[Coco] Coco 3 makes an appearance on TWiT

L. Curtis Boyle curtisboyle at sasktel.net
Fri Apr 12 22:10:37 EDT 2013


I visited TWiT again this past week, and even had an official guest appearance on The Giz Wiz show. I also showed up in between a couple of shows (I believe my technique is called "photo bombing"). :)
I also took a Coco 3 system (128k stock Coco 3, never modified or even opened), along with a full height 40 track drive with a DECB 1.1. Disk controller, a cassette cable, manuals, and several disks of games that I have had the authors permission to copy/release. A few original cartridge games and one original disk game was included as well, including Steve Bjork's Clowns & Balloons (Steve is hopefully going to be at TWiT later this month as well-Steve, if you get a chance you should have them get the Coco 3 out and demonstrate it and maybe give a story or 2 about the Coco).
I also had written a quick BASIC program the night before I left to draw the TWIT logo, which we surprised Leo with after Security Now ended taping. 
If you want to see it, you can find the clip at:
http://www.justin.tv/twit/b/389087756
starting at around 4:29:00
(If you keep watching into the start of This Week in Google, you will see Leo mistakenly refer to it as a Commodore, which a few other TWiT staff did as well, which I forgive them for as the C-64 _was_ the best selling 8-bit computer of all time).


Sent from my iPhone

On 2013-04-12, at 2:02 PM, William Astle <lost at l-w.ca> wrote:

> On 13-04-12 01:44 PM, Kip Koon wrote:
>> William,
>> This is very cool!  Fantastic work!  This will enable a lot of the old games
>> to be updated for the Coco 3 and new ones created.  I can hardly wait to see
>> what everyone comes up with using this new knowledge.
>> Could you create a master video modes file with a table detailing all the
>> codes for each memory location and the modes they produce please.  I would
>> love to experiment with these also.  Thanks a bunch.
>> Kip
> 
> As Nick Marentes has noted, the FF9C semigraphics hack is not new information. What might be new is the specific behaviour of FF9C values 11 through 14 but I have no reason to suspect I'm the first one to carefully study the results of those values.
> 
> For the most part, the proper bitmap modes in coco3 mode are more useful and easier to understand. And for text, the coco3 text modes are more useful.
> 
> 
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