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Screen - Life and Times of the Color Computer

1. Falconbridge s first PDP 8 system had only 8K of core memory a 256 Kword disk paper tape reader punch and an ASR 33 teletype as an operator s console Our second system had two 256 Kword disks and we thought it was marvelous Subsequent PDP 8 systems were equipped with 1 6 Mword disks and 32Kwords of memory All of our initial systems had a 4Kword executive and allowed 4Kwords for programs to run in Our later 32Kword systems kept the restriction of 4Kwords for all programs using the additional memory for disk caching and keyboard and printer buffering as well as addi tional process control programs CoCoNuts VEVA TAVO RA ENIE THE COIRE T AND TIMES OF THETCOLORTCOMRUTER This enabled us to build multi user multitasking real time systems on the PDP 8 that ran in 32K memory with disk buffering 4 simultaneous non process users as well as all the process control in the plant and monitoring of environmental monitoring stations scattered around a 30 mile radius Benchmarks Experience on multiple systems invariably leads to questions of What ll she do Benchmark programs were becoming popular about this time and we compared our ancient PDP 8 systems to the more modern Apple Il and the latest kid on the block the IBM PC and the even more impressive IBM PC AT using a simple program that calculates all prime numbers between 1 and 1000 It s not sophisticated but it translates easily into BASIC FOR TRAN
2. PALETTE RGB prior to running the game Might even add a line there at the top 1 WIDTH 32 PALETTE RGB since the game will not run properly out of 40 or 80 column mode also recommend the high speed POKE for those that prefer a little more action I play it exclusively at this speed It s way more fun CoCo 3 POKE 65497 0 CoCo 1 2 POKE 65495 0 Be sure to slow down before access ing the disk or tape CoCo 3 POKE 65496 0 CoCo 1 2 POKE 65494 0 Some very old CoCo 1 s may not be able to use this POKE Game Play Playing the game is pretty simple You find yourself on the VidGrid en sconced in the ever popular and overly clich Lite Psycle Your job is to drive about and snag all the colored squares you can before you bash into your own light trail But beware the evil video game controller gods have set upon the field nasty green squares that will smash you just as easily as smacking into your trail Avoid them drive like a maniac using the arrow keys and rack up as many points as you can always liked weird scoring sys tems So here s one Every space on the screen your psycle moves you get 10 points Easy enough When you snag a colored square though you get 10 points plus the ASCII value of that square Do you know your CoCo colors If so hitting those higher colors can net you more points In the spirit of simplicity there s no exit Hit BREAK when you re tired of it way to ge
3. There s plenty more including an update to the DOS command a fix for DSKINI no longer erases a program in memory and an auto execute feature The HDB DOS DriveWire edition is pretty much the same as the regular edition of HDB DOS but does not include several utilities A full review of HSB DOS is beyond the scope of this review but it certainly worth consider ing if you re interested in working with DECB and a hard drive You can view the entire manual for the regular edition of HDB DOS at www cloud9tech com NitrOS 9 Operation As said using DriveWire with NitrOS 9 is simple Booting is accomplished from an included dsk image that contains the operating system Just put the boot disk in the CoCo s floppy and execute the correct loader NitrOS 9 boots from the DriveWire server automatically You can use a real hard drive in conjunction with DriveWire under NitrOS 9 NitrOS 9 can be configured to assign different drive designations to different devices So you could for example have an IDE hard drive a SCSI CD ROM two floppies and DriveWire all hooked up and usable at the same time Page 30 Not being terribly familiar with NitrOS 9 wasn t able to test everything However was able to move files around transfer them to floppy open files and execute programs via the DriveWire without any difficulty If you re interested in NitrOS 9 the ability to use it this way is worth the price of the DriveWire
4. CoCoNuts VEVA TAV RA sys 0 THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR COMPUTER Wow what a year this has been so far want to thank everyone for making this dream of mine come true can only hope that my dad is smiling down on me from heaven know if we would have been able to continue through life together he would have wanted me to be part of this community back in those times think have done a pretty good job of bringing most of us closer together with something we all love We all love a good magazine about our favorite machines have come to learn that all CoCoNuts all seem to have three things in common Astronomy Star Trek and Dr Pepper I m sure you note the big change in format with this issue of CoCoNuts Steve 6809er Bjork has stepped in as our art director and typesetter He has given us a beutifull new look that is also easier to read I m sure we will see more of Steve Bjork s work in future issues too So if you guys behave yourselves and keep getting submissions in on time might just add a couple articles that review our favorite episodes of Star Trek or add in some pictures of vintage Dr Pepper cans hope you enjoy this issue of CoCoNutz E Zine Mary Kramer Executive Editor What s inside Getting to Know Steve Bjork Real Donkey Kong on a CoCo The Color Computer 3 Prototype The 16th Annual CoCoFest The Asimov Awards Mister Mind 2007 Getting to Know Jack Rodda L
5. One of the final areas to be cleared out was a small storage room in the basement known as the morgue Inside the morgue were some of the more interesting artifacts of Microware s past Shelving units full of Compact Disc Interactive CD i development systems stood across CoCoNuts from piles of old software disks and tapes Endless VME I O cards motherboards and reference hardware sat under layers of dust next to boxes of blank EPROMS and serial cables It was a place that in the 1980s would have been a hardware hacker s wet dream but today it was just a room of ancient technology with no modern value or use to anyone Just like Noah and the Ark two of each potentially useful item was to be saved Anything that was no longer supported or functioning was to be sent to the great recycling center in the sky Some historic items were allowed to be taken home including an infamous Japa nese video game system that ran OS 9 and featured mecha nized 5 1 4 floppy drives and a fancy joystick There were a few other pieces of unusual OS 9 hardware that escaped a crushing fate For instance the CD i ma chines also had some historic significance Many were development systems used to create the tools Phillips and other companies used for making CD i content Others had been part of a shopping kiosk business known as Micromall co owned by Microware in the 1990s These CD i machines were saved then sold off at the 2
6. about 500Hz The single bit sound seems louder both because voltage at the RCA jack is about 1v peak to peak while the DAC signal is about 0 75v peak to peak The significant amount of overtones in the square wave also contribute to its perceived loudness For comparison try the SOUND command which should be in between single bit and 6bit DAC quality Single Bit Sound This does not work with the MESS v 111 but should with later versions ORG 6000 START ORCC 50 STA LDA ANDA turn off interrupts FFD9 fast cpu clock FF23 PIA 11110111 STA FF23 LDB FF22 ORB 2 STB FF22 ORA 4 STA FF23 LDA FF22 get current values LDX 330 settimer ORA 2 set bit high STA FFf22 LEAX 1 X BNE B BRN A balance loop LDX 330 reset timer ANDA 11111101 set bit low STA FF22 LEAX 1 X BNE C BRA A END START program FF22 as data direction program single bit sound as output return PIA to normal wait wait BASIC Creator Program 10 REM 1 bit SOUND 20 LI 80 30 FOR M amp H6000 TO amp H6038 STEP10 SUM 0 40 FOR I 0TO9 READA VA VAL amp H A SUM SUM VA POKE M 1 VA NEXT READ CHK IFSUM lt gt CHK THEN PRINT ERROR IN LINE LI END 50 LI LI 10 NEXT 60 SAVEM 1 bit amp H6000 amp H6038 amp H6000 70 END 80 DATA 1A 50 B7 FF D9 B6 FF 23 84 FB 1616 90 DATA B7 FF 23 F6 FF 22 CA 2 F7 FF 1714 100 DATA 22 8A 4 B7 FF 23 B6 FF 22 8E 1262 110 DATA 1 4A 8A 2 B7 FF 22 3
7. and Adam Osborne for the first time still remember Steve Wozniak bringing in his first Apple computer mounted on a wood board While primitive by today s standard it was like nothing anyone had seen before You could just turn it on and start writing a BASIC program It sounds little a like your CoCo that youu still play with today You can thank Steve for that Later in 1975 finished high school and move on to Collage while working at Radio Shack store for the first time At this time was playing around with both S 100 bus computer based on the Altra 8800 and the SWPC computer based on the 6800 a new CPU from Motorola I was moving from Collage to Collage looking for courses that aid me in new study of Digital Electronic Micro Page 3 Steve Wozniak s Apple computer Computers and software programming Mary was going to ask you about when you start programming After all you re mostly known for your games that you programmed Steve Most people probably don t know that I m primarily a computer hardware engineer love hardware spend just about as much time with a soldering iron in my hand as typing on a keyboard started my studies in programming back in 1972 about the same time as digital hardware design The high school offered classes on program ming in BASIC and FORTRAN FORTRAN used punch cards and was a real pain in the neck because the program had to be sent Downtown on punch car
8. thought that was rather amusing also was asked to sit in on Steve Bjork s panel for his discussion of how the CoCo changed your life During the discussion Steve brought out his Electric Crayon machine and Allen also showed his COCO prototype was real nice to see those items and hear the story that went along with it Allen Huffman videotaped this event If we bug him enough maybe one day all his fest footage will be published The last part of my day before had to return to my family was when sat down to talk with Steve This interview was also videotaped by Allen Huffman and we used an audio copy to create a transcript for this issue The funniest thing have ever seen was watching Mark Marlette and the others belly crawl so they wouldn t disturb the recording found everyone there at the fest to be wonderful and a pleasure to talk with Page 13 will be back next year but will have to work out alternate transportation My drive home was dangerous and very long will not drive to the fest again will however return next year Since missed seeing one of the people talk to the most online asked someone to draw up a cartoonage of him Diego Barizo shows the true spirit of wanting something so much he was willing to risk everything We have all come together to help him pay his price for attending the fest Diego has true spirit and brought a smile to all the faces at the fest wish could have
9. DAC can be used to measure voltage that s how the joysticks work and a waveform can come from a tape recorder radio or microphone via a preamp The problem is that the fastest ml programs properly bal anced so they don t introduce errors can t read the DAC in this case ADC Analog to Digital Converter faster than that required for about 8 10 kHz tones In any case the amount of data generated would rapidly flood the Coco memory even with add on boards of 2 8Megs Storage of the data would require a hard drive system There was one fairly good commercial sound editing system for the Coco3 Studio Works by Jeff Noyle sold by Oblique Triad It took the input of the ADC 6 bits and stored short snippets of sound in memory These could be saved to disk and later used by Basic or by machine language programs 70 END 80 DATA 1A 50 B7 FF D9 B6 FF 23 84 FB 1616 90 DATA B7 FF 23 F6 FF 22 CA 2 F7 FF 1714 100 DATA 22 8A 4 B7 FF 23 B6 FF 22 8E 1262 110 DATA 1 4A 8A 2 B7 FF 22 30 1F 26 804 120 DATA FC 21 F2 8E 1 4A 84 FD B7 FF 1567 130 DATA 22 30 1F 26 FC 20 E4 00 00 00 663 DAC generated sine wave works with MESS ORG 6000 START LBRA BEGIN SINE WAVE DAC values DATA FCB 127 131 135 139 143 151 155 159 163 167 FCB 171 175 179 183 187 191 195 199 203 207 FCB 211 211 215 219 223 227 227 231 235 235 FCB 239 239 243 243 247 247 247 251 251 251 FOB 255 255 255 2
10. PASCAL and C and gives a good idea of the relative performance of the arithmetic in the various systems Unfortunately the CoCo with its inter preted Basic barely kept up to the IBM PC s interpreted Basic and was no match for the compiled Basic on the PC or even our PDP 8 FORTRAN Obviously the next step was to write a CoCo version of our FORTRAN com piler interpreter to see if could pump up the performance The easiest and LITE PSYCLE by CaptCPU captcpu clublidstudios com One of my favorite CoCo program mers of all time has got to be Richard Ramella Each month when was a wee lad I d eagerly open up the new fastest route was to write the arithmetic part of the interpreter FORTRAN virtual machine first and just hand compile the simple little program into interpreter code As recall preliminary results were very good with the 6809 easily matching the performance of the compiled Basic on the PC Unfortunately that s as far as went and the work that did has been lost in the intervening 20 odd years I m going to have to start over again with what can remember of the coding did and some borrowing of coding that I ve done on the x86 along the same lines Unfortunately along with my original coding I ve also lost my EDTASM cartridge and all my CoCo manuals as well as the cassette recorder and all the cabling The only thing got back from my brother in law is the CoCo1 itself
11. be any interest in a simple FORTRAN IV like language for the CoCo It seems to me that all of the users on CoCo3 com are interested primarily in games which certainly doesn t fit with FORTRAN T T igal 19 Hot CoCo Gifts Man from Gs The CoCo Hut j Gift Shop e __ New items coming soon BEDS Wwa cafepress com cocohutshop This first offering was actually a test of Roger Taylor s Rainbow IDE for programming in Extended Color BASIC Not exactly the use for which it was intended but it certainly beats NotePad by leaps and bounds Lite Cycle is a variation of the game everyone probably writes up for the CoCo at some point Kind of the Hello World program of games In some forms it s called snakes or Tron style light cycles or what have you But it makes an interest ing beginner s programming exer cise Being a rank amateur figure it s a good place to start Requirements Lite Cycles uses smidgen more than CoCoNuts May 2007 Vol 2 Issue 2 800 bytes that s with comments spacing and formatting so it should run on any CoCo 4K and up tape or disk don t think used any ECB commands in there so it should run on a Color BASIC machines as well tested it on Ramona CoCo 3 DECB 2 1 128K and Ol Betty CoCo 1 F Board DECB 1 1 64K as well as the CoCo 2B and CoCo 3 NTSC emula tion in MESS Color Computer 3 users that have an RGB or VGA monitor will want to type
