Well, I ordered the part today to (hopefully) fix my malfunctioning CoCo3. Gene and I think it's been narrowed down to IC9. Find out in a few days. The CoCo3 that has been flakey had a PBJ 512k memory expansion on it. So, I took it off, clipped C65 & C66 on my 128K CoCo3 and commenced to playing Sockmaster's port of Donkey Kong for a few hours. It was pretty fun.
Along with the part I ordered for the CoCo3, I ordered all of the IC's to make Tom Gunnison's MPI clone, as posted on CoCo3.com. The IC's are dirt cheap - <$20 for them and the capacitors. I'm drawing up a board layout in ExpressPCB right now. Think I'm on my third revision. It's gotta be a double sided board, I don;t see any way around that. I think the cost is gonna be around $125 for 3 6 x 8 double sided boards. I'm trying to find ways to move things around and make it smaller. I think it'd be cool as hell to have it small enough, and dimensioned so that it'll fit inside the existing MPI cases. Then you could continue to use your existing case, or buy one to make your own. The biggest problem I see right now is getting the power and ground planes down correctly...
One change I am going to make, is going to be a modification to my CoCo's. I'm going to either replace the card slot with a dual row header and just use and existing IDE cable to connect the MPI since I'm using a dual row header on it, or make a male card edge with the header installed on it. Finding a 40 pin male card edge connector has been a royal bitch!!!
I'll be back working on the re-pack again pretty soon. I gotta borrow my dad's Roto-Zip to do some case mods. I thought the Model III case would give me ample room for component placement. I'm questioning that thought, as with Roy's VGA adapter installed, I still have to fit the electronics of the sound system in, and the MPI.
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