[Coco] Re: Re: Tandy Printers to give away

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/17/06 7:57:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time,  
os9dude at gmail.com writes:

>One  thing I always thought would have been neat was if the CGDP+ could
>take  advantage of the CoCo 3 extra RAM & speed, and load some or most
>of  its components into memory instead of loading and swapping to  the
>floppies


 
This was a major complaint with many of Tandy's OS9-L2 games for the Coco  3.
"Sub Battle Simulator" and some others rolled in overlays from disk, but  
lost them as soon as another overlay was brought in, so had to reload the first  
one next time, etc. etc.
 
Even from a HD it was annoying.  I understand that Tandy had to assume  a 
base 128K RAM Coco 3, but the games *could* have checked for 512K and if so,  
leave each overlay in RAM.
 
The UltiMusE composing program had 9 overlays, but each one got loaded only  
once as needed, then stayed RAM resident.  OS-9 L2 provided support for  such 
loading and later linking.  Probably a lot of extra coding would be  needed 
for an RSDOS app.
--Mike K.