I usually shy away from interviews on YT because they feel a bit stilted and not very natural, but this was a fantastic interview - great flow, well shot and well edited - I know you don't need to hear this commentary from just another viewer on UA-cam, but this was really good. Good stuff!
> over the years it continues to go from "strength to strength" That's an odd way to put it (assuming English is not your first language). I think you meant the channel keeps getting better and I would agree with you.
@@rommix0 Actually, English probably is his first language, specifically the English known as British English. I read several magazines that are based in the UK and you see the phrase "strength to strength" used quite often in the magazine articles. I assumed from the context it means what you stated.
@@michaelburns8073 it’s a little more subtle actually than just better and better! It does mean that, but with the specific tilt of branching-out into new skills/specialties/features. It’s generally said about a set of skills rather than just one specific skill. :)
You might struggle to believe this but I still remember clearly going to a high school special assembly in the gym back in '65 so the whole school could be exposed to "Elmer Gantry", the film from which the above line would be a quote if Love replaced English. I was going to say something about English being like an organism that has adapted to different ecological niches and been changed in the adaptive process but I couldn't find the words and became distracted. I got a Superboard II, in '78 then a KIM1 then a SYM then built my own 6502 computer on a breadboard before wire wrapping a version to control lights for a rock band. Then I got my CoCo and what a great leap forward was that larger register set, eh and how bright the future looked. Now I sit here in the future with umpteen billion transistors in the box beside me and dead calm LCD screens arrayed before me that play Crysis at a hundred frames per sec 6000 pixels wide feeling quite nostalgic after watching this video and regretting not having the mind of a collector.
A major change in the 1.1 ROM was the syntax of the COPY command. I wrote a BASIC program to copy every file on a disk to a disk in the other drive. I had to check the ROM version and goto the subroutine with correct syntax for the ROM detected. Yeah, CoCo was notorious for r.f. interference. I used to have my coax wrapped round a ferrite rod.
Thanks, Adrian. I really appreciate you diving deeper into some of the questions I and others brought up. Nice work getting Frank (you know a machine that unique needs a name) back up and running again.
Hi Adrian. Several things you can do to try to reduce the interference: 1) shorten any leads to/from the CRT. Otherwise, they’re just big, fat antennae picking up noise! 2) replace the thin wire from the CRT aquadag to the CRT board ground with copper strap; this’ll give a much better ground, and minimize ground loops. 3) if the CoCo motherboard came with an RF shield, put it back on! That’s what it’s for. Or get some from a dead C64 and try to make an RF shield for this mobo. 4) replace the individual wires going to the tuner (I presume these are power & ground) with coax, with the grounded (shield) side to the black wire, and the positive supply (red wire) to the inner conductor. Again, make this as short as reasonable and still have enough slack so you don’t stress the connections when removing the computer case for servicing. 5) disconnect any unneeded antenna wire from the TV tuner; connect up ONLY the computer’s RF to it, or - better yet - do a composite mod if the CRT board is not a hot chassis. This way, you can bypass the tuner entirely, and run the composite to the CRT board’s I.F. strip. HTH! ❤️
I'm pleasantly surprised you got it back up and running Adrian. Regarding the frozen drive spindles; I have found that old dried grease/oil responds almost instantly to a couple drops of MEK. Pour a little in a tiny tip bottle
@@andrewdunbar828 Can buy it at hardware store. For thinning Roofing Tar, cleaning roofing and shingling tools and I think something with Auto Body repair and painting. Lighter fluid can substitute it's compatibility with paints and plastic in electronics I'm not 100% sure of. Mek dries so fast it so far hasn't affected anything beyond what I'm cleaning grease and goo wise. Lighter fluid can cause labels to release if it's spilled
I may have missed it, but an odd aspect of the 'Frankenstein’ nature of this beast is that while a TV tuner has been moded into the case, the tube itself presumably is from a monitor - or why would a monochrome screen be green. The original tube from the case, maybe? But what a fantastically eccentric machine - have loved watching this little series. I know so little about the CoCo series of computers - although a friend of mine from my first job was very passionate about his Dragon-32.
There is a reason that the Coco disk drives spin up both drives when either is getting accessed - if you are doing a COPY or BACKUP, they would slow down if they had to wait for each other to get up to speed. So all motors for all drives hooked up (up to 3 double sided if you put new connectors on with all teeth, or 4 single sided) turn on at the same time, so they are all up to speed at the same time, and keep running while reading/writing.
My father designed and built the ACORN based on the 6800/68000 but sold and modified the COCO 64. My machine was a repack built out of a COCO 1 with a hard drive control 3.25 drive, composite video all jammed into a VT100 case. NOW…. Adrenal if you want a all the manuals for A SWTPC and a fully operating one with peripherals but WAIT THERE’S more…. He has COCO 2 doc, mods, PC board designs…. AND his personal ACORN with all the goodies (later OS and software using PROM to RAM transfer etc). He is in his late 80’s and he wants it to go to someone who will appreciate it (Mom just wants to divest of things). Let me know with a come et on how we can connect. You could a heck of chat with a guy who is a self taught engineer from before transistors and was key in the Motorola digital age! Cheers, Peace.
There was a guy who came up to the north country (Canadian oil patch) in the early 80s trying to sell a CoCo hybrid called the Acorn or was it the Apricot? I'm not sure, but it was at a trade show and I got a chance to check it out.. the big thing was "sprite graphics" and the ability to run CP/m. The motorola 68000 processor in tandem with a Z80 or was it the Hitachi variant HD64180 with 128k maximum memory. There were some pretty esoteric designs back then, just no real conformity.. except for the CP/m roms.
LOVE this video! Great interview as well. I actually worked at a Radio Shack Service Center, 40-7761 in Ft Myers, FL. We absolutely did board level repair on RS equipment. I'm kicking myself that I don't have the manuals anymore... We did all sorts of repairs for RS/Tandy equipment, Compaq, HP, IBM, Acer, Oki, Apple (That was special to my center because I was a certified Apple Tech). Great times, great memories. Sad that it's all gone now.
The RCT can test the MCM4517 and also all other variants, e.g the MCM4516 (note that for the menu usually the Intel labeling is used). So use the Intel 2118 setting to test the MCM4517.
@Mr Guru To be honest, it's not obvious that this IC is an "Intel 2118". With other testers you are forced to look for the IC in a list and then enter a number for the test. With the RCT you get lazy because it shows the most common type in the display and you don't even look at the compatibility list. ;)
Great series, thanks. Not looking for full restore but I'd love to see you actually try to repair those disk drives, including finding a way to disassemble the spindles, etc. to re-lubricate them. BTW, when I lubricate old stuff (stuck box and other fans), I use lightweight synthetic oil, seems to last a lot longer and not harden like petroleum based ones regardless of original thinness.
I think you should make this an ongoing project. Keep upgrading it in the spirit of the original as and when you get suitable parts. Turn it into the ultimate Frankencoco.
I snagged a pristine looking CoCo 1 off eBay that ended up not working and ran into the same issue with schematics when it turned out to be a 26-3002A. If you scroll down a bit more on Color Computer Archive, look for a file called Color Computer Redesign Schematic that seems to be a preliminary schematic for the Rev F boards. Not sure if it's exactly the same as the ones they ended up selling, but it looks a lot closer.
