[Coco] RAINBOW vinyl records?

[Christian Lesage]

William Schaub wrote:
>>
> Not only that but if I recall correctly it loads from tape (and 
> floppy) a lot faster than some other machines contemporary to it like 
> the C64. which had amazingly slow disk and tape. (there are hacks to 
> speed up the 1541 but still its pretty slow)
The C64 had nonetheless much better graphics and sound capabilities than 
the first two CoCos (and even the CoCo 3, to some extent). And with the 
FastLoad cartridge, the 1541 was quite usable. I'd say the main problem 
with the C64 was its ROM: the Kernel and the BASIC interpreter could 
have been made much better. Perhaps Commodore decided that it would 
become a gaming platform, and as such, it didn't need to have an 
advanced BASIC interpreter. The CoCo, on the other hand, had poor 
graphics and sound support, so it needed a feature that would appeal to 
some people: Microsoft Extended BASIC and Disk BASIC. It's a shame 
Microware left so many bugs behind when they patched Extended BASIC for 
the CoCo 3. They had enough room to hide a 6KB picture in the ROM... 
IMHO, that space could have been better used! The buggy ROM could have 
been part of a scheme to lure customers into buying a disk drive, OS9... 
and then a 512KB add-on memory board. I didn't buy the latter back in 
the day; I had already spent $200 on the CoCo, $100 on a monochrome 
monitor, $400 on a disk drive and $100 on OS9 (Canadian dollars)... Yet, 
I would have needed that damn 512KB board to be able to do any kind of 
serious work with that system. I was pissed off, to say the least. 
Retrospectively, I think I should have bought an Amiga! Now folks, 
please don't flame me... I still have a CoCo and I think it's a fun 
machine to mess around with. (I also own a very cool C64 and an ultra 
cool Amiga... [grin].)

Christian