Yep. However Zippster has created a new more capable MPI (Multi-Pak Interface) that has a built in OPL3 chip in it so you can play OPL music right on the CoCo with a player made for it, plus if anyone wanted to they could program something to use it as well.
Nah, I'm waiting to see how someone implements "Bad Apple" on the NABU. ((a co-worker has a podcast on the CoCo, and I suggested he needed to make Bad Apple work there too, but making use of the CoCo sprites and sound).
IIRC, the Adaptec card requires that 1 of the connected devices provide Termination Power, not just termination. The adapter does NOT provide termination power as that would drain the battery of the laptop. I suspect the Conner drive is not set to provide it. Edit: I checked the documentation and the adapter does indeed NOT provide term power.
You can retrofit the thinpads with LED backlighting, there are ready-made kits. I did this with an X200t, also because the AFFS panel was really great.
Would that be possible on my PowerBook Pismo? The backlights are starting to go as the image is fairly dim and has a yellow tint to it. If not that I want to see if I can replace the ccfl tubes.
@@EvilTurkeySlices Yes that's possible, there are such kits on ebay for all monitors you just have to cut the LED bar. once paid 8€ for it. But the problem is the connection and replacement of the inverter. Since kit for all types must check someone with knowledge if the voltage and polarity is correct.Alternatively, you can also buy new CCFLs, but installing them will be tricky, they can break quickly.
@@EvilTurkeySlices Postscript: so the LED voltage regulation board, comes with wide input voltage , with my up to 30V. I would connect the LED strip before and test, that should be easy to test. Problem is that possibly the brightness regulation does not work, so the LED runs at 100% which is very bright.
You pronounced Ukiah correctly. Glad you like the CoCo3. Makes me happy someone will be using it instead of collecting dust in my collection. I also did get my 1084 fixed and its amazing!
Wow! A lot of effort has been put on this old Thinkpad to be as useful as possible congrats to the unknown Clint! First time I saw Debian running on a computer, looks neat! This CoCo is just beautiful although being a audiophile I just love the C64 with the legendary SID synthesizer... Keep up, best wishes from Greece!!
19:15 - I mean, Commodore's industrial design often gets mocked, but that CoCo 3 is not a pretty machine. That said, it's nice to see a machine of that vintage in such good condition!
The thing you referred to as micro XP is called Mini XP iirc, my dad and I use it when we need to get onto hard drives and copy the data over. It's included in Hiren's Boot CD.
CoCo 3, that brings back heaps of memories. The GIME chip was known as Gimme as in “gimme this, gimme that” or gimme more memory, gimme more graphics. GIME stands for Graphics, Interrupt, Memory Enhancement. Tandy/ Radio Shack literature called it ACVC which, from vague type memory, was Advanced Color Video Chip.
I used to love GNOME back in the 2.x days, but now it's just.. too different. I now find myself using KDE more and more whenever I need to do Linux things.
I've got the Lenovo X220. It was the last of the standard-key keyboards before the switch to the chicklet style. I did an SSD swap and that thing keeps up with modern chromebooks in standard surfing. Also has a headlamp for seeing the keys at night. It's small and light, so I've taken it on many a vacation, including to Europe for a month. Recently started using an HP Elitebook 840 with a touchscreen and backlit keyboard. Much faster and easier to use in low light.
At work I use a Thinkpad X220. It's very very nice. It has a backlight for the keyboard...but it's not below the keys, oh no. It's right next to the webcam, it's a tiny little white light that shines onto the keys! I love the feeling when you take a nice old XP laptop that has sata ahci, and getting xp installed with all the updates, and running in AHCI mode.
I used the same SCSI adapter to make backups of my laptop on a DDS tape streamer. Worked very reliably. But I remember the PCMCIA card was a little bit picky with some hard drives. Maybe your disk is still alive.
Those earlier X-series thinkpads were absolutely fabulous; nice and small/light/portable, but with the best-in-class keyboard (with almost no compromises for the size) and the trackpoint (the superior portable pointing device, for those accustomed to it). I used a couple of the tablet convertible versions (with a flip-around screen) through school (an X41T then an X220T from right after the Lenovo buy-out while they still had IBM designs in the pipeline), and paired with OneNote were an engineering student's best friend!