12. been there to give him a hug like did some of the others Diego don t want to say you are honored because of your situation but do want to say you are honored because of your determination You took a 20 hour train ride to get to the fest That alone is dedication and desire to the ma chines we all love so much know that we are all one big family and this was like a reunion for him and myself That is why it is worth it to ride 20 hours on a train to get there So this picture is for you Diego will see you next year at the fest Mary Kramer Diego Barizo CoCoNuts VEVA TAVO RA ENIE The Asimov Awards The final decision A chat with Diego Barizo Mary How many people tumed in a game Diego Only 3 this year and in one of the cases asked the participant if he wanted to include his already finished program in the contest think another two were working on something but I m not that sure about that Mary Did you extend the deadline Why Diego Yes at the last minute it was extended by some 2 extra weeks The official version is that some of the programs were almost ready with the programmers working really hard to get them ready in time for the original deadline The fact that someone cared enough to work that hard just to be able to enter was more than enough a reason to do it Also at that time was felling a bit disappointed by the low number of entries and really
13. electronics back then Steve Yea they had digital electronics back than but no microprocessors built my very first computer back in 1974 using only discrete integrated circuits I C It s memory was 4 groups of three 7489 IC for a total of 64 12 bit bytes of memory and it could only do 8 instructions NOP ADD COM AND OR SHIFTLEFT SHIFTRIGHT JUMP_IF_ZERO It was basically a fancy calculator that da not calculate very well The first personal computer and the world would never be the same About a month after finished my computer saw on the cover of January 1975 Popular Electronics magazine the Altar 8800 the first microcomputer kit using a real micro processor believe that was my first could had a V 8 moment in my young life After spending almost two years building my computer if you could call it that there was a true computer kit for only 400 Mary What changes did you see because of the Altar 8800 New personal computers based on the Altar 8800 and its S 100 bus started showing up the scene along with the Homebrew Computer Club up in Silicon Valley From time to time I built my very first computer back in 1974 using only discrete integrated circuits I C would drive the almost 400 miles for the club meeting Why would anyone drive so far for just a club meeting you may ask It was there that met people like Steve Wozniak creator of the Apple computer
14. package alone The OS really shines when it has a little elbow room to play with Shuffling Back and Forth Until you get things organized there is a bit of back forth from the CoCo to the PC as you switch disk images This can be a blessing though for getting your CoCo s software collec tion organized For example you can create libraries of like programs and files in separate disk images and mount them as needed The CoCo can t use long file names but the file names of dsk images on the PC can Each CoCo disk can also be labeled using the RENAME command in HBD DOS Loading multi disk programs seems to require going back and forth however But once you ve got every thing loaded over to the PC in dsk format you might find there s little need to attach floppy drives to your CoCo Everything loaded from the PC fired up just fine did not try to load any programs that needed to be cracked because of disk protection These may pose a problem for DriveWire Those that were already cracked worked fine also didn t fire up anything using the DOS command nothing on the PC that used it If it doesn t work would suggest the old Radio Shack DECB 1 0 loader could be used The primary reason bought DriveWire however was to transfer files from my PC to the CoCo and vise versa Particularly wanted an easy way to get stuff downloaded from the Internet on to a real CoCo floppy If you re in a similar frame of mind D
15. the real disk drive 0 attached to the CoCo This is why Step 3 above is necessary Once virtual disk 0 is turned off to allow access to the floppy drives you can t access it any more So all the files need to be copied to a virtual disk with a drive number higher than the real floppy drive you ll be using Step 6 Type DRIVE ON to disable the real floppy drives and reactivate all the DriveWire disks That s it Instant floppy disk you can now use on your CoCo Copying files to the PC from the CoCo is as simple as reversing the procedure Just DRIVE OFF 0 BACKUP 0 TO 1 DRIVE ON BACKUP 1 TO 0 It s a good idea to copy the files back to disk 0 since an emulator and other PC CoCo utilities might not see them otherwise This may seem like a bit of work just to get a working CoCo floppy disk but it s quite intuitive once you do it a few times The scheme also allows for a great deal of compatibility with regular DECB There s no new file system for Page 31 use with the drives on your PC DriveWire just uses the familiar DECB system You can also use programs that don t let you specify which disk to use for example game that automati cally save to drive 0 Is It Worth It Oh Yeah DriveWire does have its limitations From talking with some CoCo users I ve learned that it s not as fast as a real hard drive If you need blazing speed a SCSI drive and controller is probably the way to go On the other hand D
16. to noise ratio SNR is a much simpler technique easily calculated for the Coco while measur ing distortion requires special test equipment A good example of poor low SNR is a single voice at a party with many people talking loudly at the all at the same time It is quite difficult to concentrate on that one single voice Since there are only two voltages from the single bit sound outlet the signal to noise ratio becomes meaningless Any random output has exactly the same volume as any desired output There is also no possibility for a change in volume The DAC with 64 different voltage levels has an SNR of 1 64 or 1 56 The normal method for expressing signal to noise is in decibels dB and the values are not linear but logarith mic The formula for calculating SNR based on bits is SNR 20olog10 2n where n equals the number of bits So the Coco DAC SNR is 36aB To put this value into perspective let s look at some common examples A good Hi Fi system has an SNR of better than 100dB A properly recorded CD which uses 16 bit coding has an SNR of 96dB while a DVD with 24 bit coding and has an SNR of 144dB A loud orchestra can reach 80 90 dB and amplified rock music 110dB so an SNR of a CD or DVD is very desirable for realistic music Since a change in volume of 6dB appears to sound twice as loud it is a shame that the Coco did not use an 8 CoCoNuts VEVA OW Co Buran ENIE bit DAC SNR 48dB as that
17. to thank him for this chance to do this and also all the help he has given me on this issue of the E Zine Z 89 Zaxxon for the CoCo 3 Article and Photos copyright 2007 by Steve Bjork Other Photos copyright by other sources Mary We are here with Steve Bjork Hi Steve Steve Hi Everybody Mary We will start off with Where do you live Steve First of all I m going to pro nounce my name so everyone gets it correct it s Be York It s Scandina vian my father is 100 Swedish and comes from Minnesota Bjork is a common name back there Anyway I m born and raised Southern California I m definitely a California beach boy as you can tell by my music and the time spend at the beach Mary can tell by your tan Steve definitely spend some time in the California Sun As we are record ing this it s the end of March and we ve only two inches of rain since last July So that tells you that we get lots and lots of sunshine Love the climate out here and love being close to Disneyland Hey used to be a skipper on the Jungle Boat Cruise for a while like to think that have a little bit of an entertainer s soul in me Mary Do you have any Kids Steve have one child Jeannie and she is my pride and joy and she will be 12 this September My lovely wife Lori and met believe it or not on a hiking outing with the Sierra Club Mary So you get out and do stuff Where s woo
18. ve covered the technical details of what is where can go on to the dissection of the programme which wrote to display this First some house keeping and a title 10 CLEAR 2000 REM ASSIGN ENOUGH VARIABLE SPACE 20 PRINT DIRECTORY UTILITY Next prompt the user for a drive number giving the option to keep the default drive which is found in memory at amp HO95A Drive numbers CoCoNuts VEVA Oa Co RA ENIE THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR COMPUTER are only valid from 0 to 3 Variable DN is used to get the user response This is converted to numeric in ND bounds tested and transferred to variable DN to be used in later programme lines 30 DN PEEK amp H095A REM DE FAULT DRIVE 40 PRINT WHICH DRIVE ENTER DN INPUT DN 50 IF DN lt gt THEN ND VAL DN IF ND lt 0 OR ND gt 3 THEN 40 ELSE DN ND Next the option to output to the printer is given The PR variable is set to 2 if printer output is wanted or 0 if screen 60 PRINT OUTPUT TO PRINTER Y OR N INPUT PR 70 IF PR Y THEN PR 2 ELSE PR 0 Next a table header is printed 80 PRINT PR FILENAME EXT TYP ASC 1ST LAST 90 PRINT PR SECT Here s where the real work starts The track variable TK is set to 17 the directory track and a FOR NEXT loop is started beginning at 3 and ending at 18 Line 120 does the actual reading of the data as explained earlier Line 130 concatenates 127 bytes from B onto the end of A
19. would be perceived as twice as good a unit as the 6bit DAC Eight bits is also the word size for the Coco so the use of an 8 bit DAC would make program ming much easier But How Does It Sound doubt that many of us have our Coco audio routed to a Hi Fi system so there will certainly be some loss caused by the cheap audio equipment in our monitors or TVs and there is also the issue of frequency response How fast can a Coco running at 1 or 2 MHz send data to the DAC and what will that translate into in terms of sound We ll get to that shortly but first let s try to generate some actual sound Don t expect that the commands SOUND or PLAY will generate any thing decent If you look at the code for these routines you will find that they send only three values to the DAC low medium and high That is not much better than single bit sound What we will do is write our own routines to generate 1 bit and 6bit sound of the same frequency and compare the results The code is written to make the sound as clean as possible without regard to practicality in applications The code as written will compile with the Rainbow IDE but is easily altered for use with EDTASM The code is intended for a real Coco not an emulator but might still work with some of them Since you the reader may not have an assembler the Basic programs can be used to create the binaries These programs will generate a square wave and 6 bit sine wave both
20. 0 1F 26 804 120 DATA FC 21 F2 8E 1 4A 84 FD B7 FF 1567 130 DATA 22 30 1F 26 FC 20 E4 00 00 00 663 BASIC Creator Program 10 REM 1 bit SOUND 20 LI 80 30 FOR M amp H6000 TO amp H6038 STEP10 SUM 0 40 FOR I 0TO9 READA VA VAL amp H A SUM SUM VA POKE M I VA NEXT READ CHK IFSUM lt gt CHK THEN PRINT ERROR IN LINE LI END 50 LI LI 10 NEXT 60 SAVEM 1 bit amp H6000 amp H6038 amp H6000 Page 24 CoCoNuts VEVA TAVO RA ksy lt 1 0 gt 10 POKE amp HFFD8 0 REM MAKES SURE THE CLOCK IS 0 98MHz 20 SOUND 130 40 These programs nicely illustrate the problems of using the Coco to gener ate sound The DAC program can t be made significantly faster without discarding or skipping data from the table and that would increase distor tion The single bit sound can be made 330 times faster which would increase the frequency well beyond our ability to hear it or even get it out of our speaker system So there is always a trade off between frequency response and distortion with the low sampling rate possible on the Coco This works in the opposite direction as well We are not going to get very far creating music from a sine wave table even though Dennis Kitsz did an amazing job with his 4 part harmony music editor Quaver published in The Color Computer Magazine We will probably want to capture snippets of sound with a cheap microphone and store the sound files on disk for later use The
21. 006 Chicago CoCoFest hopefully helping them end up somewhere better than the recycle bin During all of this purging a nonde script brown cardboard box was discovered One of the remaining long time employees knew of its contents and made sure to set it aside This box was the same box that Federal Express had delivered twenty years earlier This box contained not one but two Color Computer 3 prototypes and a few other surprises The con tents of this box have since helped us learn a bit more about what Tandy had intended the CoCo 3 be VEVA Oa Co RA ENIE rhe LIFE AND rimes OF rdi COLOR CONFPUTER Part 2 From Prototype to Pre Production Before the discovery of the actual Color Computer 3 prototypes the CoCo community had already seen what was being called prototype CoCo 3s A few years earlier some pre production CoCos were displayed at a CoCoFest convention The CoCo Community s official monk Brother Jeremy had acquired them somehow They were the ones used by Microware for developing OS 9 and we assumed the Extended Color BASIC extensions Externally they looked like the CoCo 3s we are all familiar with but the motherboards inside were different The GIME chips were earlier prototype versions different from the ones found in later production units Little else is known about these machines but news of their existence spread through the community After hearing that prototype CoCo 3s had been
22. 1 bought my first per sonal computer my CoCo1 with 4K of RAM and color Basic which quickly upgraded to 16K and extended color Basic with Radio Shack parts and then modified to accept 64K RAMs still have this computer although all the manuals and my EDTASM cartridge have been lost in the intervening years My extensive background in Assem bly programming and DEC systems lead to an interest in Assembly language programming on the CoCo so bought an EDTASMs cartridge and proceeded to start playing around with 6809 assembler which found to be very similar to PDP 11 assembler In fact it was the 6809 processor which was called at that time the 8 bit PDP 11 that attracted me to the CoCo in the first place One project that toyed with for a while was a FORTRAN interpreter similar to Page 16 the one that had been written for our PDP 8 systems at work It can be most easily described as being similar to the P code virtual machine used to implement UCSD Pascal on the Apple Il in the mid 1970s except our s was developed in 1970 71 In the Falconbridge FORTRAN system a compiler reads FORTRAN source statements and produces an intermedi ate code that a virtual machine or interpreter executes at runtime Al though the net result is not as fast as code which compiles to assembly code the programs are usually very small an important consideration when you only have 4K of memory as we did on our first PDP 8s
23. 12 1263 300 DATA 21 F3 20 F1 00 00 00 00 00 00 549 j m oe Homons ef Seon eo nm primal switch bene Oee 0 and ADC Biased oe 2 Set a Pi Lert PEA jack CoCoNuts VEVA TAVO RA bs 0 r THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR COMPUTER All parts except for the new 74LS138 were mounted on copper backed perf board and easily fit into the Orc 90 case In my case just sacrificed the Orc 90 left channel but one could easily use a toggle switch to select either the Orc 90 left output or the ADC input How Does It Work The above circuit worked but not as well as had wanted The problem was the low conversion speed of the ADC I m sure that those of you that like hardware projects could find a faster unit The chip is rated at a clock speed of 640 kHz which makes the optimal conversion rate 8767 measurements per second If nothing were done about this the maximum frequency without aliasing distortion would be 4000HZ resulting in terrible audio connected the ADC clock to the Coco E clock line resulting in a rate of 1 79MHz The maximum rated clock of the ADC is 1 46MHz but the chip worked anyway This faster clock gave a conversion rate of 24kHz which meant alias free signals up to 12kHz or AM radio quality sound The drawback of the faster clock was a loss in accuracy of conversion The circuit should give a reading of 80 with no input 2 5v bias but read 87 a 5 error At a clock
