[Coco] [Color Computer] COCO BASIC ROM

[Bill Pierce]

Stephen,
The {  } can be shown. try PRINT CHR$(123) & PRINT CHR$(125). I'm not sure if they were mapped to keys on the ECB rom or not, but the characters themselves are all present in the VDG and printable. On Coco 3, a lot of these special codes were mapped to ALT+key. They can all be called under OS9 as MW "C" uses { } [ ] | \ / < >  as part of the programming language. All of them are available from the keyboard.

The printable ASCII values start on page 241 of the "Getting Started With Extended Color Basic" manual.
If I remember right, MESS has a keyboard mapping function to map your own keys to the PC keyboard. I want to say it's in the preferences after right clicking the machine name. VCC also has a "keymap.ini" file but I don't think the keymap function itself was ever finished and will not work. I may be wrong on this.
XRoar will also let you redefine keys in the config file with special cmds
I don't know how extensive these key mapping features are and if they allow key-combos as I almost always work in OS9 and have access to all the keys/codes

Bill Pierce
My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Co-Webmaster of The TRS-80 Color Computer Archive
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/
Co-Contributer, Co-Editor for CocoPedia
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E-Mail: ooogalapasooo at aol.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Coco_nut <nix.thinkpenguin at gmail.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Tue, Mar 26, 2013 8:10 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] [Color Computer] COCO BASIC ROM


I understand that the ctrl and alt keys are usable, but this is what I was
trying to say:
https://github.com/dachew/electronics/blob/master/keyboard/ps2-specs/coco3-keyboard-matrix.txt
If you wanted the Coco to pretend that it had more keys on its keyboard
then it would need more pins on it.

The easier way to do this is edit the mess source so that whenever a key
like {  } PgUp PgDown etc... is pressed on the PC's keyboard that the
virtual coco's keyboard has the buttons Ctrl-< Ctrl-> Ctrl-Up Ctrl-Down
etc... pressed. That way they rom would not need to be changed, only the
emulator. I haven't looked at the source for MESS, but this should be
fairly simple to do. Just map physical keys to combinations of Coco keys.

Also I don't believe that you would be able to show all characters. AFAIK
some chars like {} cannot be shown. That would require both changes to the
rom and to the emulator.

I still may be wrong, but this is how I understand it.

--StephenR

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 3:29 PM, Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote:

>
> Stephen, you are wrong on this. Only RSDOS did not support the 4 new keys
> on the Coco 3. And they can be used. OS9 Level 2 used the alt and ctrl for
> alternate characters and the "keyboard mouse" feature od Level 2 that
> allowed you to use the arrow keys as a mouse also used F1 as the firebuttoon
>
> Bill Pierce
> My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
> https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
> Co-Webmaster of The TRS-80 Color Computer Archive
> http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/
> Co-Contributer, Co-Editor for CocoPedia
> http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
> E-Mail: ooogalapasooo at aol.com
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Coco_nut <nix.thinkpenguin at gmail.com>
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Tue, Mar 26, 2013 5:46 pm
> Subject: Re: [Coco] [Color Computer] COCO BASIC ROM
>
>
> Well if you want to look at the asm for basic then you can find it here:
> http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Programming/Source/Color%20Basic/
>
> but the coco hardware doesn't support all keys. I believe that the Coco3
> keyboard matrix was entirely used up when they added the extra buttons to
> it. There is no way to add more without a large modification to the
> hardware. If you wanted your coco emulator to support all the keys then you
> would need to modify the source code to the emulator. Out of curiosity,
> what keys would you add and why?
>
> --StephenR
>
> On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 11:33 AM, Ben Jimenez <ben_jimenez at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> > 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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> >
>
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