DEPARTMENTS
MORE MARSHMALLOWS
LOAD 'eM
COCO LINKS
SCRAPBOOK
LETTERS TO THE LOUNGE
ABOUT QuarkX

Last update November 11, 2005

By Glen VanDenBiggelaar

Hello, and welcome to my attempt at a thorough support page for the beloved Coco. We here at Quark X are dedicated to preserving the past, and from time to time we come across old Technical Reference Manuals, Service Manuals, and schematics. I will do my best to make them into PDF files, to share. If you have an interesting old manual, book or schematic that you would like to donate to the Co Co library, or if you have any interesting story and/or corrections/additions, please feel free to e-mail me. This site started out as a composite of all the CoCo sites I could find and a lot of information (and thanks) is due in part to great CoCo sites by Al Santos, SockMaster, L. Curtis Boyle, Techno's site, Cloud 9 , Nickolas Marentes, just to name a few. If I haven't named your site, I do apologize. These are the main ones I have gathered info off of.

Latest updates
November 11, 2005
WE have a big suprise for the 1 year aniversary of the lounge, but I can't release that right now. Today, I made a whole page dedicated to Project Green Thumb, as I promiced to do when I got the chance. I really didn't have the time today, but I made it, after I got a picture in the E-mail of an AgVision VideoTex Unit from Joe B. THANKS JOE. I had no Idea it was blue, but it looks nice. It is posted here and on the "Video Tex" Page.

November 7,
The last few days have been both "up and down" for me. Saturday night, I hooked up the floppy to the CoCo 3, and was getting crazy I/O errors. At first I assumed that this was because I was using an FD 500 on the 3, with out a Multi-pak. SO I hooked it back up to the CoCo 2 (with out the MP) and I still was getting errors. At first, I thought I had fried my drive, then I hooked up the MP and it worked fine. I got on the fourms, and they suggested I add a fan and replace the caps on the PS circuit board, as the caps can dry out over 20 years, especially if they have not been used. I tore the drive apart (again) and got a regular 12 volt chassis fan for a PC. The fan has a regular "hard drive" plug, and it has a extension (a male and female plug) so it was no issue plugging it right in to the power for the drives. The tricky part is they cove cannot be put back on it this state, so I am hunting down a dremal tool and will be cutting a hole in the side of the case. I left the drive powered on all night and there was no temperature change and remained cold to the touch.
Sunday, was just a day I took to play Zaxxon, as it is my favorite game, I also have a tape with "sailor man" but I could not get it to load up, the tape is to old. I also received another e-mail from RS themselves, from the Director of Corporate Records and Information and they are going to see if they can find a lot of information buried in the RS archives, and send them here. I also have updated the Load 'eM page with a wacky game called "Bouncing Baby Boys"

November 5,
This last week has been quite productive on the CoCo, but I do have a bit of a problem. I can only use one machine at a time! :) last night I jumped back to the CoCo 3, and switched the floppy over- looks like I am going to have to get another couple of drives.
Over the last few nights, I have been busy on the CoCo 2, porting the cassette programs to disk. The basic programs are not a problem, but the machine language games are a bit more tricky. With the help of Robert G., from the CoCo fourms, I have had a bit of success. He gave a small basic program that works with most programs, and I had success transferring Pooyan, and The King over, but no luck with Zaxxon yet.
Last night was CoCo 3's night and I typed in the"patch" from Steve Bjork to make Ghana Bwana, Pitfall II, One on One , and Desert Rider to work on the CoCo 3 with color. I had to type it in twice as after the first time, I couldn't find a formatted disk to save it on, and after doing a dskini0, it has whipped the program from memory. I really have to learn how to use a Ram Disk in 512K. I typed it in the second time, and it still wouldn't work with "Ghana Bwana" but Pitfall II worked with color.
I am working (amongst other things) on a new page Called "LOAD 'eM. I have tons of disks to go through and I decided to put a page of reviews of what these are. Sites like the CoCo games review pages does not have all the games and programs posted and I every night I load up a new disk to see what it is. I will review how hard the game is and if you need instructions etc.