24. 55 255 255 255 255 255 255 FCB 255 251 251 251 247 247 247 243 243 239 FCB 239 235 235 231 227 227 223 219 215 211 FCB 211 207 203 199 195 191 187 183 179 175 FCB 171 167 163 159 155 151 143 139 135 131 FCB 127 123 119 115 111 103 099 095 091 087 FCB 083 079 075 071 067 063 059 055 051 047 FCB 043 043 039 035 031 027 027 023 019 019 FCB 015 015 011 011 007 007 007 003 003 003 FCB 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 FCB 000 003 003 003 007 007 007 011 011 015 FCB 015 019 019 023 027 027 031 035 039 043 FCB 043 047 051 055 059 063 067 071 075 079 FCB 083 087 091 095 099 103 111 115 119 123 FCB 127 JSR A976 DAC AUDIO ON ORCC 50 TURN OFF INTERRUPTS STA FFD9 FAST CPU CLOCK LDA FF20 ANDA 3 KEEP ONLY CASSETTE AND RS 232 BITS PSHS A SAVE DATA LDY FF20 POINT TO DAC PORT LEAX DATA PCR POINT TO SINEWAVE TABLE 5cycles LDB BEGIN DATA GET OF ENTRIES 2cycles LDA X GET DATA BYTE ORA S ADD CASSETTE AND RS 232 BITS STA Y SEND TO DAC DECB UPDATE COUNTER BEQ A NOP BALANCE THE LOOP FOR LEAX amp LDB NOP 7 cycles BRN BRA END CoCoNuts VEVA Oi Co RA ENIE THE LIFE AND TIMES Hardware Hacking The only way to get around the hard ware limitations of the Coco is to add new hardware Tandy did this with the Speech Sound and Orchestra 90 cartridges They take over the task of sound generation from the CPU and DAC The Orc 90 pack contains the equivalent of two 8 bit DACs actually just re
25. ASIC first seems is it One Liners by John Kowalski Sock Master This one liner is Snow in Spring Spring is basically here but we had a snow storm over here a few days ago Here is the CoCo version of it with bonus spring style snow 10 POKE65497 0 CLS0 DIMA 63 C 63 S 63 FORX 0T063 A X RND 28 C X 5 S X 1 SET X 31 1 NEXT FORQ 0TO1STEP0 FORX 0T063 A X A X S X SET X A X 1 C X RESET X A X IFPOINT X A X 2 THENA X 0 C X RND 8 S X RND 0 2 5 NEXT NEXTELSENEXT NEXT This one liner is Mystify It started out as a program that let you doodle on the screen but it ended up evolving into a mystifying spiro graph style doodler Use the right joystick to draw 10 POKE65497 0 PMODE4 1 PCLS SCREEN1 1 DIMX 63 Y 63 C 63 U 63 FORA 0TO1 STEPO FORE 0T063 LINE X B Y B C B U B PRESET X B JOYSTK 0 4 Y B JOYSTK 1 3 C B X E U B Y E LINE X B Y B C B U B PSET B E NEXT NEXT Both programs will work on either a CoCo 1 2 or 3 Just remove the POKE65497 0 or replace it with POKE65496 0 on CoCo 1 2 How made my DSK file into drive letter on the coco have a backup zero to one one is my 3 5 a Real 5 25 CoCo Disk dual 3 5 and 5 25 drive setup for my floppy drive number coco now with both disks in their By Mary Kramer drives typed BACKUPOTO1 that On the desktop of my computer made a folder named Mary and then moved my DSK file named COCO and the DSKINI program into that folder
26. ID A EN 32 1 11 1 REM NEXT CHAR IS FILETYPE Lines 180 and 190 do the same for the ASCII FLAG This byte is usually displayed as either A or B when you type DIR so have maintained that convention here using AF to receive the flag to be printed later 180 AF ASC MID A EN 32 14 12 1 REM NEXT CHAR IS ASCII FLAG 190 IF AF 255 THEN AF A ELSE AF B Line 200 is used to find the first granule entry of the file in the GAT Again ASC is used to convert the string variable to its numeric equiva lent 200 GR ASC MID A EN 32 1 13 1 REM NEXT CHAR IS FIRST GRANULE OF FILE Page 21 Line 210 calculates the value of the number of bytes used in the last sector of the file This is a two byte number because the complete sector could be used resulting in a value of 256 amp H0100 which is two bytes long This is calculated by multiplying the first byte by 256 and then adding the second to arrive at a number between 1 and 256 210 LS ASC MID A EN 32 1 14 1 256 ASC MID A EN 32 1 15 1 REM NEXT 2 CHARS ARE LAST SECTOR LENGTH The next two lines 220 and 230 are used to skip deleted files and detect the end of the directory Remember deleted files have the first character of the filename set to 0 amp H00 and the end of the directory is reached when the first character of the filename is 255 amp HFF If the file was deleted we simply skip the output part of the programme and con
27. ITE PSYCLE How to read a disk directory DECB The Coco amp Music Cloud 9 s DriveWire And Much More 13 14 16 17 20 29 Executive Editor Chief consultant Publishing Senior Writer Staff Writers Art Director amp Typesetiting Photos Our Staff Mary Kramer Bob Devries dad Roger Taylor Robert Gault Steve 6809er Bjork Cris CaptCPU Egger Allen OS 9er Huffman Richard Ivey John Sock Master Kowalski Brian Briza Palmer Steve 6809er Bjork Allen OS 9er Huffman Steve 6809er Bjork Page 1 CoCoNuts THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR COMPUTER VEVA TAVO RA ENIE Getting to Know Steve Bjork Steve has been missing from the CoCo scene for a long time When someone challenged me to try to get him back immediately sent out the email After waiting for a short period of time pounced on him in the CoCo3 com chat one evening Steve s wonderful per sonality quickly won me oh A The ball started to roll Steve and agreed to meet at the fest and do a video taped interview considered this a great honor and was a bit nervous Steve s wonderful personality quickly won me over He is a very polite person and was an absolute pleasure to talk with am so proud to offer this interview for this issue Now Steve is extremely active in our CoCo community once more Wel come home Steve This is the tran script from that video taped interview want
28. Once figure out how to run these new fangled cross assemblers on my PC I ll try to get started at this again although don t know why no one would want a FORTRAN system on the CoCo Just something I d like to do I ll have to cobble up an RS 232 cable from the PC 9 pin to the DIN recep tacle on the CoCo I ve been retired for over 15 years now having retired at 50 years of age on Jan 1 1992 Since retired my wife and issue of Hot CoCo and flip straight to Elmer s Arcade Usually I d be punch ing in Mr Ramella s latest game before even reading the latest goings on at Elmer s The genius of his games came from the simplicity Playing Dang It and Broken Field Nightmare over and over contributed mightily to the nut case am today Most of my programming endeavors at the moment focus around the same concept I m nowhere near as skilled or inventive as Mr Ramella of course But think a bit of visiting Elmer s each month rubbed off and the idea of creating a super simple but im mensely fun game that will run on just about any CoCo has a huge appeal This isn t it but it s a step Page 17 have moved at least 6 times 4 of which were double moves first into storage for periods ranging from 1 to 7 months then into the second house It s a wonder that can find any of my old computer stuff at all This is starting to ramble so I d better close for now Meanwhile does anyone out there think there may
29. RND 8 130 POKE 1024 RND 31 RND 14 32 128 16 C 1 15 140 NEXT L 150 P PEEK 135 160 IF P 94 THEN Y Y 1 170 IF P 10 THEN Y Y 1 180 IF P 8 THEN X X 1 190 IF P 9 THEN X X 1 200 IF Y lt 0 THEN Y 14 210 IF Y gt 14 THEN Y 0 220 IF X lt 0 THEN X 31 230 IF X gt 31 THEN X 0 240 IF PEEK 1024 X Y 32 gt 143 THEN S S PEEK 135 SOUND200 1 250 IF PEEK 1024 X Y 32 143 THEN PRINT 263 crash B crash B crash GOTO 300 260 POKE 1024 X Y 32 143 270 S S 10 280 PRINT 480 SCORE S 290 GOTO 150 300 POKE135 0 310 IF INKEY THEN GOTO 310 320 IF S gt HS THEN HS S 330 GOTO 10 Page 19 CoCoNuts VEVA Oi Co Buran ENIE THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR GOMPUTER How to read a disk directory in DISK EXTENDED COLOR BASIC by Bob Devries While reading the directory using a BASIC programme is not trivial it is not difficult once you understand the structure of the disk directory track Let me refresh your memories on what is where I ll start with a brief explanation of the structure of a Colour Computer disk The disk is divided into 35 tracks like rings numbered from 0 to 34 Each of these tracks is divided into 18 sectors which each contain 256 bytes charac ters This structure is repeated for each side of the disk So the capacity of the disk is 35 18 256 161280 bytes per side Take out the directory track and you ll be left with 156672 bytes of storage The directory track stores t
30. Shack or TRS 80 Radio Shack the company that work once before at the time with over 5 000 outlets was going to sell computers Yes a real personal computer no kit no loading programs Page 4 Foo lll L m TRS 80 Model one computer with expansion unit and hard drive in by switches Plus the number place that you by a computer has jump by a factor of ten overnight The personal computer was really here When my contract for the Magic show was over it was back to Los Angeles and the start of my real career in computers At this time pulled a Bill Gates dropped out of collage More like did not start my classes in the fall First start working for the Shack again but selling computer this time qiuckly became the top sells person in the district if not in the country because knew how to write programs for my clients Mary What types of programs did you write to help sell the TRS 80 Steve did a couple of demos real fast but also wrote application programs too When someone would come in and ask what could this computer could do would then write the program for them to sell the computer One of the projects that got paid for was a loan amortization program for a local car dealership The program did such a great job for the load manager that he started firing his staff The TRS 80 did a better job at fill out the load applications than people Back in the 70 s computers takin
31. Sound Steve ran the company for a very fun one and half years The summer of 1980 started of a very colorful period in my career But that s a story for the next issue of the CoConutz You can contact Steve Bjork via his website at coco etechwds com Verbatim A Space Ball for a TRS 80 VEVA OW Co RA ERIE The real Donkey Kong on a CoCo NO WAY As many of you already know I went to the fest this year with a very special purpose was going to debut the newest and most amazing project by none other than the great Sockmaster Nick John and I kept people waiting in the chatrooms on drop little hints Mary What inspired you to do this John I ve been wanting to do something really neat on the CoCo for some years now but I ve never had the free time that would need to do something really big When some free time actually presented itself decided to use it hadn t really decided what would do at first except that wanted to do something that had never been done on the CoCo before That part is important to me After thinking about it a bit finally settled on a game Mary Why did you choose Donkey Kong instead of a different arcade game John had made a short list of about 5 arcade games that would be interesting to do on the CoCo didn t want to do something too easy didn t want to try something that turned out to be impossible after all didn t want to do a ga
32. Then in windows went to the The Colour ieriaer Pig ti alas START menu and clicked on RUN and C ter S fi KARE typed in the word COMMAND and OMPULEP oopwar Whallllaaa had a real working 5 25 floppy disk of my DSK file pressed enter Preservation Project Now that am in DOS typed CD _2T DS Whew nboodoenumder com Until got a C prompt Then typed This website is dedicuted to pre in CD MARY to give mea c Mary saring software and documenta prompt Then typed DSKINI spacebar A spacebar COCO DSK ton for all versions of ihe Tardy Pleme comtrbuie We auod bais Should look like this DSKINI A Colour Cam puter The files which be ane reduc Ht COCO DSK A is the drive letter of are available have the documenta e my 3 5 floppy disk drive Coco is the tion and disks in MESS DSR name of my DSK file Then took format included in the ZIP files Bis Pe WT DEFE the 3 5 disk I just made and put it in iega my Coco s 3 5 drive Then put a eran eee re 5 25 disk into my Coco s 5 25 drive and typed in DSKINIO ZERO is my Page 22 CoCoNuts May 2007 Vol 2 Issue 2 THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR COMPUTER The Coco amp Music by Robert Gault There have been a number of messages on Malted Media about using musicin Coco games Let s consider what is required to be able to do this First how can the Coco make sounds of any kind There are two pieces of hardware in all Coco
33. al path Perhaps there were plans Page 12 to achieve the 256 color mode by some way that would allow accessing those extra lines Nick was able to track down the original designer of the GIME but he had no recollection of any such mode It seems likely that this mode if it ever existed may not have even made it to the GIME stages So the prototype while not quite a blue sky machine with enhanced sound and true RS 232 serial hard ware did certainly represent a some what nicer machine than what was actually released Imagine a CoCo 3 with 512K standard normal DB9 monitor port on the back and a place to plug the disk drive ribbon cable in and still have the cartridge port available This would have removed need for the MultiPak for the large number of CoCoists who used floppy and RS 232 or perhaps floppy and the Speech Sound Pak When the prototypes are fully in spected and hopefully reverse engineered there may be more mysteries discovered Though the prototypes were supposedly working when they were packed away 20 years ago until someone qualified has time to inspect them no attempts are going to be made to power them up The conclusion in the next issue of CoCoNuts Allen s CoCoFest Map Drop by and place your mark on the map This will not only give an idea on who all is going or may be going but it can be used to help coordi nate ride sharing if that helps some folks attend who might not otherwise
34. been away from the CoCo world for about 23 years First a bit of background was working for Falconbridge Nickel Mines Ltd a base metal mining company in Sudbury Ontario Canada when started out programming on an IBM 1800 process control computer in Sept 1969 My first 2 years were spent writing FORTRAN programs on this computer and on a remote S 360 In July 1971 the IBM 1800 was replaced with a DEC PDP 8 E computer Falconbridge personnel wrote the operating system and a FORTRAN compiler interpreter for this new com puter did mainly FORTRAN program ming on this computer but also taught myself Assembly language program ming in my spare time using a spare CPU that we kept as backup for the main computer that was controlling one of Falconbridge s ore processing plants By 1974 was doing mostly Assem bly programming and in 1976 77 did most of the coding for an executive for a dual PDP 8 A system being installed in our Nickel smelter Between 1978 and 1990 did a lot of Assembler coding for this system and another PDP 8 A and did some enhancements to our in house FORTRAN compiler interpreter During this time also got some hardware experience helping our Instrumentation Dept work on the interfaces for the PDP 8 also got some exposure to microcomputers with an Apple II that was bought by our computer department and then 4 hardened industrial microcomputers based on the Commodore PET In 1980 or 8
