[Coco] WordPak RS/CO80

[Boisy Pitre]

On Jan 3, 2005, at 8:20 PM, Arthur Flexser wrote:

> Maybe it is for the Disto Display-80 rather than the WordPak?  
> Conceivably,
> Tandy at the time the module was developed might have been leaning 
> toward
> licensing the Disto display rather than a version of the PBJ WordPak 
> that was
> its competitor?  Or maybe the driver is for the original PBJ WordPak 
> rather than
> the WordPak-RS, in which case I think the only difference would be the 
> base
> address of the registers.
>
Perhaps.  I'm not familiar with the Disto board, though I did see it 
while walking through the Rainbows this afternoon in search of more 
information on this card.

There's more than just a base address difference.  The co80 driver that 
I started with is very simplistic in what it does, and doesn't even 
begin to address the complexity that this card has when it comes to 
setting up.

I did dig up something interesting about this driver in one of the 
Kissable OS-9 columns in the Rainbow.  Puckett was writing about one of 
the Microware OS-9 expos in Des Moines, and one of the programmers 
talked about the CO80 module being written according to a specification 
that Tandy provided them, but with hardware that was in prototype 
stage.

What a mystery...