Comment: CoCoing and Sleeping

Well, I said I was going to post the rest of that last post "next week" and still haven't gotten more than 20 minutes, in ten minute intervals, with that case. And all the while the temperature here in Okie-land is dropping daily, and the External Evil Lab (Bay 16-A-441) isn't heated. So may have to cut back the ambitions. The goal at this point is to

1. Mod the CoCo board (the other one) to the PC power supply. Not sure if I can pull this off, but I'm told it's fairly straight foward.

2. Get the light kit installed.

3. Finish the case, or at least what can be done in time.

That means I might have to drop immediate plans to upgrade the processor and install fans. Which is no real problem since that can be done in the Evil Lab Internal Division (Suite 44A). So we're good. The hold up at the moment is fundage to aquire the light kit and fans. Two more weeks... just two more weeks. :) The real challange comes from the timing on the case. If the temperature drops below 60F for the season, it's bye bye to the painting. (Acutally, you can paint down to 50F but it sucks, takes forever, and the colder it is, the dicer the results.) So, the top of the case must be painted, regardless of where the mods are, by that time.

I've got the first cut out just about done. I bit more light sanding and some filler bits and it'll be complete. Kind of a perfectionist on that sort of thing. Seriously, if I could get a whole afternoon on it, it'd be done. Anyone got one? :P

What else... Ah, been searching for one liners for the Mary's newsletter which inspired me to sit and try my hand at some of my own. Very BASIC stuff. Silly really, but it's an interesting mental excercise trying to get it to work right.

Also played with POKE 282, which will inverse the video, like hitting SHIFT-0. Okay, cool... but, um, why? Well, I sorta found a use for it, but what it really led to was an inverse video input routine for accepting program input when you want a black background. The default INPUT command, of course, makes a green background mess all over the place. Still some work and error catching to do on it, and it doesn't backspace yet, but it might come in handy at some point.

Which brings us back to POKE 282 (0 for regular video, 1 for inverse). There might not be any use for it. But screwing around with something long enough often leads to something else, which DOES turn out to be useful. I recommend sitting down and whacking away at something assinine on your CoCo as often as you can. It's good for you. :)

Now I've got to go get some of the sleep stuff. Someone needs to up the supply of that as well.

Angel's Luck,
Capt.