35. bytes long So 128 bytes are stored in the each Page 20 string variable For the purposes of my example programme 127 bytes from the second string variable are concat enated to or added to the end of the first and the last byte can be dis carded because it does not have any information in it that is needed to interpret the directory entries Perhaps a more correct way would be to detect when the first string has been used and simply copy the second string to the first My version is however simple and it works So to read the first of the sectors containing the directory entries the command will be DSKI 0 17 3 A BS Of course any string variable names could be used and the drive could be any of the four possible drives 0 3 There are 8 possible directory entries in each sector say possible because not all the entries are always valid DISK EXTENDED COLOR BASIC marks a file that it has deleted by setting the first character of the file name to 0 amp H00 as well as setting all the granules to free by making them 255 amp HFF Also when a disk is newly formatted the directory track and all the other tracks is filled with 255 amp HFF so when the end of the directory is reached the next filename will have 255 as its first character That means we can easily write code to skip deleted entries and stop when the end is reached by examining the first byte of each filename extracted Now that I
36. d Pak would be useful The RS 232 pak would also have made a nice addition effectively giving all those power user features to the base model A really deluxe CoCo with better graphics would also need to support something other than an old style television set Other obvious enhancements would include more memory and speed Ultimately the CoCo 3 that was released in 1996 only contained a handful of these blue sky items Compromises had to be made to keep costs down One of the original Tandy CoCo 3 developers Steve Bjork has stated that there was a requirement for the CoCo 3 to be produced ata lower cost than the CoCo 2 it was replacing This ambi tious economic goal certainly limited all the developer s requests for enhanced hardware When released the production model CoCo 3 did contain better graphics up to 640x480 with four colors or 320x225 with 16 out of 64 colors More memory was added with the base model of 128K expandable to 512K RGB analog monitor output was added as well as audio video outputs for hooking to VCRs or composite monitors The CoCo 3 could also run at double speed even in RAM mode allowing a boost in performance for more than just BASIC ROM calls The CoCoNuts VEVA TAVO RA ENIE THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR COMPUTER CoCo 1 and 2 had a double speed poke which sped up ROM access but the so called triple speed poke that sped up RAM access garbled the video displa
37. d life working 6 days week for 8 to 10 hours a day would work there after school or on Saturdays doing what a boy could do to help out It was there that learned what it took to run your own business After Softape follow the lead from my parents and start my first com puter company Computer Light amp Sound Softape let me keep the software that wrote for them plus the redesign light pen and used them to start the company Page 5 It was not long before every TRS 80 third party company that was selling a Light Pen based on my design and software knew that if gave them my design and kept the software price low then could corner the Light Pen Market can still remembe walking the isles of the West Coast Computer Fair and seeing only my light pen at the third party TRS 80 booths and thinking that had done well Besides the Light Pen also created three more video games Galactic Fighter Space Ball II and Galactic Fighter Il Space Ball was Breakout meets Space Invaders and Galactic Fighter was like Galaxian but predates it by 3 months One other Computer Light amp Sound product that I m proud of was SoftMusic This was a two voice music driver that loaded with your BASIC program It had to firsts playing music on key thought out an 8 octave range The second was play the music in two voice harmony and was unheard for a software only music system Mary Who long did you run Com puter Light amp
38. de If the above waveform was symmetri cal that is constant frequency it would seem to be a tone with a very objec tionable amount of harmonic distor tion The distortion in this case results from a square wave actually being a combination of many frequencies of sine waves that are overtones of the fundamental but that goes way beyond the scope of this article The above square wave is not sym metrical along the X axis so it is frequency modulated A frequency modulated square wave can sound like sequence of tones with large amounts of distortion It is quite adequate for generating noise for games but is not desirable for music Can the Coco do better than this The DAC used in the Coco is a six bit unit Each bit represents a different voltage level and it is possible to represent 2 6 or 64 different levels This means it is possible to create a digital version of the analog smoothly continuous sine wave As you can see the wave is now a stair step shape If a complete cycle Page 23 were drawn there would be 32 steps above and 32 steps below the mid point on the Y axis This clearly is not a true sine wave and it has consider able distortion but it is much better to listen to than a square wave of equivalent frequency generated by the single bit sound output Evaluating DAC Quality There is another method for evaluat ing the quality of sounds generated by the Coco or equipment such as Hi Fi systems Signal
39. ds It would take days to get printout the program s run and to see if it worked at all BASIC on the other hand was entered via a teletype with a paper tape for storage and you could run the program right away to see if it worked You can tell which one preferred The shot fired in the Intel Motoral CPU war The SWPC 6800 computer CoCoNuts May 2007 Vol 2 Issue 2 It did not take long before past the level of what my high school could offer so while at the age of 16 and still in high school was off to Collage for courses on Advance BASIC programming was also taking a Saturday and sometimes after school class offered by the school district for Assembly and Microcode programming It was there that t would take the knowledge of both hardware and software to become a success in computers learned the most important lesson of my professional life While at the district s computer lab the MicroData mini computer started having a few problems Each day MicroData would send out a techni cian to repair the computer First was a hardware guy who found the hardware working fine so it had to be a problem with the software The next day a software guy would look over the computer and find the software was up to date and loading great Day after day each of the techs gave the computer a clean bill of health till both showed up at the same time by accident As watched them could see t
40. ds in Southern Califor nia Steve Ah well what is interesting is that one of the largest city bound parks exist in Los Angles by the name of Griffith Park There is an Observa tory Zoo Museums and lots of hiking in the mountains The Local chapter of the Sierra Club host hikes on week nights in the spring with up to 500 people hiking in 20 or more groups That s a lot of people Mary Do you have a dog or any other pets Steve No not at this time But I m fond to Basset Hounds They have such a sad face with those long droopy ears and big sad eyes Their temperament is great a kid could pull there tail and all they would do is turn with a sad sorry full look of why are you doing that Mary Interviewing Steve CoCoNuts VEVA OW Co Buran ENIE THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR COMPUTER Mary Oh you got to love them Now how did you get start with computers Steve Well got started back in the early 70 s Back in high school during my sophomore year was taking electronic classes was not inter ested in learning about the old tubes and transistors wanted to know about the new digital stuff started studying about the digital electronics and was going a little faster than the instructor When the instructor was teaching the class and was not sure how to interface some thing he would then look in the back of the room to see if was shaking my head yes or no Mary They had digital
41. e The CoCo on the other hand is from the same era as these arcade games It isn t several times faster or John The trick is to emulate only the parts of the hardware that is within the capacity of the CoCo to emulate and the hardware must be emulated because it simply does not 1982 version of Donkey King by Chris Latham for a 32k CoCo CoCoNuts May 2007 Vol 2 Issue 2 exist on the CoCo The other parts that cannot be emu lated need to be converted into something that would work on the CoCo The big part that can t be emulated is Donkey Kong s Z80 CPU amp Z80 program code The CoCo has a 6809 CPU not a Z80 What had to do there was reverse engineer the Z80 code and translate it into 6809 code That way it can run on Second Level of 1982 version of Donkey Same level on 2007 version of Donkey King the CoCo and still run the same King by Chris Latham for a 32k CoCo by John Kowalski for a 512k CoCo 3 way that it did originally to hackers in Donkey Kong s rom code Did you know that Donkey Kong actually runs out of barrels when the time runs out on the first level nthe r on for the colors John The decompression takes about 20 seconds to process That s a long time to wait If there was nothing happening on the screen people might think the program was not working and reset the computer The crazy colors are an easy way to show that the computer is actually doing someth
42. ed to the monitor port Under the machine where the monitor plugs in is a square Page 11 indention that could have fit some kind of small box Perhaps there was an idea of converting the main RGB A output to some other format via a converter box maybe simplifying monitors between US and other parts of the world Perhaps there was some other intended us that we may never learn about Perhaps the CoCo 3 prototype will eventually give us a clue A more pressing mystery is why CoCo 3 software always asks Com posite TV or RGB on startup even though there was a way to detect if a CM 8 was plugged in Something else learned by inspecting the prototype is that Tandy may have had much higher goals for their base model machine The prototype has no place for RAM expansion Instead it is populated with 512K This would have driven up cost and would have caused real problems during the RAM price crisis of the late 1980s when memory upgrades shot up by hundreds of dollars due to a fire at an overseas production J facility Looking back releasing a cheaper 128K unit that could be upgraded later was probably a smart move though it ultimately led to few official Radio Shack products taking advantage of systems with that much memory Another interesting discovery was noticing a 1773 chip on the prototype This chip was part of the CoCo floppy drive controller pak The prototype had the floppy drive circuitry built in and conta
43. ed to exist as an independent entity in 2001 after it was acquired by Oregon based RadiSys Corporation Over the years the once thriving embedded operating system company had become a much smaller strug gling company trying to compete in a Page 8 market now filled with hundreds of competitors including offerings from Microsoft and embedded versions of the free Linux Although the building completed in 1996 was once fully occupied by Microware staff it had slowly been rented out as the com pany reduced in size At some point the building was sold and the former owner became a renting tenant It was on this day that the last remain ing Microware folks would be relo cating to a much more appropriately sized rented office space a few miles away The move was somewhat emotional for those who had been with the company since the 1980s Efforts were made to preserve any OS 9 related artifacts that might still prove useful such as motherboards for any versions of OS 9 that were still sup ported VME cards were salvaged and server racks were saved but endless other pieces of ancient hardware were to be recycled Large trash units had been brought in to the parking lot Old PCs SUN workstations endless cables and old parts were being thrown in to them A mountain of monitors was stacked high in the lobby waiting to be picked up by the recycler Decades of history had been rendered useless by the advances of technology
44. ego Yes all the programs are there It was always my intention to make all the programs available even if had to use a flippie or multiple disks Mary Does the game work in an emulator Diego yes all of them do use a little known one called Bjork I believe it was also known as Poco http members lycos co uk poco6809 bjork index html They should work OK in any other emulator Mary Does the winning game need a joystick Diego No the only game that needs one is Glove All the other ones work with the keyboard Mary What is the name of the winning game Diego The winning program is Mister Mind A computer version of the classic board game Master Mind Mary Who wrote it Diego Christian Bilodeau On a final note 1 of the participants is from UK and the other 2 from Canada Let s hope that Team USA shows up for the 2007 edition Yes this is a cheap shoot trying to make national pride another reason to participate CoCoNuts VEVA TAVO RA kst lt 1 0 gt Asimov Award Winner Mister Mind 2007 By Chris Bilodeau Mary The sound is awesome is that your voice Chris Yes it is my voice recorded all with my PC microphone in a wave editor program and saved it as a wave used my Tandy CCR 81 to record the music sample Mary How did you do that Chris recorded all the digital samples on the PC First part was to record the song that would be played when the playe
45. ely be the way to go Cloud 9 can also provide burned EPROMs DriveWire acts like a hard drive or perhaps better stated a whole lot of floppy drives attached to your CoCo There are four drive slots in the server and each slot holds a dsk image that can contain up to 255 virtual disks Access to the drives is done through the DRIVE n command where n is the drive you wish to access Loading and saving programs to and from the CoCo is as easy as using the already familiar DECB commands SAVE SAVEM LOAD LOADM BACKUP COPY DSKINI etc all work as they should on the DriveWire virtual disks HDB DOS adds a couple of com mands and modifies a few of the old ones For example the COPY com mand no longer needs the second file name to work It just uses the same file name for the copy Another handy command is RENAME which changes the disk label This is particularly useful when you start filling a virtual drive with disks and want to group them together The disk labels can be long and are not limited to 8 3 file naming A utility that would let the CoCo display all the disks on a virtual drive listing their number and as signed label would be a nice addition but alas is not included at this time HDB DOS also includes the FlexiKey utility that makes command line editing a lot easier particularly be cause it can recall the last few com mands entered find myself fre quently booting up HDB DOS just for FlexiKey