November 3,
Ok, for those of you who haven't checked, The latest issue of More Marshmallows is up. Also the teardown page for the CoCo 2 is up and I plan for this Saturday for the CoCo 3 (well photography for it anyway's!). The last few nights have been fun, frustrating, and finally success! I should have taken pictures for another teardown page!
I use a single drive FD 502 for my CoCo 3 , and had a FD 500 kicking around as a back up. I also had another FD 500 that when I tested it out to put on the online store, it was giving me I/O errors and there was rust around the bottom screws. I decided to put that on my shelf, because I was unsure if it was a controller problem, a cable problem, or, in fact a drive problem.
Last weekend, I cleaned out my storage room and moved all my stock here to my suite. Because, I had set up my CoCo 2 display, I got my "good" FD 500 out. This baby was almost mint, low S/N and the warranty stickers had not been touched. I originally thought that I would just take the 500, change the jumper, and slap it into my 502. (I can almost here some of you laughing now). I have been building and repairing computers for 10 years and what I saw hen I opened my 502, kind of shocked me. I had read Tandy had a "different" power connectors on the 502, but. WOW.
needless to say, I put the 502 together without even trying. I have a lot of old computer and odd connectors, but no way to adapt that.
I did have a backup plan though! I reset the jumper, and put the drive back in the 500 case. Got the "Bad" 500 out, tore it down , set the jumper, and put it all back together, and hooked it up to the CoCo 2. Popped the OS-9 disk in, formatted, and tried to copy. Every sector had errors. Got a new floppy and tried again. Same result. This confirmed my suspicions that this was a bad drive. I was almost ready to give up, but I had another backup plan.
When I had got my big shipment of 500's in the spring, my buddy Mike upstairs (he is the one that worked at one of the original Tandy Service Centers here in Alberta back in the early eighty's) had bought a drive off of me, but has not yet set all of his CoCo stuff up. I knew also a dual disk setup would do me more good than 2 singles, so I traded him my 502, which he gladly accepted, and got to work yet again. This "new "set up works great, although I am going to put a fan in, because it does get hot. Now I am spoiled. If you haven't yet got a dual disk drive, get one. it makes life SO MUCH EASIER in doing anything with floppies (copying, formatting, etc). The only thing left to to do is actually hook it up to my CoCo 3 and run Deskmate and Multi-Vue, which I plan to do tonight.

October 30
Yesterday, was almost a whole day dedicated to the site. I borrowed the digital camera and still could not get it into "Macro" mode, so I did the best I could. I have updated the "scrapbook" page. Due to many requests, I have posted a picture of both my CoCo 2 and 3 works stations. I will clean up my CoCo 3 desk and re-take the picture soon. I was working all day on both "Teardown pages" for the CoCo 2 and 3, and hopefully I will have them up in the near future. I have also been slowly fixing the "Carts" page and in between all this, I have been moving my inventory out of my storage room and bringing it down to my Apartment. I also ran to the post office to ship some of the orders from the online store. Today, I just plan to keep plugging away.

October 29
OK, the joke is official and I did indeed get caught. "The Sounds of the Hounds" was and still is an April fools joke. In fact the second news group answer saying it could be played if you work at it, was just more of a spin on the joke. I thought it was indeed funny, and a lot of work was put into it. I have taken it off the online store, but if anyone wants to have the disk, along with the other "Mid Iowa & Country CoCo Upgrade news letter disks", I have about a dozen or so. Just send 12 blank 5 1/4" disks and $5 to cover shipping, and I will gladly make a copy of these disks. Just be aware that these disk want a printer, and are (as they warn) "CG" rated, which means that they were put out by a Christian group and do contain some bible stories, sermons, etc. The "Christmas" disk is great for the holiday season and has carols and great (for the CoCo) holiday graphics.
In other news, there are rumblings on the news forms about a "NEW" old OS that could be ported to the CoCo. This OS is called CUBIX. See his sight at http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html
Also, I have gotten my hands on a good digital camera, so in time for the first birthday celebrations, I will be bringing you the rest of the "tear down pages" for the CoCo 2 and 3. Today is Saturday, and if all goes right, I will be making my regular run to the post office, clean out my stock room and move all my old CoCo's out of storage to my apartment. I have gotten a hold of a few old, small tv sets, and I will also be testing them and setting up a CoCo 1 and CoCo 2 station in my apartment. If I had another 2 desks and room, I would have like to set up 2 more stations. Why?, well I have 1 CoCo 3 station set up with a CM-8 monitor already, I will be setting up a 64 K CoCo 2 station today, and maybe a white 64K CoCo 1 station. If i had the room I would set up a 32K silver CoCo 1 station, and a 128k CoCo 3 station with a TV instead of a CM-8 monitor. I have the Drives for the sliver CoCo 1 and an "un-moded" MPI for the CoCo2. To complete the "display" I would have to get a silver MPI -which are rare, and a CoCo 2 drive (26- 3029), although any drive will work with the CoCo 2, I just would love to get them all "matching"- some day. I will take pictures and post them on the "scrapbook page" which I will update soon.