For the drives, since you have them spinning, you can partially disassemble them so you can get access to the EDGE of the bearing, and use something like WD40 and get it to wick into the bearing, it helps soften up the grease (I tend to use a custom mix of alcohol and grease to make it REALLY thin and work it into things) yes this gets messy but helps the bearings free up and move again.
I love that you went to so much trouble. And that it was Color Computer related. Color Computers were how I started and I still have a lot of love for them.
Yes!! Incredible. Love it. Great repair video and great machine. Related: in highschool (grade 8), a friend's dad created a custom wooden shell for the family's Coco 1, because the chassis had cracked. It included a 11" color TV, two floppy drives (flat), and a 3rd party keyboard (to replace the chicklet keyboard). I think he even wired in a powerbar in the back for a one-switch-for-all. The machine was wonderful to type on, and having the floppy drives under the TV was great. And the whole thing could be lifted with a couple of elegant metal handles on the side.
Adrian, a tip from an old TV repairman. Using the CRC cleaner on the tuner will leave all the contacts with bare metal exposed and will corrode fairly quickly. Back in the day I tried many different tuner cleaners and what worked best and KEPT WORKING was WD40. Don't be afraid of soaking it down; with hundreds of TV's over a period of 5 years in the business I never had a problem. With regards to the disk drive slowing down, I also repaired tape decks that used the same motor belt drive system and I would be willing to bet that the belt is slipping.
Great series on this odd repack. I'm starting to think perhaps the memory swap out happened as an attempt to fix what ultimately was a bad CPU. Then, not only did you have a non-working CPU, but the wrong memory installed as well.
That might have been the case. I don't think Mike remembered exactly what happened to this machine (although I didn't talk to him directly.) Maybe he'll comment on this video with more insight. :-)
I'm thinking because there were multiple jumpers, maybe one or more of them controls the voltages (maybe the wire wrapped one?) while other jumpers tell the machine how much RAM it has. Maybe if only some were changed to 16k the voltages would still be correct for the original chips.
My first computer was a CoCo 1 with 4K of RAM and the revision D motherboard. It does my heart good to see that the CoCo is still getting love these days. Long live the CoCo!
Everytime I see a TRS 80 on your channel, it brings me back to college days. Our Programming class had to use those to put in Basic code. I had to use them too. Until I got my Commodore 64. Also in our programming room, there were like 20 TRS-80 systems. It was really nice, they were all good working, and always very clean. I met the girl who had to clean them all the time. If I could afford a COCO TRS-80, I would love to have one.
Hey Adrian! When I worked for Radio Shack, we had printed catalogs that we used to find cross-referenced Radio Shack part numbers for other branded products. This is 10 or 15 volumes set that each store had. Surely someone saved one somewhere!
Just wanted to say thinks for the memories. I grew up with a Coco 1 and 2 in my home and model 4 in my classroom so this is such a blast from the past :)
I worked at two stores. One a franchise (oregon), the other a company store (Dallas). We sent all repairs to authorized service centers (1977 to 1980). Many stores were associated privately owned local stores. They often had their own repair techs.
I worked in both consumer and computer repair centers til the early 90's. We serviced both company and dealer stores. We had the ability to do component level repair on computers or exchange boards/drives/power supplies as needed. We could actually get mechanical parts to repair the Shugart/Tandon/Texas Peripherals drives. Those were some good times.
This was awesome 3 parter. I enjoyed the surprises 😮 and the successes. (Even though I'm not a CoCo fan). Great to see Tim too. Love Sibling Rivalries channel play, so fun!
Excellent sequence of videos. So nice to see this machine being brought back to life step by step. I would have performed the composite modification if I were you, to give to the Coco the image quality it deserves. I loved the conversation with Tim. Greetings to both of you and a happy new year from Athens, Greece.
Hey Adrian, that was such an engrossing series. You talked about MAME. If you really want to see what the MC6809BE is capable of, you should emulate a 512K or even a 1 or 2M Coco 3 with an emulated hard drive and OS-9 Level II on at least a 486DX2-66. It can pre-emptively multi-ttask with up to 15 80 x 24 high res text screens and also the 32 x 16 TermVDG screen. There was also a patch to OS-9 L2 that would boot directly into the 80 x 24 screen. There was also a patch to gfx2 that would boot Multi-Vue in high-res mode.
My CoCo experience: I bought a 4k CoCo, and before the day was out, I had put piggy-backed 16k DRAMs in it to boost it up to 32k. A while later (years), I ended up converting it to 64k (so it would run OS-9), and I found a CoCo-2 keyboard, and installed it in the CoCo-1 case. Good times last century!
It’s been literally 4 decades so things are slightly hazy these days but once I got a floppy drive and J&M floppy controller to add to my CoCo 1 I thought my grey 16K ECB NC Board version CoCo 1 did run some of a buddy’s OS9 floppies. Maybe I’d already done a 32K piggyback or 64K upgrade by then but I thought those came after I got my floppy drive.
Lovely interview, very well done, you make a very good interviewer, very natural and easy chat, i would definitely recommend doing it again if the opportunity comes up.
Haii @Adrian, nice vid and nice restoration of a unique machine again. I would have done a bit more, maybe keep those suggestion for a part 3/4 ;-) the drive are actually easy to dissassemble and bearing can sometime be restored with simple ptfe lube, but a replacement would be easy and cost under 10$ if you buy the bearings on amazon. The most critical missing part from your second drive can be 3d printed, I am 200% willign to print and send you this part free of charge if you are willing to save and use this drive. bona nota, while seemingly working, you monitor pcb might still have some bad filtering and there is a weird comportement i could observe when you turn it on and the deflection circuit kicks in(might be camera related issue though)
8-Bit-Danceparty-Demo on the Frankenstein, just so cute! The interview part is new, a little bit of a strange format for your channel but i liked it more than i thought i would. You are a great interview host. It all sounds as authentic as is so much appreciated from your channel. Big thumbs up from a german viewer.
I really didn’t know how an interview would go. It was amazing. It felt good to watch you guys geek out, I felt like I was there with you guys and we were all having fun. You asked the questions I think everyone wanted to ask. This series has been awesome and this was a hell of a way to end it. So few channels on any topic can get away with videos this long but I knew I’d watch every second - and I did. Merry Christmas Adrian!
There were 16K drams made that only needed +5v. These may have actually been 64k parts with only 1/4 of the memory being used, perhaps parts that were somewhat defective and laser jumpered on the die to deselect part of the ram. The 5v only 16k parts came out about the same time as the 64k parts. Without the schematic it might be hard to tell, but I suspect that there might be a way to jumper the board to run with the +5 volt only parts. Some of those jumpers are probably ONLY for the voltage select, and others for the address select. Buy using just a sub set of the jumpers you can probably get what you need, or maybe with some extra bodge wires.
