[Coco] CoCo Questions

[Robert Gault]

Dan Olson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm new to the list, I've recently gotten interested in the CoCo again 
> and haven't had any luck finding much useful information on the 'net so 
> I hope I'm in the right place.  I've been thinking about trying my hand 
> at building my own cartridge, but I hate to tear apart one of my good 
> ones, as I have so few...and it looks like there's a screw under the 
> label.
You can't hurt the cartridge by removing the screw and opening it up if 
you are careful. The halves are latched with plastic hooks so you will 
want to disengage them carefully with a thin screwdriver. After you see 
how the cart. is designed, it can easily be reassembled by snapping it 
together and reinserting the screw.

> Does anyone have one in the junk pile that they'd be willing to 
> part with? I've also been wondering, on a 64k machine, I know that part 
> of the memory has to get mapped out in order to use the BASIC ROM, can 
> BASIC actually make use of the full 64k of memory (without pokes and 
> peeks) or is the ROM always mapped in instead of RAM?
If you want to have a full 64K of RAM, you must either POKE some bytes 
or use a short ml program. POKE&HFFDF,0 will put a Coco1 or 2 into all 
RAM mode but it will immediately crash as there won't be any software 
running. What is normally done is to copy the memory $8000-$DFFF from 
ROM to RAM. Then the Coco will behave normally but it will be in full 
RAM mode so the system code can be modified.

>  Also, I've seen 
> some mention of sound cartridges and other things that plug into the 
> cartridge slot (aside from the more common MPI, disk, RS-232) but have 
> seen little more than that. Is there a more complete list somewhere?  
> For that matter, any pointers to web sites with technical info would be 
> great too.
There are lots of sites that can be found with a Google search. One of 
many good places to start is coco3.com

>  Sorry about all the questions (jumping all over the place) 
> for a first-e-mail, hopefully someone out there can point me in the 
> right direction!  Thanks.
> 
>     Dan
> 
> 
>