[Coco] Remembering the Deluxe Color Computer....

[Nick Marentes]

Here is part of an interview I did with Mark Seigel, project manager for 
the Color Computer at Radio Shack back in the day:



MARK> My biggest disappointment was the Deluxe Color Computer not coming 
to market. It was a pretty cool next generation Color Computer 2 but 
Motorola ran short of video/memory controllers and Tandy had a choice of 
where to put them and they chose the cheaper Color Computer 2.

It had a GI sound chip, a real UART, 64K of memory (in Disk Basic, 32k 
was used as a RAM drive). It had a 40 column display with a 320x200 mono 
graphics mode, the Color Computer 3 keyboard and some cool new Disk 
Basic commands.

NICK> How was the 40 column display and 320x200 mode generated? The 
Motorola 6847 video chip used in the Color Computer couldn't produce this.

MARK> My recollection is fuzzy on this but I think we added an 
additional video controller to the unit. But since it had to go out the 
RF it was restricted to 40 columns.

MARK> Was it to have a restyled case?

It was a Color Computer 1 case with some work on the back and it was 
painted black.