Disk Extended BASIC 1.1 had several things over 1.0: 1) Fixes some bugs that occasionally trashed the directory (on track 17), and 2) It added the DOS command, used to boot a disk by typing DOS. This was mainly used to boot OS-9, but also booted some games, etc. The user didn't have to worry about figuring out what program to LOAD, RUN or LOADM - on disks set up for 1.1, you could just blindly type DOS no matter whether it was a game, productivity app or alternate OS.
1:10:44 "that really blew my mind as an Apple II user back at the same time as the CoCo was out, I wished I could have something as cool as that." OMG 🥺😢🤧 As a kid with a Coco I was happy with my computer but I had serious Apple II envy and so I wished I had one. I've never heard of anyone expressing the opposite. Even if you were only talking about the fast tape drive, that hit me in the feels. Thanks for a nice Christmas present. 🎄
If you could disassemble the drives to the point of there being no plastic or rubber components attached, you could submerge the assembly containing the spindles in a bucket of light oil (WD40 or similar) and let it soak a long time. Did that with a head-positioning stepper from an old hard-disk that was seized, smooth as butter now! (granted, I fully disassembled it, removed the bearings, and just soaked them, so YMMV, but I didn't remove the shields from the bearings)
Amazing content. Would love to see more on this machine. Like a proper composite mod (or an RF filter?), master power switch, and fixed drives?... and a custom case badge (where the model 4 logo goes) but that says it's a CoCo instead! Maybe get all the keys working? This thing is so dang cool!
I believe that Disk Extended Basic ROM 1.1 only adds the "DOS" command, which allows an easier boot into the OS-9 OS. (Yes there was an OS-9 "Level I" for the CoCo 1 & 2, and a "Level II" for the CoCo 3). Though I seem to recall there was a hacky way to get into OS-9 if you had ROM 1.0 without the DOS command.
Ah right -- yeah I'm pretty sure you can still load OS9 without that extra command, but it certainly is quicker and easier with it. I never looked into exactly what the improvement was with ROM 1.1.
I find it amazing that people like the Radio Shack manager tackled projects like this CoCo repack. Like you guys were saying, they had to be following magazine "how to" articles back in the day. At least where I live here in Newfoundland, there were no user groups per se, no internet of course. We had to rely on print magazines. Invariably, in rural areas like ours, these were often only carried by some local drug stores. I never had a CoCo, but whenever I was looking for current information on Commodore 64 programming, the good ol' Commodore magazine was my primary source for information on programming and all the current fabulous hardware from companies like CMD, etc ... which I hadn't a chance of getting at the time. Heck, with prices, I could barely afford 'em now! lol ... Adrian, thanks for the videos. Any chance of more CMD-related content?
Awesome interview, don't think I've seen a Frankenstein Coco before, thanks. Remember using a 6809 assembly language cartridge that required 16k ram with only 4k of ram to do programs that included programing an A/D chip in the Coco to make sounds.
I have vivid memories of my dads coco having an expansion slot thing on the side with black cartridges for the floppies and he put aluminum foil on the cartridges to cut down on the tv interference
Back in 1985, i walked into the computer room to do my homework in Basic. And found these TRS-80 computers. There was about 20 to 25 of these at each workstation. And I was able to do my work for my homework.
I think this is one of my favorite videos of the year. My dad (and by extension, me) had every 8-bit system except any TRS-80s, despite both of us being Radio Shack fans. I have such an appreciation for them, and someday when I have the room, hope to start my own collection (especially the systems that run Xenix). Anyhoo, thanks so much nothing of you (and Mike).
I'm surprised that you didn't check which jumpers change what, since it seems to me that it would be entirely possible to set the jumpers to some in-between configuration where some of them are set to 64K for the single 5V power supply and some are set to 16K to avoid the chips being duplicated across address spaces. Edit to add, there was a machine-code program (POKEd into RAM) which allowed you to turn the COCO into a serial buffer, using most of the remainder of the 64K RAM as the buffer. It was advertised as a way to put a surplus COCO to good use. Good if you had an older serial printer which was slow, since most text documents could be streamed to the buffer leaving your main computer free to do other tasks while the buffer unloaded itself to the printer. Of course, this was 'way back before multi-tasking OSs were commonplace, so printing from a program would tie up your computer until the printing process was finished.
I’ll add some anecdotes of mind relevant to the part of the interview where they talked about computer repairs at Radio Shack. I had a job in college around 20 years ago where I worked at the university’s help desk fixing computers. Staff, faculty, students, and in fact the public could bring in their computer for a “cheap” diagnosis or to directly fix known issues, do upgrades, factory resets, etc. Sometimes people would bring in laptops with broken power connectors or broken usb drives. We had another student employee who was comfortable soldering would do soldering repairs and had a very high success rate. The other part of the story was that beyond the most basic things like OS resets or swapping ram, our team wasn’t allowed to touch the Apple computers. I would sometimes go and hangout with the full time employees who were allowed to do Apple service work. They showed how thorough they had to be with paperwork with part numbers and serial numbers. They had to send back full motherboards before replacements would be received, etc. Apple had a very rigid process but the results were that you wouldn’t see the same computer in multiple times for repairs. One visit was usually sufficient, if not long due to shipping.
I have loved this series. I never used the Tandy Coco or its derivatives BITD but my friend in Primary school had a TRS- 80 original that we used to play games on. Fond memories.
For the first time an episode of Adrian's Digital Basement looked like a scene from an 80's sci fi dystopian movie where hacked together ancient computers are turned into a semi-functional unit.
You don't need to type DRIVE 0 at power up, as DECB defaults to that setting. When saving/loading, you only need to specify a drive number if using a different drive than the default.
You can also use the period instead of the slash / although the .BAS is optional as well as the :0 and the closing quotes are not necessary if you are not going to write anything else. SAVE"NAME EITHER LOAD"NAME
Fabulous show, it's a pity that the units could not be repaired, it's incredible to see our valued Tim Lidner, and enjoy our world of coco, something that seems fabulous to me is OS9 and Nitros 09, 2 operating systems that still exist and are very professional , which make the coco can be used in multitasking and everything in the 81, impressive. You can also use the period instead of the slash / although the .BAS is optional as well as the :0 and the closing quotes are not necessary if you are not going to write anything else. SAVE"NAME EITHER LOAD"NAME
Add a drop of fully synthetic, no detergents, oil down the motor shaft. The type of oil used in silent air compressors works well. Something like Sincom 32E or equivalent. I bought the Luve V version of it in an 8 oz. bottle. I use it for lubing cassette deck motors. It doesn't have a strong hydrocarbon motor oil smell and I think it plays well with most plastics. I have it in a flux dispensing bottle with a needle tip for small drop applications. Grease that works with plastics and metal: Molykote EM-30L. It works well around plastics, doesn't dry out or oxidize quickly and can be used around electrical connectors without problems. Oddly enough, it is sold in small containers by a garbage disposal company in New Jersey. They repackage the big industrial quantities into smaller consumer sizes which you can't get otherwise. Any type of lubricant containing silicone will oxidize into silica dioxide or sand which is very bad. It makes for a wonderful insulator that doesn't come off easily basically destroying contacts. Invest in a Hakko FR-301 desoldering gun. It is life changing for desoldering on occasion. A big step up would be a desoldering station but that may only be worthwhile if you were changing out all the capacitors on every board. I do that on cassette decks since quite often the audio path goes through a lot of questionable electrolytic capacitors. Love watching these!
