[Coco] [Color Computer] COCO BASIC ROM

Tue Mar 26 22:47:04 EDT 2013

Stephen
I checked mess and the keyboard config is in the options menu at the top after you get the Coco emulation running. I'm pretty sure you get this in SDLMess as well though I may be wrong. Go to "Keyboard" there you can selct "coco" layout, "natural" which is PC layout or "Customize" where you define your own keys. Some of the special characters are still not available through RSDOS due to no RSDOS support for them. But under OS9, all characters will print under "natural". Since RSDOS doesn't use these characters in basic programming, they were never implemented in rom even though the ascii character was available in the VDG chip and will print using CHR$(xx).
You may be able to expand the "customize" layout by modifying the sdlmess sources and expand the character set, but the rom would still have to be patched to use it. Also, this may be different on different versions/builds of mess as many things changed, appeared, disappeared, and got dropped as mess developed. You may want to try diffrent versions. The current versions of Mess suck. The older ones seem to be a little more versatile.

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 9:48 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] [Color Computer] COCO BASIC ROM

Ah, excellent. I never had a coco3 until recently and even then, width 80
is unreadable without a RGB monitor, so I never knew that the "lowwercase"
[ was meant to be a curly brace. I use SDLMESS being on linux and it
doesn't respond to the [ ] keys. Perhaps this is different with mess for
windows.

No need to mess with the rom at all (No pun intended ;-))

--StephenR

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 5:35 PM, Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote:

>
> 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
> 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 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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