46. er Eventually a second prize of 20 was established And still have to send the winners some certificate diploma Yes am lazy Mary How did you get the money for this Diego Out of my pocket The second prize came from a donation At the CoCoFest traded diskettes with the programs for donations I m sorry that wasn t able to be there on Saturday My plans were to be there on a table and talk to people about the awards But since had already missed half of the fest just couldn t stay on a table also forgot to take the power supply for the laptop which was going to use to show the games running in an emulator Anyway after the word started to spread people was actually offering me donations and asking for the diskettes Mary Are there copies of the winning games Diego Yes made a DSK file including all the programs that were submitted Page 14 plus another one that would have submitted if someone else had organized the awards also included a simple program that explains what this is all about and works as a menu for the disk Mary How can get a copy Diego You can download it from http coco sclaudia net AA DSK still have to put a real link to it in the page http coco sclaudia net AA aa htm There is also an OpenOffice document that used to make the disk sleeves at http coco sclaudia net disk_sleeve odt Mary Is there copies of the other contenders games Di
47. er of OS 9 Level 2 made the new model a more revolutionary a leap than from CoCo 1 to CoCo 2 This brings us back to that box and the prototype within By the time hardware is created even if it s just a massive circuit board stuffed with chips and wiring most blue sky goals have been eliminated The goal of the initial prototype is to begin working on what will hopefully be produced later Projects certainly continue to evolve often based on feedback from working with the prototypes but examining early designs can shed light on the intent of the designers at that moment in time As mentioned earlier the CoCo 3 prototype contained the common ports found on all CoCos up to that point cassette joystick printer TV RF out and cartridge New RCA jacks were added for composite audio video output and a DB9 appeared for the new RGB analog monitor While the RCA jacks would make it to the production CoCo 3s the DB9 connec tor did not Instead an odd square 10 pin header connector was added to the bottom of the machine This was likely a cost reduction move since placing the connector there on the motherboard probably saved some layout money and using a surface mount header was cheaper than adding a DB9 port Still it does indicate that Tandy may have intended to use some kind of monitor that had a DB9 connector like other monitors of the day On a side note the production CoCo 3 still contains one mystery relat
48. esistor divider with an isolating capacitor was used to create a line level input for an AC signal and bias it to 2 5 volts Ole CONS ede Bode ees Ucn BASIC Creator Program 10 REM DAC 20 LI 80 30 FOR M amp H6000 TO amp H60DF STEP10 SUM 0 40 FOR I 0TO9 READA VA VAL amp H A SUM SUM VA POKE M I VA NEXT READ CHK IFSUM lt gt CHK THEN PRINT ERROR IN LINE LI END 50 LI LI 10 NEXT 60 SAVEM DAC amp H6000 amp H60DF amp H6000 70 END 80 DATA 16 0 B5 7F 83 87 8B 8F 97 9B 1184 90 DATA 9F A3 A7 AB AF B3 B7 BB BF C3 1770 100 DATA C7 CB CF D3 D3 D7 DB DF E3 E3 2142 110 DATA E7 EB EB EF EF F3 F3 F7 F7 F7 2406 120 DATA FB FB FB FF FF FF FF FF FF FF 2538 130 DATA FF FF FF FF FB FB FB F7 F7 F7 2514 140 DATA F3 F3 EF EF EB EB E7 E3 E3 DF 2342 150 DATA DB D7 D3 D3 CF CB C7 C3 BF BB 2038 160 DATA B7 B3 AF AB A7 A3 9F 9B 97 8F 1646 170 DATA 8B 87 83 7F 7B 77 73 6F 67 63 1202 180 DATA 5F 5B 57 53 4F 4B 4 3F 190 DATA 37 33 2F 2B 2 1 200 DATA 17 13 13 F 210 DATA3 3 3 0 220 DATA0 0 0 0 230 DATAB B F 1 240 DATA 23 27 2B 2 5 lm ost B 3F 43 502 250 DATA 47 4B 4F 53 57 5B 5F 63 67 6F 894 260 DATA 73 77 7B 7F BD A9 76 1A 50 B7 1249 270 DATA FF D9 B6 FF 20 84 3 34 2 10 1146 280 DATA 8E FF 20 30 8D FF 34 C6 B5 A6 1470 290 DATA 80 AA E4 A7 A4 5A 27 F1 12
49. g over jobs was a big deal and hate to say that was part of it CoCoNuts VEVA TAVO RA kst lt 1 0 gt THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR COMPUTER It did not take long for me learned that could make more money if spent all my time writing programs for clients After about six months moved on to my first paid program ming gig at SofTape There wrote programs for the Apple II and the TRS 80 including my first game Space Ball Mary Your first game what did you write it in Steve should first correct myself and say that Space Ball was not the first game that ever wrote There were a few BASIC games that wrote just for fun Space Ball was my first game that was marketed and it was also my first assembly language game too Mary The same company did Apple and TRS 80 stuff A light Pen for a TRS 80 Steve Yes Third party computer would and still do create projects for more than one type of computers While At SoftTape did work on both the Apple Il and the TRS 80 Beside games also did drivers for Light Pens Mary What is a light Pen Steve In the years before the mouse via the Mac the only way to tell a computer what to do was via a key board and it was not a lot fun So third party companies tried to market all types of new input device The light pen was a small pen that you point to a stop on the screen and the computer would read where you are pointing at But SoftTape s Brig
50. get to attend http www frappr com cocofest2008 VEVA TAVO RA ENIE The 16th Last Annual Chicago CoCofest My experiences there have never attended a fest or anything like this was excited to go planned for several months and even kidnaped my younger brother to go with me had never even been to Chicago My mother was upset was going to Chicago and my husband just couldn t understand why wanted to travel so far to look at a bunch of old computers am very headstrong and told them both was going weather they liked it or not My mother demanded that leave my son home with her and so I did The drive up there was fairly nice until we hit Chicago Chicago was a huge surprise was amazed to see all the big buildings and the sears tower crowded with think it was fog had never seen those above ground subway train things before thought that was neat that they had passenger trains running right next to the main roads did however miss a lot of the tolls cause was unable to get into the right lanes figure owe Chicago at least 5 dollars My intentions as to going to the fest were to debut Sockmasters Donkey Kong and video tape as much as could of the fest was also extremely excited to meet and chat with Steve Bjork and talking him into an interview for this issue got there around noon and stayed until 5pm at the fest In those short 5 hours did hook up my coco3 for the deb
51. giving a length of 255 bytes For our purposes the last byte can be dis carded as mentioned above 100 TK 17 REM DIRECTORY AT TRACK 17 110 FOR SE 3 TO 18 REM DIR ENTRIES START AT SECTOR 3 120 DSKI DN TK SE A B 130 A A LEFT B 127 Next a FOR NEXT loop is started to read the 8 directory entries in the sector that was just read 140 FOR EN 0 TO 7 REM 8 DIR ENTRIES PER SECTOR FLG GRN Line 150 extracts the FILENAME from the sector Note that for this example the data is not stored but this could be done by using an array The offset into the sector is calculated from the entry number variable EN 0 7 multiplied by the number of bytes per directory entry which is 32 plus 1 because string variables are indexed starting at 1 Filenames are always padded out to 8 characters using space characters amp H20 The MID command extracts 8 characters from A starting at EN 32 1 which for the first entry will result in a value of 1 Subsequent values will be 33 65 150 FI MID A EN 32 1 8 REM 1ST 8 CHARS IS FILENAME Similarly the EXTENSION is ex tracted in line 160 except that this time the offset has 8 added to it and the number of characters extracted is only 3 160 EX MID A EN 32 1 8 3 REM NEXT 3 CHARS IS EXTENSION Line 170 gets the FILETYPE of the file Values can be 0 3 as explained above Here the ASC command is used to convert the string to its numeric equivalent 170 TY ASC M
52. gram on the CoCo floppy disk and Page 29 NitrOS 9 loads right up from the server This is way faster than doing it on a floppy disk Having it boot off a ROM would make it virtually transpar ent My initial foray with DriveWire met with a little resistance Constant I O errors plagued the operation even after managed to get the COM port settings correct In some cases the PC and CoCo would both completely lock up These errors were most likely caused by my flaky Windows ME installation It likes to pause randomly and think for awhile before returning control A quick email to Boisy Pitre at Cloud 9 fixed the problem right up Allow me to insert a plug here Cloud 9 s support for their products has always been top notch in my experience Buy and install with no fear The fix is to download a newer version of the server off of Cloud 9 s website Simply copy the downloaded exe file over the old one The newer version looks better It has photographic images of disk drives instead of a gray dialog box see screen shot It also runs much more stable Disk BASIC Operation First let s get some of the technical details out of the way Included with DriveWire is a special edition of HDB DOS HBD DOS DW an enhancement for Disk Extended Color BASIC that let s the CoCo access hard drives The included edition works only with DriveWire It can t access IDE or SCSI drives hooked up to the CoCo at the same time NitrOS 9 ca
53. have written a program that extends recording capacity to just over three minutes although the sound is not very good Want to read about these programs and see their code contact the editor for more articles te olor Computer Super Site goal of the project is to create the next level of a CoCo by using software only via an emulator Some of the features of the V R CoCo 4 will be faster speed better graphics and sound What are your ideas on the project Add your input in the V R CoCo 4 section of the forms at coco3 com CoCoNuts VEVA TAVO RA ENIE Donkey Kong for the Coco3 By John Kowalski Game Review By Brian Briza Palmer We die hard game players have waited 20 years for a version of Donkey Kong to call our own Sure we did get a clone of Return of Junior s Revenge But it was never classed as a classic in the Coco gamer s field What we needed was the Classic of all Donkey Kong games to be done for the Coco3 And only the master of the impossible SockMaster would dream of doing such a port But what a way to do it Not do a clone But a actual port of the game using the Arcade machines Z80 code translated to 6809 And doing hard ware emulation into software based code then routed to the Coco3 hard ware that could do it I m not a Techy by nature but that s the best way can describe the achievement Sock s did in doing DK Now onto what Donkey Kong is and what it means on the Cocos A
54. he file names and other pertinent information about the file The directory is stored on track 17 of the disk starting at sector 3 Ona standard 35 track disk there are 9 sectors used for directory entries The maximum number of files is limited not by the directory capacity but by the granule table which is stored on track 17 sector 2 This table has only 68 entries If you re using a modified DISK EXTENDED COLOR BASIC that allows 40 track or 80 track disks you will have comparatively more directory entries Each directory entry takes up 32 bytes characters of the directory track sectors of which half is normally unused The first 8 bytes are the filename padded with spaces the next 3 are for the extension Next comes 1 byte for the filetype either 0 for BASIC file 1 for BASIC DATA file 2 for BINARY file and 3 for TEXT EDITOR file After that is the ASCII flag byte A flag byte is one that stores one of two values like YES or NO TRUE or FALSE ON or OFF It is 0 for normal binary saved files and 1 amp HFF for ASCII text files Then comes a byte pointing to the first granule of the file more on granules later and then two bytes to show how many bytes in the last sector of the file 1 to 256 The next 16 bytes are usually zeros amp H00 but may be used for other information Disk EDTASM uses that area for its own values and some other DISK EX TENDED COLOR BASIC versions use it for the creation date a
55. heir combined knowledge was needed to deduce that the problem was a cross between hardware and software What was going on was the ROM that held the Microcode was dropping just a few bits so the Microcode was not running Steve Wozniak s second Computer The Apple II right Basically a hard to detect bug in the hardware was making the software programs run very buggy They showed me that it would take the knowledge of both hardware and software to become a success in computers Someday must thank those two technicians for this life changing lesson Mary It sounds like you did a lot with computer before the CoCo What other personal computers did you write for before the CoCo Steve Oh there were a few comput ers here and there Besides 8080 based computer like the Altar 8800 there was other computer based on the 6502 In early 1977 the Apple II and the Commodore Pet were intro duced and started playing with those still remember being at the The Apple Il was followed by the PET 1977 West Computer Fair and seeing the introduction of the Apple II In the summer of 1977 took a little break from computers by working with a fellow magician at Nevada casino in a dueling magician magic show One day before work stopped in the local Radio Shack store to get the new 1978 store catalog It was like most other store catalogs except for a little insert on the last page for a computer call the Tandy Radio
56. her The PC software comes on a 3 1 2 disk and includes the server software The CoCo software comes ona 5 1 4 disk It includes a special version of HDB DOS for Disk BASIC users as well as NitrOS 9 loaders The cable included has a PC serial plug on one end and the round RS 232 CoCo serial plug on the other The user manual included is nine single sided pages and details installation and operation Installing DriveWire There are no hardware modifications required to use DriveWire Your CoCo will need its serial port free and a 5 1 4 disk drive tested the system with a stock CoCo 3 at 128K and duel FD 501 disk drive controller plugged directly into the pak slot also ran tests using a 512K CoCo 3 with home built 40 track 5 1 4 drives on a FD 501 controller plugged into a Multipak Interface There was no noticeable performance difference between the two CoCos using DriveWire The system will also work on a Color Computer 1 or 2 though at a slower baud rate CoCo 1 2 operation was not tested for this review I hooked it was able to transfer a file from the PC but didn t have time to do anything more thorough Your PC will need a 1 44MB 3 1 2 drive and a serial port installed The PC tested on was an old Pentium 4 1 44 GHz computer running Windows ME and with the DriveWire plugged into the serial port set to COM 1 The only problem a user might run into is a newer PC without serial ports or a floppy drive T