Our Radio Shack also had a tech who could do all kinds of board-level repairs. I recall going in the back as a teen and seeing the disassembled electronics on the workbench. They would repair any electronics - even stuff they didn't sell. I always assumed that was just a normal service for Radio Shacks at the time (late 70's, early 80's).
I know that it is now a thing of the past, but I wondered if a lead based "paint" painted inside the case would have helped with RF shielding? I know in the past, many computers had a sort of "Faraday Cage" built over the motherboard to actually prevent RF leakage. Many systems like the Bally Astrocade, the "Heavy Sixer" or 6 switch Atari 2600, and others their "weight" was rather hefty because of the shielding. And many tinkerers and technicians had actually removed the cage due to trying to maintain it and having the cage often either soldered in and having to unsolder it ,or it was a type of "twist tab" you had to bend the tabs to line up with the holes and then remove the cage. Either way it was still a pain, and you won't often find a vintage computer or game console with the Faraday Cage still intact. But love your presentation!! It is always thorough, and shows the love many in the collector community do to keep these gems alive and running. I have a Commodore 128, TI99/4A, Coleco Adam, Mattel ECS add on for Intellivision II, and an Atari 800XL. And I often spend many hours learning and maintaining them and shows like this give me good tips on keeping them preserved.
Wow, you are such a good interviewer Adrian! I was, not gonna lie, a little trepidant about how it was going to be. But you’re a natural! Of course your existing lighting and multicamera skills helped, but the interview itself is like you’ve been doing it for years! Both presenting and interviewing - editing interviews are their own skill too, plenty of people who present fine alone still have awkward edits in their interviews.
A brilliant story to follow, and I loved your skills and experience. I have learned a lot as you went along. The computer now looks like something straight out of the game Fallout.'
Wow, so you weren't actually restoring this machine to its former "glory" after all, you were finishing it's build for the first time! Congratulations on getting it working as well as it is. That was quite a feat for such a basket case of a machine.
IBM PC's use a modified floppy pin-out. The original Shugart's pin-out had pins 10, 12, and 14 as Drive selects 0, 1 and 2 with pin 16 being the motor select. The twist in the PC ribbon cable swaps pin 10 for pin 16, and pin 12 for pin 14. Since pin 10 is Drive 0 Select on the first drive it is ignored by the first drive which is jumpered as Drive 1, but becomes pin 16 Motor Select on the second drive. Pin 12 on the first drive is the Drive 1 Select, since both drives are jumpered as Drive 1 the first drive see Pin 12 as selecting it. Pin 12 becomes pin 14 on the second drive, and pin 14 becomes pin 12 or drive select 1 and again the second drive is jumpered as Drive 1 also so it see pin 14 as pin 12 and is selected. In Shugart Drives, the jumpers in the drives are each jumpered differently and there is NO twist in the cables so pin 10, 12, 14 and 16 are the same connection on all drives. The first drive is jumpered as Drive 0, the second as Drive 1, the third as drive 2, and pin 32 is for the fourth drive select or drive select 3 on single-sided drives. In later double-sided configurations pin 32 was used as a side select, and some Shugart setups moved to using pin 6 as the fourth drive select or drive select 3. Tandy/TRS-80 Color Computer floppy cables from the factory did something slightly different. These ribbon cables had teeth removed from the connectors on the ribbon cable. The connector for the drive 0 had pin 12 and pin 14 removed so that if more than one drive select was selected on any of the drives, it could not feed back as drive select. This also meant many factory drives had all drive selects enable and the ribbon cable selected the drive. For drive, 1 pins 10 and 14 were removed from the ribbon cable connector. For drive 2, pins 10 and pins 12 were removed from the ribbon cable connector. Lastly for a third drive pin 10, pin 12 and pin 14 were removed from the ribbon cable connector. For single-sided drives pin 32 was removed for all drives except Drive 3, which used it as a drive select 3. In double-sided drive there could be no drive three as pin 32 was not used as a drive select and instead selected which side of the disk was read. Therefore all connectors had pin 32 connected for use as a side select. If you use a straight ribbon cable for a color computer, 4 single-sided drives or three double-sided drives can be attached. If using the original Tandy ribbon cable with teeth removed you must make sure the drive is either jumpered correctly for the connector it is plugged into OR has all drive selects jumpered. If it is a straight through cable is with out teeth removed, do not jumper all drive selects on any drives, unless you want it to respond as two different drives, doing so if done incorrectly may cause more than one drive to be selected. Also note on Shugart or TRS-80 drives that with the drive select be run straight through to all drive, all motors will run at the same time. THIS IS NORMAL. IBM avoided this by using the twist in the cablem which also reduced drive count per cable to 2 drives rather than 4 drives per cable.
I'd like to see a restoration of an even more mysterious computer called a Compucolor or it's newer models under the name of Intecolor. Getting your hands on one is another storie.
I usually shy away from interviews on YT because they feel a bit stilted and not very natural, but this was a fantastic interview - great flow, well shot and well edited - I know you don't need to hear this commentary from just another viewer on UA-cam, but this was really good. Good stuff!
I frikin love this channel, over the years it continues to go from strength to strength. Adrian is a powerhouse of production.
> over the years it continues to go from "strength to strength"
That's an odd way to put it (assuming English is not your first language). I think you meant the channel keeps getting better and I would agree with you.
@@rommix0 Actually, English probably is his first language, specifically the English known as British English. I read several magazines that are based in the UK and you see the phrase "strength to strength" used quite often in the magazine articles. I assumed from the context it means what you stated.
@@michaelburns8073 it’s a little more subtle actually than just better and better! It does mean that, but with the specific tilt of branching-out into new skills/specialties/features. It’s generally said about a set of skills rather than just one specific skill. :)
English is like the morning and the evening star.
You might struggle to believe this but
I still remember clearly going to a high school special assembly in the gym back in '65
so the whole school could be exposed to "Elmer Gantry",
the film from which the above line would be a quote
if Love replaced English.
I was going to say something about English being like an organism
that has adapted to different ecological niches and
been changed in the adaptive process but
I couldn't find the words and became distracted.
I got a Superboard II, in '78
then a KIM1
then a SYM then
built my own 6502 computer on a breadboard before
wire wrapping a version to control lights for a rock band.
Then I got my CoCo and
what a great leap forward was that larger register set, eh
and how bright the future looked.
Now I sit here in the future with umpteen billion transistors in the box beside me
and dead calm LCD screens arrayed before me
that play Crysis at a hundred frames per sec 6000 pixels wide
feeling quite nostalgic after watching this video and
regretting not having the mind of a collector.
A major change in the 1.1 ROM was the syntax of the COPY command. I wrote a BASIC program to copy every file on a disk to a disk in the other drive. I had to check the ROM version and goto the subroutine with correct syntax for the ROM detected. Yeah, CoCo was notorious for r.f. interference. I used to have my coax wrapped round a ferrite rod.
