[Coco] CoCo Questions

[Dan Olson]

> 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.

Thanks for the reply.  The only hurting I was concerned about was the hole 
I'd have to cut to pull the screw out.  I know I'm probably being overly 
worried about nothing, but it should be easy to find an old cartridge with 
the label already gone, right?

> 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.

So in short, Basic can only use 32k max for code and data, right?  If I 
understand correctly, the ROM is not copied to RAM by default, which 
leads me to thing that the upper 32k of RAM is not being used by Basic. 
This would be on a CoCo 1/2 if that makes a difference.

> There are lots of sites that can be found with a Google search. One of 
> many good places to start is coco3.com

I just recently found the site, and it looks as good as any I've found so 
far, but it looks like it's mostly stuff for the CoCo3, which I don't 
have.  Even a place to ftp/download software would be useful.  Thanks.

 	Dan