57. here were two known revisions to the production GIME 86 and 87 revision and the early development units are believed to have been just earlier and buggier versions of what was re leased But documents given to Microware during this project indicated that one of the specifications for the CoCo 3 was a 256 color mode Steve Bjork has stated that this mode never existed in any manufactured CoCo 3s and notes that the graphics hardware itself did not have enough bits avail able to represent a 256 color map However this early prototype may have had the basis for such a mode before it was deemed either too costly or perhaps too likely to compete with the Tandy 1000 graphics The mys tery of the specified 256 color mode may finally be unlocked in these early designs In a side note the whole suspicion of a 256 color mode started when a former Tandy Color Computer product manager made reference to it years later Has anyone found the 256 color mode he asked No one had but noted Color Computer programmers John Kowalski SockMaster and Australia s Nick Marentes were able to find abnormali ties in the CoCo 3 schematics pub lished by Radio Shack in the Color Computer 3 Technical Service Manual As Steve Bjork has mentioned there were not enough address lines for doing an 8 bit color but the schemat ics showed some evidence of alter ations in that area There where two extra lines being routed away from the norm
58. his is a great reason to put that old PC back into service The user manual covers installation fairly well Install the server software on the PC using the included setup routine The server has settings for COM port setting COM 1 6 and baud rate 38400 for the CoCo 1 2 and 57600 bps for the CoCo 3 You need to go into Window s hardware profiles and change the default COM port setting They re usually set to 9600 bps by default This hung me up for a bit when first installed DriveWire resulting in constant I O errors haven t used a COM port in oh years and years Once set correctly though things started working a little better The CoCo disk includes a wizard program that builds a custom HDB DOS disk Back this disk up of course The wizard asks a series of questions to configure the OS includ ing setting your floppy drives up and setting the step rate to 6ms which is handy no need to POKE them constantly It also creates an EPROMable version of the DOS for those that have a burner For NitrOS 9 the system is even easier You first mount the correct dsk image in the DriveWire server These are copied to the My Documents folder during installation along with a second folder full of ROM images of the system There are three dsk images for NitrOS 9 one for the Color Computer 1 2 Level 1 one for the CoCo 3 6809 Level II and one for the CoCo 3 6309 Level Il You then execute a corresponding loader pro
59. ht pen was easy to use because of drivers that could be added with your programs The design of the Bright Pen s circuit was done by old time electrical engineer and very over done It had small pen with a phototransistor at the pen end and the other was a pen holder with 7 transistors 14 resistors and 10 other components It looked nice but cost over 30 in 1978 dollars to make Because of my computer electronics background understood just how the While At SoftTape I did work on both the Apple II and the TRS 80 model cassette input worked on the com puter and to redesign the light pen to take advantaged of it The new design used a Darlington phototransistor and resistor inside the small pen with a cable running to the battery and the cassette input jack The design cost only 5 00 to build including labor Needless to say the designer of the original Bright Pen was not too pleased with my lower cost redesign because he was one of the founders of Softape Never show up your boss they say so soon left the company Mary So were did you go after Softape Steve have to give a lot of credit to my parents for my next move They both grew up on small farms were you learned to depend on yourself After all if something broken on the farm it was up to you fix it Also if you didn t know how to do something then you learned how They also ran their own business while was growing up It was a har
60. ined a ribbon cable connector for the disk drive Tandy must have wanted to integrate disk support in the base model and perhaps had goals of shipping a floppy drive with the system or allowing the CoCo 3 to just plug in an external drive without needing the drive controller Tandy actually did this very thing with their Tandy 1000 EX and HX PC compatibles While those systems contained a built in floppy CoCoNuts VEVA OW Co RA bss 0 r THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR COMPUTER drive 5 1 4 and 3 5 respectively there was also a port that allowed plugging up an external drive More on this later Probably the most curious observation was that the prototype did not even have a GIME chip The GIME was a custom IC created to handle things like graphics and memory In the early prototype stages before such an expensive chip could be made designers created the functionality of the GIME using programmable PAL chips and other support hardware It is unknown how much GIME support is on the prototype but since Microware used it to create the Extended Color BASIC enhancements which included the new graphics modes and since the prototype had 512K is believed to have implemented the graphics and memory controller that the GIME later would handle There could be other secrets in this prototype Early developers under Non Disclosure Agreements with Tandy received pre production CoCo 3s with pre production GIME chips T
61. ing Many demos on the Amiga and Atari ST used to use the same effect for the same reason figured it would be fitting for the CoCo to do it too Ma learned a number of gameplay tricks You can actually pull out the rivets without crossing over to the other side useful when you have the _ hammer and wouldn t be able to jump back If you do it right you can also jump off the top level of this stage and you ll just bounce back On the elevator level you don t have to jump off the elevators you can simply just walk off and land safely ry Is this the identical gam stc just ported over Mary Do we have cheat codes John There are no cheat codes in the game do have one POKE for the cheaters out there Just add a POKE9665 230 before the EXEC in line 100 of the loader for unlimited lives It kind of spoils the game so I d recommend not using it John The game should play identically to the arcade Same speed same difficulty same tricks and en You c John Even don t know the answer to Sabie that John I m not sure yet If it looks like other people are actually in the process of doing similar arcade to CoCo conversions and if decide this source code could be helpful to the CoCo community may Everybody just wanting it and ganging up on me to ask isn t going to help by the way a He you aam D ny S ecrets about John Lots There s a short message Ere
62. is clever It works like this Let s say we want to transfer a dsk image of a game to a real CoCo floppy disk Step 1 Type DRIVE 0 on your CoCo This sets the server to access the virtual drive 0 on the PC You could just as easily accomplish the same tasks on Drives 1 2 or 3 by typing DRIVE n where n is the drive you want to work with Step 2 Load the dsk image on the PC into the first bottom virtual drive on the server Step 3 Type BACKUP 0 TO 1 This copies all the files on virtual disk 0 to CoCoNuts THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR COMPUTER VEVA TAVO RA kss lt 1 0 gt virtual disk 1 on the selected virtual drive Once a dsk image is mounted it has 255 eligible virtual disks available DriveWire handles this transparently There s no need to create these disks Once an image is mounted in a virtual drive it can hold as much as you can cram into its individual virtual disks Step 4 Type DRIVE OFF 0 on the CoCo This turns off virtual disk 0 on the selected virtual drive This in turn allows access to the real disk 0 on the CoCo s floppy drives DRIVE OFF n turns off all virtual disks on the active virtual drive equal to or lower than the number specified Real CoCo disks with those numbers can now be accessed For example DRIVE OFF 2 turns off virtual disks 0 1 and 2 You can also specify a range of disks Step 5 Type BACKUP 1 TO 0 This will copy the files in virtual disk 0 on the server to
63. l motherboard with the final versions supporting 64K without hardware hacks A small run of white cased CoCo 1s was also produced which included an updated keyboard Next was the CoCo 2 in a smaller white case with a similar keyboard though they were soon revised to have an improved keyboard which would continue to be used on all later models There were numerous revisions to the CoCo 2 models though the only significant feature was the addition of true lowercase for the Tandy branded units None of the models labeled as TRS 80s had this enhanced video chip There was also another minor revision that caused the need for Color BASIC 1 3 but the end result was a machine that was effec tively no different than the original 1980 model other than in appearance To truly make a successor Tandy needed something bolder than just a new keyboard and case Game developers wanted to see enhanced graphics Similar peer systems such Page 10 as the Commodore 64 had more colors and hardware sprite capabilities which allowed more advanced games to be created easier Some of these capabilities were already available as expansion pak add ons for the CoCo but developers couldn t target those enhancements since the base CoCo did not have them In order to be useful the hardware would have to be integrated Looking at the lineup of add on hardware paks sold by Radio Shack certainly building in enhanced audio like the Speech Soun
64. ll can say is Can any other 8bitter platform do Donkey Kong better then the Coco3 version Maybe they could But think that it is only a dream on those machines The aim of this game is to rescue your Girlfriend from the clutches of Donkey Kong Who it seems was your former pet in a cage until he escaped So to get back at his former owner Mario Donkey Kong decides to Kidnap Mario s Girlfriend Alice I think this is her real name in the Japanese game Market This game has all the original screens From the intro screen to the intermis sion screens and game screens First game screen you see is DK carrying Alice up the long ladder to the Girders screen and this is where the fun and excitement begins You start at the Bottom left of the screen and which you have to Jump Bash and run your way to the top Girder And just when you think you have rescued Alice DK picks her up and runs to the next stage of this game Some Hints for getting to the top faster If you time your run off from the left of the screen you can actually just run jump to get to the top no need to use a hammer at all Here s another nifty feature which only the original did you can actually run behind the burning oil barrel at the start of this level But once its alight You cant jump past it only run In this stage you have to avoid the Barrels that Dk throws at you and the Flames that chase you after a barrel hits the Oil drum Second stage in
65. lug in to anything The cartridges matched one that had shown up a few years earlier at a CoCoFest that was thought to be some kind of Ethernet networking pak The third mystery board carried a Copyright 1984 Tandy notice on it indicating it was probably too early to be anything CoCo 3 specific It was this set of five boards that was shown at the 2006 Chicago CoCoFest and this was when the next round of discoveries were made Part 3 Blue Sky CoCo Everything even the CoCo starts with a dream When Disney s Imagineers start designing a new ride or attraction for one of the theme parks they initially CoCoNuts VEVA OTAVO RA ENIE DHE MEE AND sii eo OPRITA E COLOR COMREUTER start with what they call the blue sky phase That is the sky is the limit Anything is possible even if impos sible These initial concepts and ideas may be far grander than what is technically possibly or perhaps possible but economically unfeasible As the project continues the budget and often the realities of technology whittles down the blue sky plans to something much more humble which hopefully will get approved and built Disney fans know far too well how grand plans originally become much smaller realities such as how Walt Disney World s Epcot Space Pavilion went from a full experience with a space shuttle launch to a space station to just a simulator ride that didn t pretend to be anything grander This same appr
66. me that had already been done too many times on the CoCo wanted to pick a game that would look impressive on the CoCo After weighing all sorts of details Donkey Kong came out on top of the list Mary What was your fist step in looking at how to do this John First find out everything you can about the original arcade game and hardware See what it s capable of doing and then try to figure out how to get the CoCo to do the same thing Mary You did this via an emulator right What kind of emulator John Not exactly To do true emula tion the CoCo would have had to have been several times faster and more powerful than the arcade game There are lots of emulators on the PC Page 6 coco3 com was the main person to blame for all the torture amongst the others in chat Two weeks before the release of John s secret project Nick and would There was a lot of discussion as to what John s latest project could be Some thought it was a graphics editor others thought it was a game No one guessed that it was something so awesome This game wasn t just a recreation but the actual game ported over to the CoCo3 with 512k ram Most of you now want to know just how this all happened Here is what John had to say true emulation the CoCo would have had to have been several times faster and more powerful than the arcade game now specifically because it s several thousand times faster than these old games wer
67. models that permit genera tion of sounds the Digital to Analog Converter DAC and the single bit sound output from the Peripheral Interface Device PIA at port FF22 By choosing the correct PIA settings either of these devices can be routed to the audio connector RCA jack or cassette output Having said this what quality sound can be generated by these devices and is it worth listening to What is Sound Sound is a rapid change of air pres sure which vibrates the eardrum in the range of 20 20 000Hz cycles per second So any variation in voltage in the above range sent to the audio outlet jack on the Coco will be per ceived as sound We can classify sound into two basic types noise and music The latter normally implies that there is a high degree of symmetry to the pulsations which tend to be sine wave like in character Above is a typical sine wave Note that it is a smooth curve and will stay smooth no matter how much it is expanded A musical signal of this type is said to have 0 distortion As the curve becomes less smooth distortion increases and large amounts make the listening experi ence very unpleasant Can the Coco generate anything close to the above waveform Coco Sound Output The single bit sound sends either Ov or 5v DC to the sound amplifier That s because a single bit at FF22 is used to generate the sound So the wave form must be a square wave of varying frequency but constant amplitu
68. n however See below HDB DOS DW adds several commands to DECB that control access to DriveWire as well some command enhancements and a nifty command line utility For simplicity when referring to HDB DOS in this review I m reference the DriveWire edition unless specified otherwise Users of HDB DOS 1 1B should be aware that the DW edition is a differ ent version and you ll need to use the HE LIFE AND CoCoNuts Hae une con 2 2 kau 2 1 1B version to access your hard drives separately So to transfer software from the PC to your CoCo s hard drive using DECB you would need to first use HDB DOS DW to transfer the file to a floppy Then you could restart your CoCo fire up HDB DOS 1 1B and copy the file to your hard drive As Boisy Petre explained it via email this is a limit of the DECB environment Unlike NitrOS 9 you can only use one controller type at a time HDB DOS runs the CoCo 3 in high speed mode with no problems access ing the floppies However if a program POKEs the CoCo back down to 87 Mhz you ll need to POKE it back up before accessing the DriveWire server HDB DOS can be burned to an EPROM to replace the existing DECB ROM in your controller An image for this is created on the boot floppy when you run the wizard program This feature was not tested for this review If you end up using DriveWire as your primary mass storage device and you have access to a burner though this would definit
