[Coco] More CO80 Stuff

[Boisy G. Pitre]

The mystery of CO80 and Word-Pak RS just keeps getting more 
interesting...

Thanks to Roy Justus, I will soon have a better idea how this Word-Pak 
RS works.  According to Roy, his Word-Pak II is mapped in at $FF98, and 
I suspect that the only difference between the Word-Pak RS and the 
Word-Pak II is the addressing.  Word-Pak RS is addressed at 
$FF76-$FF79.  I'm speculating at the moment of course, but it seems so.

I found an interesting couple of paragraphs in the Rainbow Magazine, 
January 1986, pp 237-238.  This was from Dale Puckett's "KISSable OS-9" 
column:

START QUOTING
People at the session noticed some of the changes as soon as they 
walked in the room.  The Microware programmers had plugged their Color 
Computer into an Electrohome video projector.  An 80-column screen 
projected a clear image on the large screen.  As it turned out, the 
80-column card was a prototype. "We didn't know if Tandy has committed 
to produce this card or not," Hawkins said.  "They only told us that if 
they put an 80-column card on the market it will work like this."  At 
that point a Tandy employee attending the session said that an 
80-column card is available through their express order program.  After 
watching the demo, speculators in the crowd insisted that it must be 
the PBJ Word-Pak because the output character stream is written to the 
card serially, one byte at a time and no "screen" memory is needed in 
the Color Computer's memory space.
END QUOTING

At one time, I had a PBJ 80 column prototype card in a shortie pak that 
I had gotten from the bowels of a box at Microware, where the prototype 
CoCo 3s and other stuff were kept.  Stupid me, I auctioned this 
cartridge off on eBay some time back along with a lot of spare CoCo 
stuff, and now I wish I hadn't for I believe that this was the 
cartridge that was used at the above seminar.  I speculate that Tandy 
had PBJ make a special 80 column card that worked with the CO80 
co-driver, but never massed produced it.  The WordPak-RS was NOT the 
card that CO80 worked with, so it had to come earlier.  Why so many 
revs of Word-pak, I don't know, but I suspect that Tandy's work on the 
CoCo 3 killed the idea of a new 80 column cartridge.  Thus CO80 was 
written for hardware that was never produced and sold.

Just a theory...
--
Boisy G. Pitre
E-Mail: boisy at boisypitre.com
Mobile: (337) 781-3997
Web: www.boisypitre.com