[Coco] [Color Computer] COCO BASIC ROM

[Bill Pierce]

Ben,
The ROM is programmed to read the 52(?) keys of the Coco keyboard which are hardware lines. The Coco itself is only capable (physically) of reading those lines. Now if I'm understanding you right, you want full keyboard access with an Emulator. First, every emulator I know of is just that. An emulation. This meaning the emulator itself will limit the use of the keyboard as it is emulating the Coco's 52(/) key lines. So modding the rom would not get you more keys. You must mod the emulator to "accept" more keys first.

Now with that said, some emulators already have a function to use "most" of your keyboard as a PC keyboard layout. The keys the emulators do not translate are the various function and special keys that are Windows/Mac/Linux specific ie. the F3-F12 (F1 & F2 are emulated on Coco 3 emulators), insert, del, page up page dwn, etc. These keys do not produce "legal" ASCII characters and are specific to the system you are running and usually the emulator will use these keys for their own purposes

As for the rest of the keys, most emulator "reroute" the keys so that the layout is similar to the Coco layout and as I said, usually have a function to use the regular PC layout.
My question is.. what keys are you trying to get that the emulator won't produce?
I use VCC Coco 3 emulator on Windows Vista extensively for NitrOS-9 "C" programming with the keyboard translation set to "OS9" in the emulator. This basically mirrors the PC keys with a few exceptions. I have found that there's NO key that the emulator doesn't produce that the Coco needs. The Coco produces the full ascii set with a few minor "special" exceptions and I have yet to find a character I can't produce.

Each emulator has it's own settings on this and you would have to refer to the documentation to find out how to map the keys for the simple reason that you didn't specify "which" emulator, "what" Coco model, what coco operating system or what PC platform your running.
So I have no idea what you're are trying to do. I've used every emulator that's come out for Coco since 1993 and have always had full keyboard access. That was Jeff Vavsour's Coco 2 emulator for MS-DOS (the first coco emulator).


Bill Pierce
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-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Jimenez <ben_jimenez at yahoo.com>
To: ColorComputer <ColorComputer at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tue, Mar 26, 2013 4:43 pm
Subject: [Coco] [Color Computer] COCO BASIC ROM


Hi,

I was wondering if it's possible to modify the BASIC rom so that it supports a 
full set of keyboard characters? The reason is that I'm planning on running a 
COCO emulator full time on an old pc but wanted to have support for all the 
keys.

Ben

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