69. n the computer was saying HELLO instead of the usual bell sound It was funny remember some customers answering the computer thinking it was us talking Mary Why did you choose mistermind Chris originally made that game in 1989 when was still a kid liked to play that game back then but never completed it the way wanted They original version had a simple introduc tion page no Digital sound no Scoreboard no instruction and the Gameboard was taking about 30 seconds to draw before each game As well the original version didn t have a game level 2 When level 2 is selected the computer can choose up to 3 times the same color instead of 4 different adding more challenge to the game Last thing was the composite monitor colors CMP had a CM 8 Page 15 back then and only worked it out for RGB Because of the poor image quality on composite screens and the details in the game using equivalent CMP colors was making the game almost unplayable because we hardly could read the computer hints after each line crosses had to select different colors as well as displaying the hints crosses in a different manner Mary How long did it take Chris don t remember how many hours worked on the original version and I m not sure how much more for the actual version can say that worked a lot some non stop program ming overnights not having any sleep I usually prefer working full time on projects si
70. n eve e dead On First Level and it s dead on Page 7 CoCoNuts VEVA OW Co RA ENIE THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR COMPUTER The Color Computer 3 Prototype By Allen Huffman Prologue In the Beginning On a warm August day in 1985 a Federal Express delivery truck pulled in to a parking lot in Clive lowa like it did almost every day The driver retrieved a nondescript cardboard box from the back of the truck and carried it to the lobby The box was signed for and left then the driver returned to his route unaware of the significance of what he had just been part of The box you see had been sent by Tandy in Ft Worth Texas The recipient was a small computer company called Microware Systems Corporation The contents of the box were a secret prototype for a new computer which would be appearing the following year in Radio Shack stores nationwide the Tandy Color Computer 3 aka the CoCo 3 That was two decades ago a lifetime in the computer world Few specifics about what went on behind closed doors at Microware or in Tandy Towers are known What is known however is that Microware had previously established a busi ness relationship with Tandy to produce a version of their OS 9 operating system for the original Color Computer This time their involvement would go far beyond just doing another port of OS 9 to new hardware It would involve them working on the onboard firmware to bring the new machine t
71. nce it always takes time to get back into it when left for a little while Mary How did you decide to partici pate to the Asimov Chris was reading Diego s website and found out about the Asimov contest last summer but didn t really think would participate got back interest for the coco last July almost 13 years after packed it up took it out from time to time and played a bit with MESS around year 2000 but rarely Couple months later went on the coco3 chat then met some more coconuts friends as well as Diego Somewhere in December guess after a chat session with Diego decided it was the time needed a reason to do so and wanted to help the cause and maybe having a chance CoCoNuts VEVA OW Co RA ENIE THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE COLOR COMPUTER to win worked it all in January and submitted the Version 2 0 in early Febuary After the winner was announced started working on the version 2 1 and got that one a week before the Chi cago Fest giving Diego s time to update the game on the Asimov 2006 disks Conclusion had a great time working on that game and would like to say congratu lation to all other participants as think they all did a fantastic job Thanks Diego s for that contest initiative hope more people will participate next year Have fun playing the games CoCoNut introduction Getting to Know Jack Rodda Ok It s time to get back to programming on the 6809 I ve
72. nd time There may be other uses So what is a GRANULE It is some times known as a cluster or chunk In DISK EXTENDED COLOR BASIC it is a block of 9 contiguous sectors starting at either sector 1 of a track or sector 10 This is the smallest amount that can be allocated to a file and amounts to 9 256 2304 bytes The GAT Granule Allocation Table is a section of sector 2 of the directory track It fills the first 68 bytes of that sector Each byte is a granule starting at 0 track 0 sectors 1 9 and ending on 35 track disks at 68 which is track 34 sectors 10 18 The directory track is NOT allocated a granule and is simply skipped so entries in the GAT with values over 34 amp H22 actually point to one track more than the number would suggest So how do we read a directory The core of the programme is the use of the DISK EXTENDED COLOR BASIC command DSKI Its template is like this DSKI lt drive gt lt track gt lt sector gt lt string variable 1 gt lt string variable 2 gt The first three variables are fairly self explanatory Drive number 0 3 track number 0 to 34 but only use 17 for the directory track in my example and sector number 1 to 18 but 3 to 11 for my example The string variables are there to store the data read in by the command from the disk sector Why two I m glad you asked Remember that the maximum length of a string variable in BASIC is 255 bytes A sector is 256
73. nks a key is pressed No waiting Line 310 waits while you lament your recent demise Line 320 checks to see if you scored enough for a high score and loads up that variable to be displayed on restart way back on Line 20 Line 330 is the do over line Hit BREAK to quit CoCoNuts VEVA TAVO RA ENIE THe Like AND TrINES F THE COLOR GONFUTER Play With It One of the fun things about silly simple programs like this is modifying and expanding them of course Add joystick control two players have the psycle change colors when it hits a block and then wreck it if hits the same color block next or any number of bits and pieces In the end this didn t turn out to be a good game but it was an interesting Program Listing 10 CLSO 20 PRINT 500 HIGH HS programming exercise also got to play with Rainbow IDE and ended up with a game my daughter thinks is pretty neat Hey she s 7 It s been 17 years since did this so it s fun to get back into it and relearn hope others out there will do the same And if you do post your efforts Capt s CoCo Hut http coco clubltdstudios com The CoCo Hut Blog http cocohut blogspot com 30 LIGHT CYCLE CAPTAIN COMPUTER SOFTWARE 2006 40 HTTP COCO CLUBLTDSTUDIOS COM 50 X 15 Y 7 S 0 B CHR 128 60 D RND 3 70 IF D 0 THEN POKE135 8 80 IF D 1 THEN POKE135 9 90 IF D 2 THEN POKE135 10 100 IF D 3 THEN POKE135 94 110 FOR L 1 TO 25 120 C
74. o life Microware would be expanding Extended Color BASIC to take advantage of the new hardware But why Microware In 1979 Microsoft yes that Microsoft had done the original Color BASIC for the Color Computer so surely they would be the ones to continue doing so But by 1985 Microsoft had moved beyond being just a provider of BASIC and those types of projects just weren t compelling Some speculate Microsoft would have done it but it was just cheaper to have another company work on the project In either case Microware was likely chosen because they had previous experience working with Tandy and the CoCo on the OS 9 project Since there were plans to bring out the next generation of OS 9 Level 2 for the new machine per haps the economy of scale a discount for doing multiple projects did play a role in this decision We may never know the full details but regardless in 1986 a new CoCo 3 began appearing at Radio Shack stores nationwide and its new Extended Color BASIC fea tured enhancements done by Microware Although the story of how Microware had to patch and extend Microsoft s code is an interesting one this is not that story Instead this is the story of the contents of that secret box This is the story of the CoCo 3 that almost was Part 1 The Discovery It was January 2005 and the large three story custom built Microware building was finally being vacated by its original owner Microware had ceas
75. oach is common in many areas of design and likely played a role in the evolution of the Color Computer series For instance it is documented that a Deluxe Color Computer was planned but never released Evidence of this includes references to a deluxe model in the Color Computer 2 manuals Little is known about the features of this version other than a documented ability to enter BASIC commands in lowercase Such capabilities never made it in to any official version of Radio Shack CoCo BASIC but later models did include support for a lowercase display There were also references to extra keyboard keys Coincidentally Radio Shack stores sold some keyboards as spare parts during this time Theses keyboards had a few extra keys and could be plugged directly in to an existing CoCo It is believed that these key boards were designed for the never produced Deluxe CoCo Perhaps some day a prototype of this machine will surface It is possible that the CoCo 3 grew out of blue sky plans for the Deluxe CoCo actually allowing more ambitious plans to be made than just minor improve ments All that known for sure today is that the Deluxe CoCo plans got far enough for keyboards to be manufac tured and for manuals to be revised and printed To understand what was happening it is helpful to look at what had already happened Tandy has already evolved the original grey case CoCo several times There were a few revisions to the origina
76. of 0 89MHz the circuit read 80 with no input a 0 error have not determined if the error is constant linear or other In actual use the circuit sounds like a good portable AM FM radio with software that reads the ADC and sends the data to the Orc 90 DAC If you send requests to the editor of this publication and there is enough demand I ll publish a program that demonstrates how to use this hard ware For now all that is necessary to know that the ADC trigger is at FF7A and the data port is at FF7B That means you tell the ADC to get a sample with a write of anything to FF7A and read the 8 bit result at FF7B With the ADC in use you can still send data to the Orc 90 DAC right channel by writing to FF7B Put an optional switch as indicated in the schematic and you can select either the ADC input or Orc 90 left channel output Another option would be to replace the passive input with an op amp having a volume control so that weak signals can be amplified As designed above a full input signal needs to be 5v peak to peak which is somewhat larger than a typical line output A Hi Fi preamp should work but a direct feed from a CDROM drive or sound card may be too weak He fo ket Coo nawe ortiehed linke downloads reviewed FAQS cage forum photo gallery chatrooms and more CoCo goodies at What s happing at CoCo3 com The C What is the V R Virtual Reality CoCo 4 Project For years many of us in
77. r win the game was limited by the available memory as didn t want a bad playback and needed to fit the entire game into 128k Asimov contest restriction It ended up with around only 2 seconds of song samples looped into a 10 seconds song for a total of 5 to 6 seconds recording with the voice Note that had to place the song samples strategically in the coco memory to have it played like if it was one non stop song After that recorded Mister Mind with added sound effects and finally all the game peg colors Once got all that recorded as WAV format used a Coco program called Maxsound made by Gimmesoft in 1987 to convert the wave to a Coco file After getting that Coco sound file done moved it back to the PC again to edit the samples memory location to cut the unwanted blank space and moved it back again to the Coco I ve done those tasks couple times before getting the final wanted result To play it used a small ML routine to call the sound from BASIC Mary How you came up with the idea Chris made some programs with digital sound back in 80 s remember 2 of them one was for the Coco Club annual year end activity It was a BASIC QUIZ the computer was asking question then applauding when the right answer was selected It was saying BRAVO at the end The other one was for Radio Shack connected the Coco to the infrared sensor placed at the store entrance When customers were walking i
78. riginal arcade machine Here are the Specs for DK Graphics screen 256x225 Horizontal x16 colors 6 Bit DAC for sound 512k ram is needed And by what Sock s said all game data 800kb s compressed down to fit 1x157kb single sided floppy diskette is just amazing Sorry Sock s but pinched your screenshots of Dk My screenshots just can t do this game justice Have to use the best for this game review hope you enjoy this game review If you haven t tried DK yet then what are you waiting for Make a real copy and crank up the coco 3 with the volume turned up full Sit back and enjoy the trip back in time Until next time happy CoCoing CoCoNuts E LIFE AND TI VEVA TAVO RA kst lt 1 0 gt Cloud 9 s DriveWire For the TRS 80 and Tandy Color Computer Review by CaptCPU captcpu clublidstudios com If you ve ever wanted to add mass storage to your Color Computer but didn t want to enjoy the expense of adding an IDE or SCSI interface the super geniuses at Cloud 9 have just the thing Created by Boisy Pitre it s called DriveWire and it turns your PC into a big fat hard drive for your Color Computer Once installed storing and retrieving just about everything you ve accumulated for your CoCo over the last three decades is just a few commands away The DriveWire package includes both PC and CoCo software on disk an instruction manual and a serial cable for connecting the two machines toget
79. riveWire fits the bill nicely without having to install an old 5 1 4 in your PC or mess with old terminal software Note In email Boisy mentioned that the DriveWire cable is wired like a standard NULL modem cable so you could potentially use it with terminal software on both ends to transfer files back and forth if you were inclined to do so This feature would be particu larly handy for transferring text pictures music or other data that you don t want to have to convert to dsk first It also opens up the possibility of creating other software that uses the cable for communications between the CoCo and the PC An automated transfer utility running in the back ground under NitrOS 9 might be interesting for example To illustrate how easy it is to transfer things back and forth here s a quick look HDB DOS uses the DRIVE command to designate which of the four 0 3 drive slots the server will use Each of these virtual drives however can hold 255 virtual disks For the example to follow I ll use the terms virtual drive to indicate the server s drive slot and virtual disk to indicate the disk on that virtual drive The reason for this is that the DRIVE command with the OFF ON switch can also indicate which virtual disk your CoCo is accessing You need to turn the virtual disks off to access the real disks in your CoCo s floppy drive This is of course a limitation of DECB but the way Cloud 9 got around it
