you can enter "PCLEAR 1" at the BASIC prompt and it will free up 4.5k of that memory. (Graphics memory is allocated in 1.5k chunks. Unfortunately CoCo Basic won't let you reserve *zero* pages.) A 32/64k upgrade will give you about 23k with high-res graphics, 28k without. (About 1k less if you add a disk controller)

If you enter "Tandy's Little Wonder" into Google's search box you'll find links to a .pdf that has all sorts of interesting, if somewhat randomly arranged, info about the CoCo. Somewhere around page 76 you'll find a discussion about RAM upgrades. The "letter designation" is based on the suffix of a revision number located in the right front corner of the motherboard. If there's an "E" or it says "NC" or no letter at all then it's upgradable according to the instructions in the PDF. (The procedure is just scary enough you might want to find someone who plays with soldering irons to do it for you.)