Category: TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo)
I’ve repeatedly referred to I-code in previous articles. Let’s go into some more detail, and in passing correct a mistaken impression I may have given. What distinguishes I-code from other virtual machine code As you enter, edit, or load source code with basic09, it is converted to I-code. I-code is commonly likened to code for virtual machines, like the JVM…
Anyone with at least one foot in the Tandy Color Computer (CoCo) world these days will have already been hearing about something called the Game Master Cartridge (GMC). What is this device? Another whiz-bang flash-in-the-pan hardware announcement with little real utility? Or is this a good and useful product that everyone should acquire for their CoCo collection? Well, as the…
Welcome to part 4 of a multi-part series on simple things you can do to speed up Microsoft BASIC on the Radio Shack Color Computer. These tips may be applicable to other systems with Microsoft (or other) BASICs. See also: Introduction, part 1 , part 2 and part 3. Part 4 – GOTO and GOSUB Unless you are writing a program that…
The official Tandy Assembly twitter account has announced that Tandy Assembly 2018 will be held on October 13 and 14 in Springfield, Ohio. They haven’t even updated their web site, but various podcasts had been hinting that Tandy Assembly would be held in roughly the same location and around the same time as 2017. Attendance was quite good last time,…
John W. Linville, the omnipresent CoCo advocate and host of the CoCo Crew Podcast, just published on his Retro Tinker blog that the Infocom’s Z Interpreter source code for the Color Computer has been recovered and it is available on the Color Computer Archive. For those not familiar, the Z Interpreter (or Z Machine) was developed by Infocom allowing them…
What programmers debated in the old days Nowadays people argue about object-oriented versus functional programming or dynamic versus static typing. But back in the day, it was all about structured programming. The brouhaha started with a letter E.W. Dijkstra wrote and which was published in Communications of the ACM in March of 1968 under the title “Go To Statement Considered Harmful“….
Welcome to part 3 of a multi-part series on simple things you can do to speed up Microsoft BASIC on the Radio Shack Color Computer. These tips may be applicable to other systems with Microsoft (or other) BASICs. See also: Introduction, part 1 and part 2. Part 3 – Variables Previously, we took a look at FOR/NEXT and numbers, and…
Allen Huffman is graciously sharing ways to speed up programs written for the family of Microsoft BASIC interpreters common on personal computers of the time that interests us, including the various flavors of Color BASIC. These ways all boil down to Modify your code to work around the limitations the BASIC interpreter inherited from its origins on systems with extremely…
The BASIC 10Liners contest is, for me, one of the highlights of the retro scene and I am happy to announce that the 7th edition of the competition is already online, accepting new entries. This year, the organizers have changed a few rules after receiving some feedback from the previous edition. The most important change is that for the PUR-80…
Although Glen is currently covering a conversion from the arcade version of Defender to the Color Computer, he took the time to step back a bit and write an article that gives an overview of the process to convert an arcade game to the Color Computer. The post is not very long, and also is easier to grasp the overall…