@Adrian's Digital Basement ][ : Regarding the limited capabilities of the CoCo 1-3: the Dragon 32 was pretty much identical to the CoCo (save for the ROMs etc.) hardware-wise: 6809E CPU, 32K RAM, 6847 VDG, 6-bit DAC, etc. and the demoscene has come up with things like ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-e-xLSwyAlJ4.html. The machine is definitely capable of some cool stuff! 👍
Yes. And NTSC CoCos can make good use of artifact colors to get 4+ colors on a 256x192 screen. The CoCo 3 can use 8-bit values in pixel-pairs to do ~256 colors at an effective resolution of 160x200 on a composite monitor. Recent work by Sockmaster has increased the perceived spatial resolution of 8-bit artifacting on the CoCo 3 to produce some pretty spectacular full color images on a 640x200 screen using just 4 'real' shades of gray. Here's a slideshow I made up years ago showing the basic 8-bit artifact colors on a CoCo 3. This involves no palette switching tricks, page flipping, or any other CPU-intensive tricks. As far as the computer knows this is a 4-color screen. I need to do a new version of it using Sockmaster's new algorithm. Until then: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-hjcUdoW0rrg.html
And if you want to dedicate the CPU to the best quality image display, and have an RGB monitor, Sockmaster's HiColor program can't be beat: ru-vid.comwL6g7AvbOn0
Had a T20 (actual IBM) years ago. Replaced the backlight, which was a bit painful, but not terrible. Loved that old machine, slow as could be, but tough as rocks. Memories ...
The CoCo 3 is in fact faster than the 1 and 2. All the chips on it are rated to run at 2 MHz instead of 1, and a simple POKE &HFFD9,0 will double the clock speed from .89 MHz to 1.78 MHz. Under (Nitr)OS-9 Level II, the CoCo 3 always runs in high speed mode.
Wow that thinkpad is brand new. I haven't seen one that nice in a long time, most of them look really sad at this point. If it only has a Core Duo I think the sender meant that it has an X60s motherboard in the X61s case, all X61s models have a Core 2 Duo.
It might be different on the X series, but a useful hint for T60 owners: The original 1.x BIOS of the T60 only supports the Core Duo, but the later 2.x BIOS for the T60 series also supports the Core 2 Duo. So before upgrading the processor, you should upgrade the BIOS. I found it out the hard way trying to replace the mainboard in my Core2Duo-equipped T60, and received a mainboard with a version 1 BIOS. As I also switched from ATI graphics to Intel graphics, I couldn't just take the BIOS chip from the old board. I ended up programming the BIOS chip for the new board using a parallel-port-to-SPI adapter.
That still has an IBM badge on the front - so it's made by Lenovo but before the buyout. Real computers have the badge right-side up when closed, not upside-down to impress people at the coffee shop :) My main computer is still a maxxed-out W520. Trackpoint forever babe!
@Adrian's Digital Basement ][ Even though it's in such great shape, check the caps inside anyway as those do continue to age even when not in use. It would be sad to see that beautiful retro system come to harm!
18:27, ahh YES! This was the machine (had the CoCo 1-3) that started me on my computer journey. I learned how to program on this machine. Seeing this brings back fond memories. Good times, good times.
Hey Adrian, I'm so jelly of that Coco 3. Once upon a time I had a Coco 2 & a Coco 3. I did RAM expansions on both of them and installed a power-on LED on the Coco 2. I also installed a 3 1/2 " diskette driive on the FD-502 dual diskette drive. Replaced the stock round drive cable with a ribbon cable so I could crimp on the connector. The Coco 3 really shines with OS-9 Level II !
A couple of notes about the Coco 3: It is twice as fast (1.78 MHz vs .895MHz) than a Coco 1 or 2... but it boots up in the slower speed for backwards compatibility. (One POKE 65497,0 will kick it into the faster speed). Most Coco 3 games, and the OS9/NitrOS9 Level II operating systems will always run at the faster speed). Also, the Coco 3 has a 64 color palette, so the same colors as EGA. There are some more impressive demos (and games) for background sound thanks to the GIME chip's programmable interrupt timer, of which I am sure you have some on your CocoSDC already. :) Just in case, I emailed you a DSK image with one music player with a song that you can try (the music in the demo's you used are using the old Coco 1/2 style software drivers, from what I heard).
With the Core [1] Duo CPU the board may be from an X60, a reverse Frankenpad so to say. sudo dmidecode -s system-version should show the model name under Linux, CPU-Z should be able to show mainboard infos under Windows as well.
Those ThinkPads are great. An ex of mine used to use Ubuntu on one on the couch or her giant beanbag a decade ago. It was nice to see you using Linux to interface with the old drive as well. Even though it was just happenstance, since as you pointed out it wouldn’t have mounted on XP! These old screens really are so dim. I’ve been tempted to install LED strips in my laptops of this vintage but it’s so fiddly.
Also There are stereo sound processor cartridges, and speech cartridge that increase the music (and speech) capabilities of the CoCo1, 2, and 3. However, when using the speech cartridge in the CoCo you can use the high speed poke to double the clock / CPU speed. The cartridges can be modified for the faster clock speed however.