Wow!, now ADB is a more complete show. Adrian is a great host and the interview was refreshing. Hope this happen more often.
Thanks, Adrian. I really appreciate you diving deeper into some of the questions I and others brought up. Nice work getting Frank (you know a machine that unique needs a name) back up and running again.
Hi Adrian. Several things you can do to try to reduce the interference:
1) shorten any leads to/from the CRT. Otherwise, they’re just big, fat antennae picking up noise!
2) replace the thin wire from the CRT aquadag to the CRT board ground with copper strap; this’ll give a much better ground, and minimize ground loops.
3) if the CoCo motherboard came with an RF shield, put it back on! That’s what it’s for. Or get some from a dead C64 and try to make an RF shield for this mobo.
4) replace the individual wires going to the tuner (I presume these are power & ground) with coax, with the grounded (shield) side to the black wire, and the positive supply (red wire) to the inner conductor. Again, make this as short as reasonable and still have enough slack so you don’t stress the connections when removing the computer case for servicing.
5) disconnect any unneeded antenna wire from the TV tuner; connect up ONLY the computer’s RF to it, or - better yet - do a composite mod if the CRT board is not a hot chassis. This way, you can bypass the tuner entirely, and run the composite to the CRT board’s I.F. strip.
HTH! ❤️
I'm pleasantly surprised you got it back up and running Adrian.
Regarding the frozen drive spindles;
I have found that old dried grease/oil responds almost instantly to a couple drops of MEK. Pour a little in a tiny tip bottle
For anyone else curious like me, MEK is Methyl Ethyl Ketone, also known as Butanone.
@@andrewdunbar828 Can buy it at hardware store. For thinning Roofing Tar, cleaning roofing and shingling tools and I think something with Auto Body repair and painting.
Lighter fluid can substitute it's compatibility with paints and plastic in electronics I'm not 100% sure of.
Mek dries so fast it so far hasn't affected anything beyond what I'm cleaning grease and goo wise.
Lighter fluid can cause labels to release if it's spilled
@@andrewdunbar828 also worth mentioning is that it's fairly nasty stuff and you should wear some PPE when using it.
I may have missed it, but an odd aspect of the 'Frankenstein’ nature of this beast is that while a TV tuner has been moded into the case, the tube itself presumably is from a monitor - or why would a monochrome screen be green. The original tube from the case, maybe?
But what a fantastically eccentric machine - have loved watching this little series. I know so little about the CoCo series of computers - although a friend of mine from my first job was very passionate about his Dragon-32.
There is a reason that the Coco disk drives spin up both drives when either is getting accessed - if you are doing a COPY or BACKUP, they would slow down if they had to wait for each other to get up to speed. So all motors for all drives hooked up (up to 3 double sided if you put new connectors on with all teeth, or 4 single sided) turn on at the same time, so they are all up to speed at the same time, and keep running while reading/writing.
My father designed and built the ACORN based on the 6800/68000 but sold and modified the COCO 64. My machine was a repack built out of a COCO 1 with a hard drive control 3.25 drive, composite video all jammed into a VT100 case. NOW…. Adrenal if you want a all the manuals for A SWTPC and a fully operating one with peripherals but WAIT THERE’S more…. He has COCO 2 doc, mods, PC board designs…. AND his personal ACORN with all the goodies (later OS and software using PROM to RAM transfer etc). He is in his late 80’s and he wants it to go to someone who will appreciate it (Mom just wants to divest of things). Let me know with a come et on how we can connect. You could a heck of chat with a guy who is a self taught engineer from before transistors and was key in the Motorola digital age! Cheers, Peace.
There was a guy who came up to the north country (Canadian oil patch) in the early 80s trying to sell a CoCo hybrid called the Acorn or was it the Apricot? I'm not sure, but it was at a trade show and I got a chance to check it out.. the big thing was "sprite graphics" and the ability to run CP/m. The motorola 68000 processor in tandem with a Z80 or was it the Hitachi variant HD64180 with 128k maximum memory. There were some pretty esoteric designs back then, just no real conformity.. except for the CP/m roms.
Adrian, your presentations just get more and more compelling. This was fantastic. Such a great teacher!
LOVE this video! Great interview as well. I actually worked at a Radio Shack Service Center, 40-7761 in Ft Myers, FL. We absolutely did board level repair on RS equipment. I'm kicking myself that I don't have the manuals anymore... We did all sorts of repairs for RS/Tandy equipment, Compaq, HP, IBM, Acer, Oki, Apple (That was special to my center because I was a certified Apple Tech). Great times, great memories. Sad that it's all gone now.
The RCT can test the MCM4517 and also all other variants, e.g the MCM4516 (note that for the menu usually the Intel labeling is used). So use the Intel 2118 setting to test the MCM4517.
@Mr Guru To be honest, it's not obvious that this IC is an "Intel 2118". With other testers you are forced to look for the IC in a list and then enter a number for the test. With the RCT you get lazy because it shows the most common type in the display and you don't even look at the compatibility list. ;)
@Mr Guru textbook gamma
Great series, thanks. Not looking for full restore but I'd love to see you actually try to repair those disk drives, including finding a way to disassemble the spindles, etc. to re-lubricate them. BTW, when I lubricate old stuff (stuck box and other fans), I use lightweight synthetic oil, seems to last a lot longer and not harden like petroleum based ones regardless of original thinness.
I'm amazed what people did back in the day. Then again I'm amazed what people do today! Awesome repair!
The ingenuity of the original creator of the Repack is amazing. I want to see you Composite mod this computer Adrian!
Adrian, you're a great interviewer with a very easy style; I'd love to see you do more!
I think you should make this an ongoing project. Keep upgrading it in the spirit of the original as and when you get suitable parts. Turn it into the ultimate Frankencoco.
I snagged a pristine looking CoCo 1 off eBay that ended up not working and ran into the same issue with schematics when it turned out to be a 26-3002A. If you scroll down a bit more on Color Computer Archive, look for a file called Color Computer Redesign Schematic that seems to be a preliminary schematic for the Rev F boards. Not sure if it's exactly the same as the ones they ended up selling, but it looks a lot closer.
Excellent video - well done! More guests in the basement please!!!
For the drives, since you have them spinning, you can partially disassemble them so you can get access to the EDGE of the bearing, and use something like WD40 and get it to wick into the bearing, it helps soften up the grease (I tend to use a custom mix of alcohol and grease to make it REALLY thin and work it into things) yes this gets messy but helps the bearings free up and move again.
I love that you went to so much trouble. And that it was Color Computer related. Color Computers were how I started and I still have a lot of love for them.
Nice to see the CoCo get some love. 😊 It needs that. Very underrated little machine!
I had the pleasure of using this TRS-80 in high school (1982/83) for my “Computer Math” class. Learned GW-Basic and had a ball. Thanks for this video.
Yes!! Incredible. Love it. Great repair video and great machine.
Related: in highschool (grade 8), a friend's dad created a custom wooden shell for the family's Coco 1, because the chassis had cracked.
It included a 11" color TV, two floppy drives (flat), and a 3rd party keyboard (to replace the chicklet keyboard). I think he even wired in a powerbar in the back for a one-switch-for-all.