80. riveWire is considerably faster than a floppy For most users DriveWire will be plenty fast enough Even with the newer version in place DriveWire server still locks up occasion ally on my PC As mentioned it s a very old installation of Windows ME Most of the problem is there The lock ups occur when I m doing something else on the PC and letting the server run in the background Basically it doesn t appear to be very tolerant of interrup tions For the most part this isn t a problem but it s something a user will want to test and compensate for before trying anything mission critical Overall DriveWire is brilliant Installa tion and operation is easy and intui tive For a mere US 40 00 at the time of this writing plus shipping you can add mass storage to your Color Computer This is hands down the easiest way to transfer files between your PC and CoCo If you use DECB the HDB DOS enhancements are a great bonus by themselves NitrOS 9 users get another great storage option and the ability to transfer and execute programs quickly In short DriveWire makes any CoCo even better and more capable than ever Links DriveWire is available for order from Cloud 9 Tech at www cloud9tech com Please see the website for the latest pricing and options available
81. shown publicly one of the original Microware CoCo 3 developers made a comment that those couldn t possibly be the real prototypes because the real ones were still in storage at Microware This was the first clue that there was something else still to be discovered Something few had seen and something hidden away somewhere in a box stored down in a basement Page 9 When the box was opened it was clear no one had seen or touched its contents for many years and quite possibly not since 1986 The insides were dusty The labels were faded and cracked A small supply of bubble wrap was all that protected the contents Inside were two large green circuit boards and three smaller ones The large boards were covered in chips and wires The only thing that gave any clue that this was connected to the Color Computer was a series of familiar connectors on the back edge The standard CoCo joystick serial and cassette ports were there along with a cartridge connector Elsewhere on the board could be found a keyboard connector and further inspection of the chips revealed a few recogniz able ones like a 6809 proces sor The amount of chips on a board four or more times the size of a production CoCo motherboard was staggering The back side of the board was covered in dozens and dozens of long green jumper wires Two smaller CoCo cartridge boards were also found as well as an unidentified third board that didn t seem to p
82. sistor arrays on chips and produces both stereo and higher quality sound The Orc 90 pack also provides a perfect platform for adding a new ADC to the Coco to simplify and increase the sampling rate for digitally recording programs chose the ADC0802 which used to be sold by Tandy 276 1792 This chip except for speed was ideal as it could be directly connected to the 6809 data bus Since needed to both read and write to the chip had to add read addressing to the Orc 90 chose to piggy back another 74LS138 on top IC3 of the Orc 90 A low profile IC socket was soldered to IC3 except for pins 5 14 and 15 which had their legs bent up Pin 5 was used as an en able line and grounded pin 14 was left unconnected and pin 15 was connected to pin 1 CS of the ADC One additional chip was required for the new circuit some type of inverter The ADC required separate read write lines having the same logic values The 6809 systems use a single read write line giving read and write oppo site logic values The circuit below shows a TTL inverter but a 74LS02 NOR with one input grounded was actually used the other connected to the pak R W line P18 The data lines DO D7 of the ADC were connected to the Orc 90 ROM IC1 pins 11 19 using ribbon cable as a simple way to access the 6809 bus The ADC clock was connected to the pak E clock line P6 and the pak CART line was connected to the ADC interrupt line P8 A simple r
83. t a more random number from the program add the line 5 R RND TIMER to the listing didn t notice much difference so left it out but for the purists there ya gol Lines 110 140 just POKE in random dots around the screen chose 25 after some experimentation but you can raise or lower this value according to your tastes Line 120 looks like a mess but it s pretty straight forward The Program The program itself is dirt simple and should be easily readable This is probably more explanation than needed for this kind of program but for completeness Lines 10 50 just set up a few things like clearing the screen and setting X Y and score variables Lines 70 100 are kind of neat because they re pushing the CoCo s buttons as it were POKE 135 it like mashing a key The values simulate pressing up down left and right keys In this case we re randomly setting the direction of initial travel for the psycle By the Page 18 The value 1024 corresponds to the first upper left location of the CoCo s text or low res screen There are 32 times 16 or 512 locations 1024 through 1536 So POKEing a value into that location makes the CoCo display the ASCII equivalent of the value to the screen We want a random location somewhere within 32 columns 0 31 and 15 rows 0 14 There are 16 rows on the CoCo s screen but we ll save the bottom bit for score information The second part of the POKE selects wha
84. t character is to be placed at the screen location selected previously In this case we want a solid color block Value 128 is a solid black block to which we add color using the formula found on page 292 of the Color Computer 3 Extended BASIC manual Lines 150 230 represent checking for a key press and then making sure the psycle stays on the screen POKE 135 is a handy little guy for reading the keyboard with some limitations you can t read multiple key presses at the same time for example The values tested are for the arrow keys up down left and right respectively see pages 289 and 291 of the Color Computer 3 Extended BASIC manual As a challenge there s no border indicated and the psycle just wraps around the screen So watch out Lines 240 and 250 check to see if a colored square has been hit If it s not code 143 a green square the player scores If it is code 143 then the player has either hit a random green square or hit their own light trail and the game ends Line 260 actually displays the next square for the light psycle s path as calculated in lines 150 230 Line 270 adds 10 to the score fora successful move sans crash Line 280 prints the current score on the screen Line 290 finishes the main loop and sends the CoCo back for the next move Line 300 is necessary to clear out the keyboard resetting it to its no key pressed state Without it the INKEY in the next line barfs and thi
85. the CoCo community have talked about what we would love to see in the next version of the Color Computer But the sad truth is that Tandy stopped the production of the CoCo almost 20 years ago so there is no hope of a true CoCo 4 In the past two decades we ve seen PC and Mac system become so advance that they can emulate a CoCo 3 system with plenty of power left over Why not use the extra power to emulate a more powerful CoCo That is the cornerstone of the V R CoCo 4 Project This is not a hardware project The Page 27 What Have We Gained The addition of an 8 bit ADC to the Coco unfortunately does not give you a bed of roses You can record much better sound but are severely restricted by the Coco storage capabilities Maximum length sound clips are about 21 seconds and require 442 368 bytes of storage That s equal to 96 tracks or 2 1 2 forty track disks In short we are not much further ahead than we were using SOUND or PLAY Hope you had fun with a project that can teach us much about a very interesting topic and open doors to new ones With this new hardware have written a program to turn the Coco into an oscilloscope permitting measurement and display of signals with frequencies under about 650Hz If you are willing to sacrifice sound quality significant drop in sampling rate you can use Con tinuously Variable Slope Delta Modulation CVSDM to compress eight bits into one bit in real time Using CVSDM I
86. tinue the FOR NEXT loop If the end of directory is detected we fool BASIC into ending the FOR NEXT loop by setting the counter variables SE and EN to one greater than their maximum count values and then continuing the loop This has the effect of quitting the loop 220 IF LEFT FI 1 CHR 0 THEN 240 REM SKIP IF FILE DELETED 230 IF LEFT FI 1 CHR 255 THEN SE 19 EN 8 GOTO 240 REM SKIP IF END OF DIRECTORY REACHED Line 240 prints all the data we have collected either on the printer or the screen depending on the value of variable PR 240 PRINT PR FI EX TY AF GR LS Following this we have two lines with NEXT statements one for EN and one for SE 250 NEXT EN 260 NEXT SE The last lines 270 280 and 290 ask the user if another disk is to be done CoCoN uts May 2007 Vol 2 P Issue 2 T H E ESNE N N D M E sS and either ends if no or goes back to Here s a sample output from the Next time will show how to find all the beginning if yes programme the granules that are used by a 270 PRINT ANOTHER DISK INPUT FILENAME EXT TYP ASC 1STLAST Programme by searching through the YNS GAT That will also allow me to show FLG GRN SECT the actual file size in bytes eed de VARE YE SEW CES oe 2 GRN2TKSE BAS 0 B 32 114 hope this tutorial has shed some light ee Dap PARNO Baa ee ai gar UK ve ially Ww Ww There you have it Not as difficult as it DIRUTIL ASC 0 A 34 19 EXTENDED COLOR B
87. ut of Sock s game When first set it up people didn t know what to think The first reaction was that it was a remake Then people started to read the opening screen and someone said holy cow this is the real Donkey Kong Confu sion set in as one of the guys started to play the game So let them soak it all in as walked around the room and handed out copies of the game to everyone handed out a total of 30 copies We had a little problem setting the game up at first We tried to use Glenside s coco3 and couldn t get a joystick to work The whole time Allen Huffman is thinking to himself knew it was an April fools joke Yes Allen knew what you were thinking Finally thought perhaps it was the Glenside s coco3 s joystick port then went out to my car and got my coco3 and disk drive was right it was the joystick port on the other CoCo So then we got the game going and the crowd gathered a little at a time think one of the kids played the game for almost an hour was so pressed for time the only thing really got to video tape was a scan of the room and the seminar given by cloud nine will have that ported over by someone as soon as possible so others can see it found it very interesting how they explained everything also have on video Mark Marlette sitting behind his table with his monitor facing to the crowd for people to see as they walked by The monitor had a Windows prompt on it
88. volves you collecting the treasures Alice s Belongings and collecting the rivets to get to Alice found this to be the easiest stage to finish No hints for this stage Here you have to avoid the flames 3rd Stage Elevators now this would have to say is the hardest for me to beat always seem to get a Hourglass landing on top of my head Object is to collect the trea sures Umbrella and Hat and just make it to the top Girder where Alice is calling out to you Here you have to avoid being hit by a hourglass and Flames 4th Stage Conveyors This would rate as the second hardest to beat And this is the final Stage in this game also But you never actually get to rescue Alice as you always start at the beginning again Just gets harder to beat each stage Here you just have to collect the Treasures if you want these being a Page 28 Umbrella Hat Alice s purse and some nice tasty pies Then jumping over the flames and avoiding Dk on the top conveyor By the way this Dk game has the US and Japanese versions find the US is harder then the Japanese versions Controls are Right joystick to run and jump and directional movements You also have the option to start with 3 men standard or increase your men to 6 2 monitor displays are available RGB or CMP After you select your options press the right joystick button to start Best part is the musical tunes You feel like your beginning the game on an o
89. wanted to have more than just 2 participants The unofficial is that was late check ing the programs that were already sent so put those extra weeks to a good use Mary Did you play each of these games Diego Yes more than a few times and on the real deal A CoCo not an emulator had to learn a bit how to play the games and try to make sure there were no obvious errors in them If possible wanted to see all the screens and endings but must admit that being a very bad gamer that was not something expected to achieve Mary What made you decide on the winner Diego think that what influenced me the most was the fact that it was the only game that took advantage of the CoCo 3 capabilities tried to reach my decision based only on the user experience How big the files are or how advanced the tech niques involved are not important at all The winning program seems to me to be a very polished product easy to use and understand Most of the games I think that all but one are not original concepts The only one that haven t seen before is Sentinel That s why it deserved a special mention award Mary Where there other judges Diego No Just me I m completely guilty and deserving target of any and all critics If get a high number of programs for next year might ask for a helping hand Mary What was the prize Diego The original prize was 100 in cash to the winn
90. y The CoCo 3 allowed the triple speed poke to work for both RAM and ROM code without losing the display Other additions were compromises In lieu of real sound hardware develop ers such a Steve Bjork lobbied for and received an enhanced IRQ timer This didn t compete with the music chip in the Commodore 64s but it did allow enhanced background sound effects using the existing CoCo sound capabilities There was another IRQ that would have dramatically helped with RS 232 performance over the printer serial bit banger port It is believed this was meant to substitute for a hardware RS 232 interface but it was miswired so that potential was never realized The list of other enhancements that would have been nice but didn t make it is something discussed to this day usually under the guise of what would have been in a CoCo 4 Overall the CoCo 3 was a significant leap forward for the series It con tained better graphics more memory faster usable speed and even added the extra keys that would have been part of the Deluxe CoCo but still no BASIC enhancements to allow enter ing commands in lowercase The new monitor outputs and new color CM 8 monitor allowed using an 80 column screen finally breaking away from the 1980 vintage 32 column display It was a significant upgrade and one that developers took too quickly The new generation of programs from en hanced games with full color and background sound to the pow

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