[Coco] Fwd: Re: Supercomm fails to load on NitrOS9 lvl 2 on my CoCo 3 with 128K, and a couple of other questions?

[Dave Philipsen]

I'm not sure how black & white text would give the possibility to load
an alternate font.  Can you explain?

There is a generic source code to Supercomm available and possibly I
still have the original source code with comments.  Actually, I think
the 'generic' source has Randy Wilson's comments in it probably.  When I
left the CoCo scene back in the early 90s I authorized him to continue
to support it with his disassembled version of the source code.  I never
did release my source to anyone at the time.  I have a bunch of 3.5"
disks from way back and I'm guessing the source is on one somewhere.
Also, somewhere, I believe I have a hardcopy listing that was printed
from my trusty dot matrix printer but I have not located it at this
point.  Since I do not currently have a floppy controller I can't
retrieve the source code although I could probably work with the source
that's available now.

I'm not exactly sure what you would want as far as "a better matching
character in color mode" but, certainly, any other character or a
variety of characters could be used with a lookup table.

Dave


On 11/4/2015 1:24 AM, Barry Nelson wrote:
> If someone were willing to accept black and white text instead of
> color, wouldn't it be possible to load an alternate font and patch
> supercomm to display the characters so you could have a choice of
> either color or the full ibm character set? Also, could the routine be
> patched to display a better matching character in color mode? Is the
> source code to supercomm available?
>> Well, it's not really whether Supercomm supports the extended
>> characters or not. The problem is that Supercomm is limited to using
>> the character set supplied by the GIME which does not have the
>> extended characters. At the time I wrote Supercomm I figured that the
>> best character to use in place of the extended characters would be
>> the asterisk, "*". As I recall, Supercomm will just use that when it
>> comes across a character code that has the high bit set. But with
>> CoCo3FPGA we could modify the system or even go into graphics mode
>> and create the font there (which has actually already been done under
>> DECB).