The machine was wonderful to type on, and having the floppy drives under the TV was great.
And the whole thing could be lifted with a couple of elegant metal handles on the side.
Loved the interview. Wouldn't mind seeing interviews at the end of a series in the future.
I have even more respect for your skills after seeing this. Great video series.
TRS-80 COCO II with disk drive was my first computer. My second computer was a Tandy 1000TX. It is what most likely lead me to my 25 plus years of IT.
Adrian, a tip from an old TV repairman. Using the CRC cleaner on the tuner will leave all the contacts with bare metal exposed and will corrode fairly quickly. Back in the day I tried many different tuner cleaners and what worked best and KEPT WORKING was WD40. Don't be afraid of soaking it down; with hundreds of TV's over a period of 5 years in the business I never had a problem.
With regards to the disk drive slowing down, I also repaired tape decks that used the same motor belt drive system and I would be willing to bet that the belt is slipping.
Nice Job!, as a restorer of old tube radios and equipment I enjoy seeing old tech come back to life.
Great series on this odd repack. I'm starting to think perhaps the memory swap out happened as an attempt to fix what ultimately was a bad CPU. Then, not only did you have a non-working CPU, but the wrong memory installed as well.
That might have been the case. I don't think Mike remembered exactly what happened to this machine (although I didn't talk to him directly.) Maybe he'll comment on this video with more insight. :-)
I'm thinking because there were multiple jumpers, maybe one or more of them controls the voltages (maybe the wire wrapped one?) while other jumpers tell the machine how much RAM it has. Maybe if only some were changed to 16k the voltages would still be correct for the original chips.
The Cocostein! Only you make it possible to work! I have so many projects in my retro room that require such work !
My first computer was a CoCo 1 with 4K of RAM and the revision D motherboard. It does my heart good to see that the CoCo is still getting love these days. Long live the CoCo!
Everytime I see a TRS 80 on your channel, it brings me back to college days. Our Programming class had to use those to put in Basic code. I had to use them too. Until I got my Commodore 64. Also in our programming room, there were like 20 TRS-80 systems. It was really nice, they were all good working, and always very clean. I met the girl who had to clean them all the time. If I could afford a COCO TRS-80, I would love to have one.
Hey Adrian! When I worked for Radio Shack, we had printed catalogs that we used to find cross-referenced Radio Shack part numbers for other branded products. This is 10 or 15 volumes set that each store had. Surely someone saved one somewhere!
Just wanted to say thinks for the memories. I grew up with a Coco 1 and 2 in my home and model 4 in my classroom so this is such a blast from the past :)
I worked at two stores. One a franchise (oregon), the other a company store (Dallas). We sent all repairs to authorized service centers (1977 to 1980). Many stores were associated privately owned local stores. They often had their own repair techs.
Ah that's an interesting distincting!
I worked in both consumer and computer repair centers til the early 90's. We serviced both company and dealer stores. We had the ability to do component level repair on computers or exchange boards/drives/power supplies as needed. We could actually get mechanical parts to repair the Shugart/Tandon/Texas Peripherals drives. Those were some good times.
This was awesome 3 parter. I enjoyed the surprises 😮 and the successes. (Even though I'm not a CoCo fan). Great to see Tim too. Love Sibling Rivalries channel play, so fun!
Great post - discovered Sibling Rivalry a few months ago and am loving it too.
This vid was wonderful from so many angles. Love the first guest spot. Thank you, Sir Adrian!
Great series. Also, thanks for having Tim on the show, I've seen his name around quite a bit but don't think I've seen him interviewed.
Nice switch up with the interview. Would be awesome to get more backstory on other oddballs that come through the basement!
Excellent sequence of videos. So nice to see this machine being brought back to life step by step. I would have performed the composite modification if I were you, to give to the Coco the image quality it deserves. I loved the conversation with Tim. Greetings to both of you and a happy new year from Athens, Greece.
Great video! Hope you get to do more interviews sometime. You’re a great, knowledgeable interviewer 😁
Great interview, really enjoyed the back story. More please?
Hey Adrian, that was such an engrossing series. You talked about MAME. If you really want to see what the MC6809BE is capable of, you should emulate a 512K or even a 1 or 2M Coco 3 with an emulated hard drive and OS-9 Level II on at least a 486DX2-66. It can pre-emptively multi-ttask with up to 15 80 x 24 high res text screens and also the 32 x 16 TermVDG screen. There was also a patch to OS-9 L2 that would boot directly into the 80 x 24 screen. There was also a patch to gfx2 that would boot Multi-Vue in high-res mode.
My CoCo experience: I bought a 4k CoCo, and before the day was out, I had put piggy-backed 16k DRAMs in it to boost it up to 32k. A while later (years), I ended up converting it to 64k (so it would run OS-9), and I found a CoCo-2 keyboard, and installed it in the CoCo-1 case. Good times last century!
It’s been literally 4 decades so things are slightly hazy these days but once I got a floppy drive and J&M floppy controller to add to my CoCo 1 I thought my grey 16K ECB NC Board version CoCo 1 did run some of a buddy’s OS9 floppies.
Maybe I’d already done a 32K piggyback or 64K upgrade by then but I thought those came after I got my floppy drive.
Lovely interview, very well done, you make a very good interviewer, very natural and easy chat, i would definitely recommend doing it again if the opportunity comes up.
Haii @Adrian, nice vid and nice restoration of a unique machine again. I would have done a bit more, maybe keep those suggestion for a part 3/4 ;-) the drive are actually easy to dissassemble and bearing can sometime be restored with simple ptfe lube, but a replacement would be easy and cost under 10$ if you buy the bearings on amazon. The most critical missing part from your second drive can be 3d printed, I am 200% willign to print and send you this part free of charge if you are willing to save and use this drive. bona nota, while seemingly working, you monitor pcb might still have some bad filtering and there is a weird comportement i could observe when you turn it on and the deflection circuit kicks in(might be camera related issue though)
8-Bit-Danceparty-Demo on the Frankenstein, just so cute! The interview part is new, a little bit of a strange format for your channel but i liked it more than i thought i would. You are a great interview host. It all sounds as authentic as is so much appreciated from your channel. Big thumbs up from a german viewer.
I really didn’t know how an interview would go. It was amazing. It felt good to watch you guys geek out, I felt like I was there with you guys and we were all having fun. You asked the questions I think everyone wanted to ask. This series has been awesome and this was a hell of a way to end it. So few channels on any topic can get away with videos this long but I knew I’d watch every second - and I did. Merry Christmas Adrian!
Thank you! My first computer was a CoCo 3! I ❤️ these three part series.
Loved the interview. Please don't hesitate about doing them in the future; you've got a knack for them.
There were 16K drams made that only needed +5v. These may have actually been 64k parts with only 1/4 of the memory being used, perhaps parts that were somewhat defective and laser jumpered on the die to deselect part of the ram. The 5v only 16k parts came out about the same time as the 64k parts.
Without the schematic it might be hard to tell, but I suspect that there might be a way to jumper the board to run with the +5 volt only parts. Some of those jumpers are probably ONLY for the voltage select, and others for the address select. Buy using just a sub set of the jumpers you can probably get what you need, or maybe with some extra bodge wires.
