[Coco] CoCo 128-column text mode

[Allen Huffman]

> On Jan 7, 2015, at 2:41 PM, William Astle <lost at l-w.ca> wrote:
> 
> Yes. The coco3 modes have variants with and without attributes. Basic doesn't support them, but they're there.
> 
> There are 32, 64, 40, and 80 column GIME modes, with and without attributes. (That is in addition to the 32 column "coco2" mode.)

I've always wanted to see WIDTH 64 work ;-) TRS-80 Model I/III style. (I just assumed it was the 80 column mode, with the 32 column mode thick borders.)

Without attributes would be nice -- scrolling would hopefully be twice as fast. I forgot how sluggish PRINT is in 40/80 column mode. I did some tricks in my MiniBanners (1990) program to make it display instantly like an assembly program, and now I remember why I did that.

Did we ever figure out why the TV output of the CoCo 3 was so off center compared to the CoCo 1 and 2? At the time, we thought it was to force CoCo 3 users to have to buy a monitor if they wanted to use the larger screens. I had to open my TV set up and adjust the centering as far as I could make it just to get the left edge of 80 on screen. I remember those early days reading the blurry 80 column artifacted text on a TV until I got a composite greenscreen monitor.

		-- A