Friday, August 03, 2007

Cris invited them, I'll welcome them!!!

Welcome Bob, Briza and everyone else from CocoDownunder!!! Hearing from Cris that he invited our Aussie CoCoNutz was great news. Hopefully, and indeed it looks to be happening, you guys can bring some life to the bolg since Cris has been dealing with Harry Potter mania and I've been dealing with life. It looks like it'll be around October before I get back to my sarcastic self. Hopefully by then, I'll have Evil Lab Florida up and running. Noe guaranteesm tho...

Later,

Brian

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6 comments:

Briza said...

Hi Brian.

Thats not good mate. Won't be the same without your usual Blog posts and Coco collector posts.
So Brian. interested in doing a repack topics for the Coco Downunder thread. will make a good read.
Also Captcpu. I have to know everything you did to make your Glo Coco shine and light up like it does. I think it looks sleek and radical. I'm tempted to do the same to one of my units. I love the Black look, Especially the mean kick ass Green Glow.

laters

Briza

Briza said...

Back again.

Forgot to thank Random Rodder for the welcome. Thanks for the welcome. Hope to see a topics being done for both the threads in here.

laters

Briza

Captain Computer said...

Right now, the GlowCo is a really cool looking door stop. heh! I flubbed the install of the 6309 and haven't got a chance to get out to the Evil Lab to fix it. Well, that and it's about 900 billion degrees here in Oklahoma right now. Blah.

Looking through the old entries, I really haven't said much about the lighting, have I? That's probably due for a detailed post, but it's pretty straight forward as well.

The light bar is one I grabbed from CrazyPC for a PC project that I never used it in. It's kind of big, so if I were to do it over I would probably go with smaller Laser LEDs mounted around inside the case. That would allow a SIMM based upgrade and probably leave room for the SuperBoard as well. As is, there's NO space between the memory board and the old PBJ memory upgrade. Also strongly considering lighting the keyboard if I can figure out how to mash EL Wire down in there. Might save the EL wire for the next mod, though. :)

The fan, light bar and (eventually) the CoCo will all run off of an old 250W PC power supply that will be housed in a separate enclosure, with the cables running out the back of the CoCo where the odd punch out is (directly under where the original power cable exited). The cables will be sheathed with silver mesh cable sleeves. I have to finish making the keyboard and logo decals as well.

Once the 6309 is socketed correctly and up and running, I'll wire up the power to the CoCo. Ideally, it wouldn't have floppies, at all. What I really want is to replace the ECB ROM in the CoCo to boot HDB-DOS or NitrOS-9 on startup, and use DriveWire for all storage. Kind of like the NitrOS-9 ROM Kit from Cloud 9. Thus, no MPI needed, but the pak slot stays free. Might have to go with a SuperIDE controller instead, though.

Anyhow, there's a brief update. :)

Angel's Luck,
Capt.

Briza said...

I want to make my coco 3 a glow unit to make people say WOW. what the Hell is that. It looks COOL.
Then maybe have the Disk drive LED light change colors as it seeks on sectors. Then thats what I would call a Techno bopping coco 3.

laters

Briza

Captain Computer said...

Replacing the LED with a multicolored LED on the drive probably would not be too hard. Brian had a great idea of using LEDs to light the red, green and blue dashes on the CoCo's case badge. THAT would be cool, specially if it was tied to power, CPU usage and disk access respectively. heh... Yeah, that's way beyond me.

Check out the lighting options at www.crazypc.com. Plenty of good ideas shall issue forth. :)

Angel's Luck,
Capt.

Brian said...

Briza,

I'd prefer to keep the repack discussions on the forum (even though I haven't posted there for a while) instead of in the blog area. That way we can have a full on discussion with many people giving their opinions.


Brian