[Coco] More CO80 Stuff

[Arthur Flexser]

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Boisy G. Pitre wrote:

> 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...

As far as why so many revisions of the WordPak (3 to my knowledge):

The PBJ WordPak II was an improved version of the original PBJ WordPak.  The
difference I recall was that it was optionally available with a larger amount
of display RAM, so you could move the origin of the display between (I think) 4
different 2K banks, and so flip from one screen to another more or less
instantaneously.  I don't know if there ever was any software that took
advantage of this capability.

The WordPak-RS was the version available from Radio Shack through the Express
Order program.  I believe it was pretty much the same as the original WordPak,
except that the addressing was moved to $FF76, presumably to avoid conflicts
with addresses they foresaw would be needed for the CoCo 3 or other hardware.

Art