[Coco] What good is 512K? (was: Coco Digest, Vol 26, Issue 50

[L. Curtis Boyle]

Quite a few games required it... including some Radio Shack ones:
Sinistaar
Contras
Those Darn Marbles
Kings Quest III
Leisure Suit Larry
OS-9 version of Kyum-Gai: To Be Ninja
Gate Crasher
Pac-Man

Not to mention OS-9/NitrOS9 run much better with it (see previous posts),  
and word processors like Word Power 3.3 could use it, Big Basic, Studio  
Works, etc. etc.

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005 14:54:23 -0600, Robert Emery <theother_bob at yahoo.com>  
wrote:

> For OS-9, it does basically the same thing that more ram does for your  
> PC...
> allows more processes to run at once, allow for faster execution by  
> using a
> ramdisk, allow more features (or bugs) to fit into your software.
>
> Most would say that it does nothing for *stock* Basic, but this is  
> simply not
> true. Built-in Basic commands can't directly use it, but a few pokes can  
> give
> you extra buffer space for HGET/HPUT, more HSCREENs to flip between,  
> even use
> it to store data that will survive a reset. I used some of these tricks  
> to
> enhance Color FOG, but I chose to limit the requirements to 128K, which  
> means I
> only had one spare 8K block to play with, but that block would normally  
> be
> inaccessible to Basic.
>
> There are also commercial games that required it, many released while  
> the CoCo3
> was still in production. My favorite is Sinistaar, which I enjoy on the  
> CoCo3
> more than the arcade version. Of course, bragging rights are nice too.  
> We take
> what we can get!
>
> cheers,
> Bob
>
> --- Richard Ivey <rrivey at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> What does putting a 512k board in a COCO 3  actually do for it, anyway?
>> There isn't much out there that can  take advantage of it, right?  Or  
>> is it
>> for the "after-Tandy" era  software that has since come out.  Or is it
>> bragging rights over  Atari and Commodores?  Thanks
>>
>
>
>
>
> 	
> 		
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-- 
L. Curtis Boyle