Category: TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo)
I believe the last thing that comes to mind when thinking of game cartridges is a program made for the Color Basic. That is in fact based all in prejudice and John Linville (CoCocrew podcast) came to help destroy the wrong assumption that that is impossible. John wrote an article on his blog, Retro Tinker, explaining how to prepare a…
Glen Hewlett has been publishing an extensive 25-part article about his quest to convert the Z80 arcade version of PacMan to the Motorola 6809, allowing it to run in the TRS-80 CoCo. Well, he finally was able to finish the task, and you can download and play it. You need a 512K CoCo3 to play it though (or any CoCo3…
Unless you are a purist-masochist retro enthusiast, cross-development is the way to go when creating new software for the old machines. The idea is to use the power of modern computers to code, compile and run the software and then test/run it in a real machine at the end. I’ve been poking the CoCo cross-development tools for a while, and I…
The only upside of Radio Shack demise is the sales that happen to clear inventory. Following the store’s fire sales, the company has opened its vaults and is auctioning historical equipment and memorabilia through UBid Estate and Auctions. There are plenty of catalogs, paintings, posters, and of course retro computers. A quick glance at the list filtering by TRS-80 shows a…
The 8-Bit Guy has published a video where he walks us through the restoration of a CoCo 1 he acquired. The computer was in really bad shape, with a lot of dirty and the paint was worn off in different spots – a really ugly machine. I watched the video and he did a really good job, although I would think…
Mostly inspired by Allen Huffman and his excellent series of articles about Cross development and Extended Color Basic (CoCo Cross Development part 1, part 2, and part 3), I decided to try coding in BASIC for the CoCo using a modern editor. Equipped with MAME as emulator and LWTools to create and modify disk images, using the decb utility, I create…
The 2017 10Liners contest is over. With 64 entries, this year contest is a staggering success. There are games for Atari, Commodore, MSX, Apple II and Amstrad and the quality of them is really impressive, considering how restrictive is a BASIC program in only 10 lines! But creativity wins! Here is the first 3 on each category: PUR-80 – Maximum of…
LWTOOLS is a set of cross-development tools for the Motorola 6809 and Hitachi 6309 microprocessors. It supports assembling to raw binaries, CoCo LOADM binaries, and a proprietary object file format for later linking. It also supports macros and file inclusion among other things. The version 4.14 has been released bringing the following changes, including explanations from the author: The “forwardrefmax”…
Vintage Computer Festival East is starting today, March 31 and goes until April 2nd at InfoAge Science Center in New Jersey. The show is targeted for the whole family (but we know we would enjoy it the most!) with conferences, exhibit, vendor stands and more. In terms of presentations, the show will have Bill Herd talking about Surface Mount Technology,…
NOTE: This is a minor update of an article (“PCLEAR 0 to get more CoCo BASIC memory“) that originally appeared on my website in January 2015. On the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, Extended Color BASIC added new commands to access high resolution graphics modes. The following modes of the CoCo’s Motoroal 6847 VDG chip (video display generator) were implemented: PMODE…
