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Volume 1, ISSUE 8

November 2005

Welcome everyone to the November issue of the CoCo Lounge online Magazine. This month officially marks our 1 year anniversary on the web. I do have so much plans for the birthday, but just physically not enough time to do them.
This issue, I will take the time to "go back" and tell you all how this site came to be.
1982-83
I was 12 or 13 years old at the time and now the memory is a bit "fuzzy" on the exact year that I was introduced to the CoCo, but I had a friend at the time named Kevin Schubert (hopefully I spelled that right, I wonder where he is today, the last I heard he was working for InterTan in about 1989). He was the first person I knew with a full office desk in his bedroom and a Computer! He showed me wonderfully stuff with his old gray CoCo. BBS systems and what we could do with it. We talked for hours and he showed me how to "Piggyback" the chips to get 32K. He was only a year or 2 older than me, but he was my first "computer Mentor". Up until this time, I had only experienced the PET at school, and no one knew anything about them, we had to figure out how to make them do anything ourselves.
83-84
My cousin's got a Commodore 64 for Christmas, and I had played a lot of games on it. they even had a floppy drive. After a while, my dad was thinking about getting a computer, and another cousin had bought a CoCo 2 and had ton's of games on tape. So my dad was procrastinating on which system to buy. I was bugging also for a CoCo and Kevin had a few friends now at Radio Shack. They had found an older 16K (I believe) CoCo 1 in the warehouse and could not sell it on the showroom floor, because the CoCo 2 had been out for a while. Dad picked it up for a song. He also got a CCR-81 cassette deck (which is still kicking around today) and a few games (downland , and Return of the Jedi was some of the favorites).
I learned Basic programming and to my surprise, so did my dad. He even created a program to pick the lotto 6/49 numbers for us, and created a cool opening screen for it. As all things do though, the "Fad" of having a computer, and the fact that we had to continually switch between it and the Intellivision on the TV, died out. I eventually hooked the CoCo up in my room and kept buying old TV's at yard sales (which always blew up and almost started a few fires) to work on the CoCo, but I never had a modem or a disk drive.
Eventually the CoCo got packed up in a closet, as I went to high school, and my passion for computers was put on hold, as there was no computer geeks in my peer group. Kevin and I had stopped hanging out for some reason and we just drifted apart. To this day, I still don't know what happened to our CoCo, buy I suspect Mom (as all Mothers do) threw it out while cleaning one day.
But, my passion for the CoCo never really died. Fast forward to 1998. When I first got on the web, one night I was surfing. I am a big history buff and found the CoCo community was still around. About 2000, I found Cloud 9. It wasn't until Brian Hahn, working for him at the computer store, that my CoCo fever started again.
Anybody who has met Brian, knows he is the "Tandy" man. He is a walking encyclopedia on Tandy computers (except for the CoCo, strangely enough). He decided to make 8bit-micro.com and was always trying to get me "into" the CoCo again. I ordered a few old CoCo's off ebay and built the ordinal CoCo page for 8bit-micro. At that time I was more into collecting all the Intellivision stuff and even started to collect the Aquarius, because of its connection to the Intellivision.
At this time I started to learn about the CoCo "other" life with a disk drive and OS-9. I learn about Multi-Vue, and life after 16K, and always wanted an excuse to get a new CoCo 3 from Cloud 9.
Fast Forward to November 13, 2004. Brian and I were on the phone and were talking about some of the CoCo stuff I had seen on E-bay. He suggested that I "Get Off my butt" and build a complete website like his about the CoCo. He even offered me this Sub-domain. I knew I had to not only offer advice, but I actually had to use the CoCo and get back into it. So I started to buy just about everything I could on E-bay. I finally sent Mark a Money order to Cloud 9 for a "New" CoCo 3 and 512K upgrade. I spent so much money on Disk Drives, trying to get one of each model. I needed to stock the online store. The web site slowly progressed from one that matched the look of 8bit-micro, to evolve into what you see here. I have had e-mail from all over the world - Australia to Germany.

I have yet so much more to do! I wanted a new look for the 1st birthday, and I wanted to put up a CoCo BBS, running on a CoCo. I also wanted to set up a physical museum of all the CoCo's on display and working. Maybe in the next few years I will have this done, but it seems work and life must take priority for now (until I win the lottery ;))

The Long Road Ahead : Confessions of a newbie PART 4 . -by Glen VanDenBiggelaar

I write this latest on Halloween. Tonight all the kids come out in full force for some candy-great gig. Surprisingly, the weather has held and there is no snow on the ground yet! It could be a good night for the kids after all.

This month, I have not worked on my CoCo3 that much, other than testing disks before I ship them on the online store, but this weekend proved rather educational, none the less. I had to move my CoCo stock out of my storage area, and my friend also let me his Nikon D70 digital Camera, for the site. I also came across some old 13" color TV's for free, so I grabbed one and decided to make a CoCo 2 work Station, and run my OS-09 level 1 disks.
I had not taken inventory in a while, nor nave I done any re-stocking from E-bay in months, as money has been tight. As a result, I found I was down two only 2 CoCo 2's left. One a 16K 26-3027, and a 64K 26-3127. Neither of these models, I particularly like, as I dislike the "Melted" Keyboard. I was going to set up my pride- the white 64K CoCo 1, but my multi-pak didn't match it.
I tore down the "3127" and made my "teardown" page and put it all back together and ran the diagnostic Cart on it. Everything checked out and I decided to go with it. I had no seen many of my games in color, as the CM-8 displays most in B&W and this was a treat.
Last night I dug out my Cassette deck and actually hooked it up to go through all of the Cassettes I have in stock. I have a love / hate relationship with the cassette deck. I love to hate it, but I only found 1 tape that would not work. It was Donkey King, But luckily, I had it on another tape and that loaded just fine. I also loaded up Zaxxon for the first time. Wow, these two games were great. I remember wanting Zaxxon for the Intellivision and was so disappointed by how much it was not zaxxon and how it sucked. These 2 games are A MUST for any CoCo fan. 2 other games I (to my surprise) enjoyed were "Pooyan" and "Pitstop 2" (so much better in Color). I know there is a way to transfer these to disk, which I plan to do with all my cassette games. I guess I will have to break out the books.

Pitstop 2 - so much better in color

Pooyan- The colors are so much better that presented here, I suspect this screenshot came from an emulator and not the real image. The real game is not so "Pink" and had more brillant other colors, and its rather fun!

Donkey King and later just "The King"- I never had a DK game this good in graphics, and it was actually controlable with a regular Joystick.

Zaxxon, one of the best ports of the arcade game yet, and fun to play. I didn't want to shut this off.

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