[Coco] Re: 512K Basic by Microcom

[Rogelio Perea]

"George Ramsower" wrote:

>  What was that software that used the 64K bank switching to enable us to use
> several disk basic events in a task switching environment in a 512K machine?
>  I may have the details wrong, but the way I remember it, this program
> allowed up to eight copies of disk basic to run concurrently on a 512K
> machine.
>  I'm sure it was slow.

Don't know if the following would be the particular environment you
ask about; back in the days I bought Danosoft's Big Basic utility for
the CoCo 3. At the time I was looking for a way to fit everything I
needed in memory for a rather big collection of 'small' Basic progams
used on a materials management system me and a couple fellow students
at school were trying to write. We had been working with the standard
DECB MERGE"filename",R way and wanted to have a faster loading system
to allow switching programs without having the user to go over
extensive menu choices with the consequent delays between switching...
something like that, it has been too long ;-)

Danosoft's utility, if I recall correctly, consisted of a main program
control "window" from which the rest of the separate workareas were
controlled, I believe there was a way to preserve variables. Also
there was a way to use the hi-res text screens (not sure about the
hi-res CoCo 3 graphics) but the control always was WIDTH 32 to put it
that way.

I know I have the disk at home and need to look around for the manual,
which was just like 3 or 5 pages of simple instructions. The disk came
with a demo program, a very basic (no pun intended) one just showing
how to switch between windows (or program areas).

Never got around at porting our management system mentioned above,
finished up the semester before we could commit time to do so. Then
our IE lab had just begun to convert (downgrade?) to IBM compatibles
so the CoCos were seen as puhleeze-machines by most of the staff and
students. Oh well.



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-=[ Rogelio ]=-