October 23
Ok, so old jokes can be re-cycled and here I sit with egg on my face possibly. Last spring, I received a stack of floppies and quickly tested them to see if they still loaded and that was my extent until I got my monitor and full CoCo set up. I threw some up on the online store, and the "newsletters" I had kept for my collection. Last week, I got a e-mail from an interested person (Brian P.) about the disk "Sound of the Hounds". What kind of game it was, etc. I had intended when I had time today to load up the game and give it a play. I followed the label and it loaded into a B&W screen with a picture of a "hound" howling , and a tone generating a "sound" and it says adjust volume and press any key to continue. Last spring, I had stopped there, and put it in my "for sale pile". Today, I pressed a key.
What followed was a message saying "the hounds are hungry" scroll owing down the screen and a voice saying "The hound are...." repeated about 20 times (It actually sounds like "the Nouns are....) then it breaks and I get an "?ne in line 720" error. So, at this point, I was going to pull the disk off my store and e-mail the Bad news to Brian. I decried to do a Goggle search, to see anymore info, and I got 2 hits off the list groups. One thread says its an "April fools joke disk" and another say it is a full game and can be played if you can figure out how to run it. I am pulling it from my online store, for now and when I find the answer, I will post it here.

October 9
The day before Thanksgiving. I finally have a day off and am catching up with the site before I go off and stuff myself at my parents. We are almost done our Video project for work, and it will probably be another month before I can get back to working on the lounge the way I want to. Next month is our official 1 year birthday, And I do have some plans to celebrate it, by changing the design yet again. If you have something you wish to see added to the site or wish to contribute in anyway, please feel free. We are all in this together. I have finally got the new issue of "More Marshmallows" up for October. Better a week late than never.

September 24
Where does the time go? With my new job, it seems the only time that I have to work on the site (and my CoCo) is the weekends. I am learning and doing video editing, and it was mentioned in the studio to bring in an Amega. Now, of course, I mentioned the CoCo , but I am truly unaware of any video editing software for it, but I didn't mind bringing in what some people referrer to as "the CoCo's big brother" (FYI- Allot of people debate that if Tandy had naturally "progressed" the CoCo, it would have ended up exactly like the Amega).
I have also received through some "horse trading" , the software for Mult-Vue. I have had the binder since January, but because the seller deiced to "Extort" more money buy not including the disks in the auction, I ended up with just the binder (I had refused to pay an extra $20 just for the disks) .
For those of you who are not familiar with MVUE, it is a "Windows" like Gui for the CoCo. GSHELL is the actual "windows" program name. I had found out that this program will not run on NitrOS-9, and it was not a "simple" program to load. You actually had to make a boot disk for it. Tandy had a few typos in the manual, so with the help of the forms, I was able to get it up and running. The only problem (so far) is that OS-09 is NOT Y2K compatible, so the calendar says its 1905, and it is a day behind. You can display the 2005 calendar, and make notes on it, but it will say the system date is 1905. There are "updated" GSHELL versions out on the net, but I have no way of transferring them from my Windows box to the CoCo (yet).
If you are expecting "Windows 3.1" on the CoCo, you will be a bit disappointed. But it does sort of remind me of the old Mac "classic" interface with no trash can.

Desk top (Click for big Photo- Picture from Manual)	Desktop displaying contents of drive 0 (click for bigger photos)
The Calendar The area under is a "notes" window (date book)	The Clock Window

As I learn more with MVUE, I will make a page devoted to it.

PLEASE, PLEASE PLEASE CHECK YOUR SPAM FILTERS, IF YOU HAVE ORDERED PRODUCT FROM THE ON-LINE STORE AND YOU HAVEN'T RECIEVED ANY CONFORMATION OR STAUS ON THE ORDER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If I do not receive any indication back from you or messages from your server, saying the e-mail has bounced, I assume everything is OK. My e-mails go through the "Hotmail" server. Please , I can not be held responsible for YOUR filters. Thanks

Click Here to see page 1 , page 2,page 3 of past updates