[Coco] MC-10 mistakes was Re: [Color Computer] What's wrong with this Picture

[Davey Brain]

James the Animal Tamer wrote:
> 
>>OH! JOY! and just relive Tandy's worst mistake on the COCO ever.
> 
> 
> I vote that Tandy's worst mistake on the CoCo was to make the MC-10's 
> BASIC tokens different from the CoCo's.  This would be just behind 
> making the MC-10 at all.

James and all,
IMHO the worst mistake Tandy made with the MC-10 was putting the 
hard-wired BASIC ROM system hooks between the video RAM and the program 
RAM. This relegated medium res graphics to assembly only as BASIC would 
crash if one tried to increase video RAM in BASIC. If they had put the 
video RAM directly adjacent to the program RAM one could change the 
bottom or top of the BASIC program space to add RAM to the video as one 
did on the big CoCos.

As far as I know the only way to increase the video RAM was to actually 
add real 4K of physical RAM below the video RAM space; I've been trying 
to find the instructions to do this for 20 years. I was in touch with 
the Green Mountain Micro guy Dennis Kitz (sp?) for a time and he 
promised to look up the details for me. But I lost his email address in 
a hard drive crash.

I loved the MC-10 in 1983 and still do. The MicroColor BASIC 1.0 on it 
ran at least 50% faster than on the big CoCos. It taught me most of what 
I know about hacking and assembly. I converted or wrote many programs 
for it including a spreadsheet, word processor, 
graphics/drawing/printing program, educational and demo programs, etc. 
in 1983-85 but no one seems to be interested in them even now...

WarpDavey
-- 
Davey Brain
Due to political oppression I'm seeking a Canadian or European 
spouse...any takers?

"It is dangerous to be right when the established authorities are wrong" 
- Voltaire

This OS/2 uptime is 0 d 21 h 55 m 14 seconds



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