If you like the X61 you can replace the LCD with a higher resolution IPS equivalent and put in an LED backlight. It is beautiful! I’ve got some videos on my channel.
Got rid of my Coco 3 a long time ago when moving, and still miss it. It was a fun computer to play with. One fairly useless easter egg. Hold down ctrl and alt on it when powering it on or resetting it, and you'll get a picture of the programmers! You'll have to reset it to get it out of that mode...
That's a very cool laptop! I will keep an eye out for one of those! Did you get on well with that x250 I have had a little look and they are less than 200 quid these days, nice.
I write it on X301! I had X61s and I remember it had very vivid display - so it sounds strange that yours is not IPS. I can send you some spare keycaps if you care to wait for the post to arrive from central europe ;) I have had misfortune event with mine and had to obtain the parts machine - with german keyboard layout!!!
There are two official sound upgrades for the CoCo: The Ochestra-90 and the Speech/Sound Pak. The CoCo3 and the Orchestra-90 is more than capable of playing MOD files from the Amiga.
Also a lot of support circuitry for trackpads has shrunk, it wasn’t always possible to push it right to the edge before. (At least not without making it thicker!)
I've a Sony CD-ROM Discman that supposedly uses and Adaptec-derived SCSI interface card, but to date I've yet to get it to actually install drivers and be operational, works somewhat as a CD player though, not always, cos it is old (and yes, I've cleaned and lubed its' workings!)... :\
In a company I worked for, the R&D department had an old laptop running Solaris on it that had the same SCSI card installed. The card wasn't very reliable, probably due to that miserable connector, and occasionally I was called in to take a look at the machine. The machine spent most of its life hooked up to something in the lab. While at Oracle, I supported a ton of those old T-series Lenovo laptops. I preferred either those or Dell Latitudes over anything else we had in stock. I agree they're rock-solid machines that never died. I remember the extended batteries and many managers requested those when we ordered laptops for the users. Unfortunately, being a decade ago I can't remember any real details about them other than they were solid machines.
Huh, I had a PCMCIA to SCSI adapter for my A1200's CD-ROM drive, and it is pretty different. The card actually protrudes out of the side of the computer and the SCSI connector is hard wired to the part of the card that hangs out the side of the machine.
That would be the Hi-Soft Squirrel SCSI, they are pretty bulky but totally awesome for give the A1200 CD-Rom, Zip Drives and all sorts. The A1200 PCMCIA slot was mounted really shallow for some reason but did work with loads of stuff. I used to use mine with a CF card reader in the end for getting stuff on and off it.
@@nebular-nerd PCMCIA socket on my A1200 has bent pins(somehow happened when it was in storage) these days, so I gotta use the old floppy transfer method. Do need to replace the hard disk with a CF card, but the 1gb hard disk still works and I'd feel bad throwing it out while still working, even if it don't sound too healthy.
I recently donated my A1200 to a local computer museum, the 250gh Conner drive somehow still worked but did take offense to being cloned, took about 6 hours to image. Booted and worked just fine but really did not like being asked to do a sustained read of the entire contents 🤣
@@nebular-nerd Yeah, drive on here is the same. Most of the time it runs fine, but ask to much of it at once and it'll take a couple of attempts. I dunno what kinda drive mine is, I just installed it. Keep in mind, I was 12 and didn't really even know what a hard drive was. I do remember before I got the hard disk, but after getting the Blizzard 030 with 4mb fast RAM, I would load into Workbench and hard disk install games and programs to RAM: to save on disk swapping. I think I read it in Amiga Format and my kid brain equated that to the hard disk being a massive block of battery backed RAM.
@@fattomandeibu Oh yea, mountains of ram were great, I used to make use of both RAM: and RAD: (RAD worked across reboots) to do some crazy stuff. Unpack a game to RAM: play it and then delete after with any saves backed up to the HD. I still do similar on Windows for some things 😁
One of the main things my C64 posse when I was a kid used to bash the CoCo on heavily compared to our beloved commies was it's horrible beeper sound capability. While this demo's sound may not be up to the SID's standard, I was stunned to hear just how good 8-bit dance party sounded! I thought I must have forgotten how the Trash-80 actually sounded as a kid and it was better then I remembered, but that explanation makes total sense. A very unique capability though, some clever thinking to do the audio that way to get multiple channels. Cool!
I had the Slim-SCSI at one time... all I remember is it cost a bundle! I used it for my old DAT drive (HP SureStore). I also had a number of the CoCos back then... the last was running a version of OS/9, well before the likes of Linux was generally available. It was UNIX-like and related to OS-9 68K later on. I joined a company in 1985 and we developed the first automated system based on CoCo hardware and Tandy Xenix 68000 for a local UULS (underground utility locating service), a multi-user system that took incoming notifications of requested digs and notified all the utilities. Ah, memories!
