[Coco] Re: : Tandy's biggest mistakes thread

[Arthur Flexser]

And speaking of "a few ROM entry points" brings up how few they were.  The lack
of a good set of ROM vectors, especially for file I/O, hindered CoCo software
development and made it tougher for folks who wanted to learn ML programming.
I recall a Commodore-64 (or maybe it was C-128) manual that had something like
40 pages devoted to how to use each of their plentiful documented ROM routines.

Art

On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, John R. Hogerhuis wrote:

> On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 14:45 -0400, Arthur Flexser wrote:
> > Again, way too late.  (If it had info on the GIME, then you are talking about
> > the CoCo 3 era.)  I had in mind what was available in the early days of the
> > CoCo.  The manuals were written to not intimidate anyone, even children, with
> > lots of cutesy cartoons and so forth.  But they did scrimp a lot on the
> > technical side.
> > 
> > Art
> > 
> 
> There were service manuals for all the cocos, weren't there? For I/O
> chips though I guess you were on your own. I suppose the datasheets were
> available that had more details, but finding stuff like that wouldn't
> have been as easy as it is today where most data sheets can be scrounged
> off the web..
> 
> But yeah it would have been better to have it in the manual. All we got
> in the color basic manuals was how to call ML user subroutines, a few
> ROM entry points and some system variable addresses for setting up
> serial printer params and such.
> 
> -- John.
> 
> 
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