[Coco] CLOAD without ?IO ERROR

[Aaron Banerjee]

I guess this might be sort of a mundane topic, but I just thought I'd put
it out here in case anyone besides me needed it:

If you happen to have found a few old coco tapes, and for some reason set
up your coco to read them to see what was there, you may find that many of
your 20 year old tapes don't load properly.  If you were loading a BASIC
program (via CLOAD), you'd get nothing.

Should you really want to see this program, type in the following program
(which is basically a CLOAD without ?IO ERROR):

1 FOR X = 42136 TO 42301
2 POKE X-21136, PEEK(X)
3 NEXT X
4 POKE 157,82
5 POKE 158,8
6 POKE 21075,33
7 EXEC

This works on Color BASIC 1.1, and Extended Color BASIC 1.0.  Not that
anyone uses them anymore, but it is sort of a fun program.  Note that
lines 4 and 5 define the exec vector -- that is, you could have deleted
lines 4 and 5 and changed line 7 to EXEC 82*256 + 8.

This little program is most certainly not the "be-all, end-all" of loading
your unloadable programs off of tape.  You can (and probably will) get a
lot of garbage in your BASIC programs, but at least you'll get
something...

             - Aaron