[Coco] Re: OS Survey, but missing the COCO os's

Gene Heskett gene.heskett at verizon.net
Thu Sep 15 01:28:24 EDT 2005


On Monday 15 August 2005 14:55, PaulH96636 at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 8/12/2005 5:24:57 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
>
>gene.heskett at verizon.net writes:
>>Heck, we shoulda mentioned Jake Commanders Chromkey.  That was  quite
>>an enhancement to rsdos for coco1 & 2's
>
>I recall Jake Commander, but don't have a clue as to what Chromkey 
> is/was. What does
>it do?
>
>-ph

First, I've been out of pocket for the last month working on a tv
station.

Chromkey was a bit of code that spliced itself into the rsbasic
operating loop, and it gave a full screen capable line editor plus a
keyword completer.  As issued by Jake, it ran fine on version 1.0 of
the basic roms, but got sluggish as all get out when encountering a
set of 1.1 roms.  It seems the rs coders had ignored a coding
guideline in 1.0 that Jake worked around in his code, but when 1.1
came along, that fixup was no longer needed.  He wrote it to be at the top
of the bottom 32k of memory so you lost about 1.5k when it was loaded.

Way back before we had the internet as we know it today, I added a
pre-loader that put it into high memory above the disk roms after
copying them all to ram & leaving it in the all ram mode, and I fixed
the 1.1 problem while I was at it.

As to whether or not I could find a copy of it today, I'm not sure I
still have a copy because when the coco3 came out, it used that ram
and the Chromkey utility was then dead.  Maybe on a 15 year old
floppy someplace.

About a year before the coco3, I discovered os9, and the rest is now
ancient history I'm afraid.

As to Jake,  I have no idea whats become of him, but I will say
that studying his code and making it work on the later coco's was the
most eye opening experience in assembly language programming for the
6809 that I encountered.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.




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