[Coco] Your stock CoCo is DriveWire-ready out-of-the-box (was: DriveWire for dummies?)

[Christian Lesage]

Here is a short program that lets a CoCo 3 accept input from the bit 
banger port instead of the keyboard:

1 READ N,AH$,AL$:IF N=0 THEN 5
2 A=VAL("&H"+AH$+AL$)
3 FOR I=A TO A+N-1:READ D$:POKE I,VAL("&H"+D$):NEXT I
4 GOTO 1
5 DATA 
2,,F6,2C,2,1,8D,C2,F7,1,8D,FC,F6,1,A1,C1,39,1,A1,99,39,5,A1,CB,86,1,7E,8D,BD,,,

It is under 200 characters if you remove the spaces. It allows you to 
remote-control the CoCo 3.

Speed is 1200 baud. The cursor is disabled because of the delay it would 
impose between two characters. There is one catch: you lose input 
characters when the screen scrolls. Just don't let that happen, i.e., 
send a CLS, wait a little bit, send a BASIC line, wait for the 
interpreter to crunch it, and then repeat that sequence until your 
program has been uploaded completely. Then RUN it.

The idea is that the DriveWire server could send a BASIC program that 
would restore the DLOAD command. (In fact, the first four lines of the 
previous program could be reused for that purpose, only the DATA portion 
needs to be updated.) I do have a DLOAD patch somewhere for the CoCo 3; 
just let me find it and I will post it.

Christian


Boisy G. Pitre wrote:
> I don't know if it's acceptable to type a 200 character BASIC program each time you power on the computer, but hey, i'll listen :)
>
> It sounds interesting enough... provide some details...
>
> On Dec 23, 2009, at 8:59 AM, Christian Lesage wrote:
>
>