It might be the case -- the schematics would allow me to tell right away
Disk Extended BASIC 1.1 had several things over 1.0: 1) Fixes some bugs that occasionally trashed the directory (on track 17), and 2) It added the DOS command, used to boot a disk by typing DOS. This was mainly used to boot OS-9, but also booted some games, etc. The user didn't have to worry about figuring out what program to LOAD, RUN or LOADM - on disks set up for 1.1, you could just blindly type DOS no matter whether it was a game, productivity app or alternate OS.
Ah when I was playing with emulators a couple of years ago I found the DOS command on the Coco and the equivalent BOOT command on the Dragon32.
Really enjoyed the interview as well, great job Adrian!
That was a lovely interview, Adrian. Very natural
I am completely on the edge of my seat watching this!!!! OMG!!!!
1:10:44 "that really blew my mind as an Apple II user back at the same time as the CoCo was out, I wished I could have something as cool as that." OMG 🥺😢🤧 As a kid with a Coco I was happy with my computer but I had serious Apple II envy and so I wished I had one. I've never heard of anyone expressing the opposite. Even if you were only talking about the fast tape drive, that hit me in the feels. Thanks for a nice Christmas present. 🎄
Loved this series, you triggered a whole bunch of memories that have been buried for 4 decades.
Nice to see a guest appearance of Tim. Really added to the video.
Tim is an adorable nerd and I loved your interview!!!❤
If you could disassemble the drives to the point of there being no plastic or rubber components attached, you could submerge the assembly containing the spindles in a bucket of light oil (WD40 or similar) and let it soak a long time.
Did that with a head-positioning stepper from an old hard-disk that was seized, smooth as butter now!
(granted, I fully disassembled it, removed the bearings, and just soaked them, so YMMV, but I didn't remove the shields from the bearings)
Great interview! I would love to see more like this!!!!
Amazing content. Would love to see more on this machine. Like a proper composite mod (or an RF filter?), master power switch, and fixed drives?... and a custom case badge (where the model 4 logo goes) but that says it's a CoCo instead!
Maybe get all the keys working? This thing is so dang cool!
I believe that Disk Extended Basic ROM 1.1 only adds the "DOS" command, which allows an easier boot into the OS-9 OS. (Yes there was an OS-9 "Level I" for the CoCo 1 & 2, and a "Level II" for the CoCo 3). Though I seem to recall there was a hacky way to get into OS-9 if you had ROM 1.0 without the DOS command.
Ah right -- yeah I'm pretty sure you can still load OS9 without that extra command, but it certainly is quicker and easier with it. I never looked into exactly what the improvement was with ROM 1.1.
@@adriansdigitalbasement Yes, there is a little Disk BASIC program printed in the OS-9 manual that boots OS-9 if you have the 1.0 ROM.
What a brilliant 3 parter. Thanks. Happy Christmas Adrian
I find it amazing that people like the Radio Shack manager tackled projects like this CoCo repack. Like you guys were saying, they had to be following magazine "how to" articles back in the day. At least where I live here in Newfoundland, there were no user groups per se, no internet of course. We had to rely on print magazines. Invariably, in rural areas like ours, these were often only carried by some local drug stores.
I never had a CoCo, but whenever I was looking for current information on Commodore 64 programming, the good ol' Commodore magazine was my primary source for information on programming and all the current fabulous hardware from companies like CMD, etc ... which I hadn't a chance of getting at the time. Heck, with prices, I could barely afford 'em now! lol ... Adrian, thanks for the videos. Any chance of more CMD-related content?
Awesome interview, don't think I've seen a Frankenstein Coco before, thanks. Remember using a 6809 assembly language cartridge that required 16k ram with only 4k of ram to do programs that included programing an A/D chip in the Coco to make sounds.
Great vid. Love the wrap up interview. It's always nice to hear some history and context for a machine like this.
I have vivid memories of my dads coco having an expansion slot thing on the side with black cartridges for the floppies and he put aluminum foil on the cartridges to cut down on the tv interference
Back in 1985, i walked into the computer room to do my homework in Basic. And found these TRS-80 computers. There was about 20 to 25 of these at each workstation. And I was able to do my work for my homework.
I think this is one of my favorite videos of the year. My dad (and by extension, me) had every 8-bit system except any TRS-80s, despite both of us being Radio Shack fans. I have such an appreciation for them, and someday when I have the room, hope to start my own collection (especially the systems that run Xenix). Anyhoo, thanks so much nothing of you (and Mike).
This was so much fun! I wish you'd also interviewed Mike, too, though!
This might be the best series of video's you've done. Love the interview at the end.
I'm surprised that you didn't check which jumpers change what, since it seems to me that it would be entirely possible to set the jumpers to some in-between configuration where some of them are set to 64K for the single 5V power supply and some are set to 16K to avoid the chips being duplicated across address spaces.
Edit to add, there was a machine-code program (POKEd into RAM) which allowed you to turn the COCO into a serial buffer, using most of the remainder of the 64K RAM as the buffer. It was advertised as a way to put a surplus COCO to good use. Good if you had an older serial printer which was slow, since most text documents could be streamed to the buffer leaving your main computer free to do other tasks while the buffer unloaded itself to the printer.
Of course, this was 'way back before multi-tasking OSs were commonplace, so printing from a program would tie up your computer until the printing process was finished.
And this is why Adrian's is the best of all the retrocomputing channels.
Loved the interview
I’ll add some anecdotes of mind relevant to the part of the interview where they talked about computer repairs at Radio Shack.
I had a job in college around 20 years ago where I worked at the university’s help desk fixing computers. Staff, faculty, students, and in fact the public could bring in their computer for a “cheap” diagnosis or to directly fix known issues, do upgrades, factory resets, etc. Sometimes people would bring in laptops with broken power connectors or broken usb drives. We had another student employee who was comfortable soldering would do soldering repairs and had a very high success rate.
The other part of the story was that beyond the most basic things like OS resets or swapping ram, our team wasn’t allowed to touch the Apple computers. I would sometimes go and hangout with the full time employees who were allowed to do Apple service work. They showed how thorough they had to be with paperwork with part numbers and serial numbers. They had to send back full motherboards before replacements would be received, etc. Apple had a very rigid process but the results were that you wouldn’t see the same computer in multiple times for repairs. One visit was usually sufficient, if not long due to shipping.
I have loved this series. I never used the Tandy Coco or its derivatives BITD but my friend in Primary school had a TRS- 80 original that we used to play games on. Fond memories.
For the first time an episode of Adrian's Digital Basement looked like a scene from an 80's sci fi dystopian movie where hacked together ancient computers are turned into a semi-functional unit.
You don't need to type DRIVE 0 at power up, as DECB defaults to that setting.
When saving/loading, you only need to specify a drive number if using a different drive than the default.
You can also use the period instead of the slash / although the .BAS is optional as well as the :0 and the closing quotes are not necessary if you are not going to write anything else.
SAVE"NAME
EITHER
LOAD"NAME
Really cool series and really enjoyable interview. Thanks so much for sharing.