Internally, that's an X60s, the IBM palmrest gives it away. Some sort of parts Frankenstein I assume. The X61s has an extra palmrest fan, which is incompatible with the x60s palmrest. And no X61s machines had an IBM logo. The T was likely just a typo.
Ah, a very nice CoCo 3... ...I've been looking for one for years but they never come up for sale in the UK. (Plenty of 1's and 2's) Post from the US is amazingly expensive, especially when compared to anywhere else in the world so I've been rather put off importing one. Ho-hum, some day.
Very cool! I just watched another video of yours from a few months ago, regarding a USB SCSI adapter. With that adapter, you discovered hard drives set to ID 1 weren't working, and they only worked when you picked ID 0. Perhaps the same thing is happening here?
Love your channel, and I really should see if you're willing / able to fix a narfed Atari SC1435 for me, but it is pronounced D-ehb-ee-un. Debbie was Ian Murdock's wife. Ha, pet peeve of mine!
I still have a couple of those Adaptec PCMCIA and CardBus SCSCI cards. They worked really well with laptops and peripherals of the era I had at the time. One card has an SCSI II cable permanently attached and the other has a detachable SCSI II cable. I really enjoyed working with computers, laptops and servers of the late 90s.
Even modern laptops, like my ASUS ROG Strix Scar 15 have switches for wi-fi. It places the system in "Airplane Mode". It also cuts the Bluetooth signal.
Not to be that girl but.... Debian is a portmanteau of Debra and Ian. If I remember correctly that's the guy who put together that distribution and his wife. It's probably pronounced deb-ian.
If we can say one thing about English, it's that there is no one way to pronounce something, especially made up words or acronyms. Linux is a perfect example. Lih-nucks? That's typical pronunciation but Linus's name in Finnish is pronounced LEE-ness.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 It's most certainly not pronounced LEE-ness or any silly thing like that. It's just pronounced as Linus or Liinus. In Finnish. :)
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 The 'ih' /ɪ/ is acceptable in English, as it's the realisation of a short vowel. What's not good is to use a diphthong, i.e., 'LIE-nuks' /'laj.nʊks/. In the case of Debian, they have a pronunciation guide. The crappy thing about English spelling is that there's no reliable way to differenciate 'deh-bee-an' and 'dee-bee-an' in English orthography. I assume the former as a rule of thumb, given that if people want an /i/ sound will generally write 'ee'.
I quite like the older apple keyboard(although my think pad t40 has a better one) the newer apple one you’re thinking of on the m1 air is probably the horrible butterfly keyboard. The ones on the older airs and the unibody MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models is pretty nice.
FYI the t60 and t61 had some cross-compatibility and a lot of people modify their old thinkpads to be able to upgrade the motherboards or swap the better display of the t61 to the t60 and vice versa. Maybe that's why he was saying it wasn't an actual t61?
My X61T was one of my favorite thinkpads. I loved the trackpoint, so I didn't miss having a trackpad at all. I dropped it so many times and it kept on going. Hardly used the tablet feature, but it had a good pen so was nice for the occasional drawing. I think I finally broke the screen or something which is when I got rid of it.
I know Adrian said Slim SCSI card but the first time he said it my brain processed it as slim shady card. Now I've got Slim Shady stuck in my head except with slim shady replaced with slim scsi.
i hate sgi they exkaycumadadoed sun/micro-systems and i love sun micro systems and there linux hardware they was ahead of the computer game and we should all be useing some froum of unix not windows
4:40 I think what they ment was "x60" instead of t60 its very common to use x60 motherboard in an x61 as its all same inside. Cool side note that x60 can be librebooted.
I supported thinkpads in the enterprise back in the days where the one featured in this video would have been new; and i for one can say that is definitely an X series thinkpad (unless the person that sent it in shoehorned a T series motherboard into that chassis) The main notable difference between the X and T series was that the X series was in the around the 11-12" form factor where as the T series was about 13-15" form factor. For the most part they are stout and hardy machines
I have a lenovo thinkpad with the first intel i7 processor for portable computers. relatively decent computer. But mine has the older round power supply plug, 3 contact with a resistor between 2 contact points so the computer knows which watt power supply you connect. if you connect the smaller power supply, the computer becomes slower. But far too many computers used a TN screen which is not a good screen panel type!
using linux os is usefull for older driver because it does recognize it and pop up on screen and win 10 else hardly see it i do think that is x61 not t61 because of look of it
Mhere are some who manage to get the volume right on videos. many youtubers have the volume too low, so when the commercial comes on, you often have to turn the volume down quickly, otherwise it hurts your ears
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)