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

[Barry Nelson]

 My own comm program, xcom9, can operate on a graphics screen with a font loaded. In fact, instead of supporting ANSI graphics, xcom9 passes though the OS-9 control codes to the screen, and can actually be instructed to switch to a graphics screen and load a font remotely by the BBS. Only one BBS I know of ever supported this though, Matrix BBS of Miami Florida. It did cause quite a shock to the first few users who logged in and watched their screens switch to graphics mode and start displaying graphics animations like something out a scifi movie at the time, and this even worked at 1200, and even 300 baud. It was able to function at such low speeds because the BBS did not send bit mapped graphics, instead it sent control characters describing the graphics operations to "draw" the picture using basic shapes and color fill commands. What I had in mind for supercomm was simpler, just switch to 640x192 and load an IBM font, but at best it would be only 4 colors, which would probably be gray shades, and most likely just black and white.

> Dave Philipsen dave at davebiz.com 
> Wed Nov 4 04:15:44 EST 2015
> 
> Ok, so you're talking about using text in a graphics mode.  Well, I 
> guess it's worth a try but I imagine that that method will be somewhat 
> taxing even on a 2MHz CoCo 3; trying to draw the individual characters 
> on a gfx screen as opposed to the hardware font of the text screen.  You 
> definitely wouldn't be able to scroll very fast that way but it might be 
> acceptable if you don't have to much screen activity.  Let me know how 
> it works out if you try it.  I'd be interested to know.
> 
> Dave