Fabulous show, it's a pity that the units could not be repaired, it's incredible to see our valued Tim Lidner, and enjoy our world of coco, something that seems fabulous to me is OS9 and Nitros 09, 2 operating systems that still exist and are very professional , which make the coco can be used in multitasking and everything in the 81, impressive.
You can also use the period instead of the slash / although the .BAS is optional as well as the :0 and the closing quotes are not necessary if you are not going to write anything else.
SAVE"NAME
EITHER
LOAD"NAME
What you've actually created is a "Big Bang" detector out of a TRS80 4? True dat! Very impressive A-man
Look at that background cosmic radiation!
Add a drop of fully synthetic, no detergents, oil down the motor shaft. The type of oil used in silent air compressors works well. Something like Sincom 32E or equivalent. I bought the Luve V version of it in an 8 oz. bottle. I use it for lubing cassette deck motors. It doesn't have a strong hydrocarbon motor oil smell and I think it plays well with most plastics. I have it in a flux dispensing bottle with a needle tip for small drop applications.
Grease that works with plastics and metal: Molykote EM-30L. It works well around plastics, doesn't dry out or oxidize quickly and can be used around electrical connectors without problems. Oddly enough, it is sold in small containers by a garbage disposal company in New Jersey. They repackage the big industrial quantities into smaller consumer sizes which you can't get otherwise. Any type of lubricant containing silicone will oxidize into silica dioxide or sand which is very bad. It makes for a wonderful insulator that doesn't come off easily basically destroying contacts.
Invest in a Hakko FR-301 desoldering gun. It is life changing for desoldering on occasion. A big step up would be a desoldering station but that may only be worthwhile if you were changing out all the capacitors on every board. I do that on cassette decks since quite often the audio path goes through a lot of questionable electrolytic capacitors.
Love watching these!
Really great video! Fun interview with Tim too! Thanks you both!!
Are you not participating in DOScember? Im quite surprised to not see anything from you, being one of the top retro channels of all time.
Great video Adrian. I like your little sour cream storage compartment too. :)
You should totally get more guests, you're very good at interviewing people!
Our Radio Shack also had a tech who could do all kinds of board-level repairs. I recall going in the back as a teen and seeing the disassembled electronics on the workbench. They would repair any electronics - even stuff they didn't sell. I always assumed that was just a normal service for Radio Shacks at the time (late 70's, early 80's).
Really fun video. Definitely one of your best. Very interesting.
I know that it is now a thing of the past, but I wondered if a lead based "paint" painted inside the case would have helped with RF shielding? I know in the past, many computers had a sort of "Faraday Cage" built over the motherboard to actually prevent RF leakage. Many systems like the Bally Astrocade, the "Heavy Sixer" or 6 switch Atari 2600, and others their "weight" was rather hefty because of the shielding. And many tinkerers and technicians had actually removed the cage due to trying to maintain it and having the cage often either soldered in and having to unsolder it ,or it was a type of "twist tab" you had to bend the tabs to line up with the holes and then remove the cage.
Either way it was still a pain, and you won't often find a vintage computer or game console with the Faraday Cage still intact. But love your presentation!! It is always thorough, and shows the love many in the collector community do to keep these gems alive and running. I have a Commodore 128, TI99/4A, Coleco Adam, Mattel ECS add on for Intellivision II, and an Atari 800XL. And I often spend many hours learning and maintaining them and shows like this give me good tips on keeping them preserved.
Wow, you are such a good interviewer Adrian! I was, not gonna lie, a little trepidant about how it was going to be. But you’re a natural!
Of course your existing lighting and multicamera skills helped, but the interview itself is like you’ve been doing it for years! Both presenting and interviewing - editing interviews are their own skill too, plenty of people who present fine alone still have awkward edits in their interviews.
A brilliant story to follow, and I loved your skills and experience. I have learned a lot as you went along. The computer now looks like something straight out of the game Fallout.'
Another excellent video! Really enjoyed the interview, that worked really well.
I just LOVE this FrankenCoCo, it is the ONLY CoCo i ever wished i had.
Wow, so you weren't actually restoring this machine to its former "glory" after all, you were finishing it's build for the first time!
Congratulations on getting it working as well as it is. That was quite a feat for such a basket case of a machine.
IBM PC's use a modified floppy pin-out. The original Shugart's pin-out had pins 10, 12, and 14 as Drive selects 0, 1 and 2 with pin 16 being the motor select. The twist in the PC ribbon cable swaps pin 10 for pin 16, and pin 12 for pin 14. Since pin 10 is Drive 0 Select on the first drive it is ignored by the first drive which is jumpered as Drive 1, but becomes pin 16 Motor Select on the second drive. Pin 12 on the first drive is the Drive 1 Select, since both drives are jumpered as Drive 1 the first drive see Pin 12 as selecting it. Pin 12 becomes pin 14 on the second drive, and pin 14 becomes pin 12 or drive select 1 and again the second drive is jumpered as Drive 1 also so it see pin 14 as pin 12 and is selected.
In Shugart Drives, the jumpers in the drives are each jumpered differently and there is NO twist in the cables so pin 10, 12, 14 and 16 are the same connection on all drives. The first drive is jumpered as Drive 0, the second as Drive 1, the third as drive 2, and pin 32 is for the fourth drive select or drive select 3 on single-sided drives. In later double-sided configurations pin 32 was used as a side select, and some Shugart setups moved to using pin 6 as the fourth drive select or drive select 3.
Tandy/TRS-80 Color Computer floppy cables from the factory did something slightly different. These ribbon cables had teeth removed from the connectors on the ribbon cable. The connector for the drive 0 had pin 12 and pin 14 removed so that if more than one drive select was selected on any of the drives, it could not feed back as drive select. This also meant many factory drives had all drive selects enable and the ribbon cable selected the drive. For drive, 1 pins 10 and 14 were removed from the ribbon cable connector. For drive 2, pins 10 and pins 12 were removed from the ribbon cable connector. Lastly for a third drive pin 10, pin 12 and pin 14 were removed from the ribbon cable connector. For single-sided drives pin 32 was removed for all drives except Drive 3, which used it as a drive select 3. In double-sided drive there could be no drive three as pin 32 was not used as a drive select and instead selected which side of the disk was read. Therefore all connectors had pin 32 connected for use as a side select.
If you use a straight ribbon cable for a color computer, 4 single-sided drives or three double-sided drives can be attached. If using the original Tandy ribbon cable with teeth removed you must make sure the drive is either jumpered correctly for the connector it is plugged into OR has all drive selects jumpered. If it is a straight through cable is with out teeth removed, do not jumper all drive selects on any drives, unless you want it to respond as two different drives, doing so if done incorrectly may cause more than one drive to be selected. Also note on Shugart or TRS-80 drives that with the drive select be run straight through to all drive, all motors will run at the same time. THIS IS NORMAL. IBM avoided this by using the twist in the cablem which also reduced drive count per cable to 2 drives rather than 4 drives per cable.
I'd like to see a restoration of an even more mysterious computer called a Compucolor or it's newer models under the name of Intecolor. Getting your hands on one is another storie.