A little GloCo action

Okay, I wasn't going to post any more on the GloCo for awhile, but figured what the heck. Nothin' else going on at the moment. The reason for no Pimp My CoCo posts for awhile is pretty simple, by the way. I need the time and guts to attempt the 6309 upgrade again. heh. However, I would like to have some fun with the machine before I attempt to wreck it, so I went ahead and did the 512K thang on it.

This time, the upgrade took a whole three and half minutes. Seriously. If you haven't yet, do this. No excuses.

I thought this was interesting though, because for the GloCo's memory boost, I had to go retro. Really retro. A SIM based upgrade won't fit correctly. So I needed a flat, horizontally oriented board.

This is the PBJ 512K upgrade, one of the first third party boards available in 1986. Yeah, it's pretty much ancient. It's nice, though because it's flat and it fits nice and snug against the RF box there. Doesn't get in the way of the keyboard. Most important for this project, it's low. It does however, run as hot as a firecracker. The fan was definitely a good idea. As it is, with the power transformer out, the fan will blow straight across the memory board. Perfect.

Of course, we have to test the board and make sure all those ancient chips are still good. The proper way to do that would be to run a cyclic memory test on it, such as the one that comes with Cloud-9s 512K SIMM upgrade. But naw, that's the old way. The new way to test a 512K upgrade is...

DONKEY KONG! :D

I made sure to test this for a good half hour, just to be sure. And that monkey just really pisses me off sometimes. He must be destroyed! heh.

This is probably a pretty good test of the memory, though. Sock Master's Donkey Kong conversion/emulator really gives the system a workout.

By the time I was done playing, you could have cooked an egg on that memory board. And that was with the top off.

The CoCo never glitched, though. Not once. Go GloCo, go GloCo, go GloCo!

I did, of course, let the proper memory test run for awhile. A-OK. And fired up NitrOS-9 again, which was more a test to make sure I put the 40-track drives back together (the NitrOS disks are 40-track) properly. Another A-OK.






























More soon (er or later). :)

Angel's Luck,
Capt.

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