Subject: [Coco] 512K Basic by Microcom

[Stephen H. Fischer]

Hi,

180K diskette. Yes that is small.

Today we have many methods of increasing the storage that could be applied 
without using Hard Disks.

But then, you would have to ask the question, am I using the right platform 
for the task?

The CoCo Urbane Basic Preprocessor is approaching 700 lines and I can see 
running out of string space as a possibility.

I wrote routines to use the CoCo 3's second 64K for string storage and 
posted them to this list many Christmas's ago so I have a solution for the 
CoCo 3.

Also disk space may be filled up soon. I would just put some files on a 
second drive.

But I think that I can get by so the CoCo 2 use will remain.

George Ramsower wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Stephen H. Fischer"
>> Hi,
>>
>> Are you saying that there is no Disk support for saving programs?
>>
>> The words you quote say "hard disk".
>>
>
> I believe that the issue is with the memory being larger than what can be
> saved on a 180K diskette.
>
> What was that software that used the 64K bank switching to enable us to
> use several disk basic events in a task switching environment in a 512K
> machine? I may have the details wrong, but the way I remember it, this
> program allowed up to eight copies of disk basic to run concurrently on a
> 512K machine.
> I'm sure it was slow.
>
> George

I stumbled across the DECB bank switcher a few weeks ago on RTSI. Sorry but 
I do not remember the name and a quick search failed to find it.

During my "Thought Exercise" a few months ago I got excited that it could be 
done. Then upon further research it all fell apart.

Then I discovered that it had already been done but the author stated some 
of the reasons I had come to conclude that it was not worth while to look 
further into.

I plan to go back and look at it in detail much later. But I have concluded 
that a very simple "AutoExec" system would do a better job.

Stephen H. Fischer