[Coco] 128 or 512?

[farna at att.net]

Okay, I don't use a CoCo any more, so what I say may not carry much weight, but I did develop a couple programs (neither required 512K, though I seem to recall a BASIC09 derivative someone wrote of one of them may have...). 

Anyway, if you can get the game into 128K without compromising game play or graphics to much it's worth it. If there is a big speed boost or play/quality boost by using 512K, then by all means go that route. Any serious CoCo user will have (or want!) 512K by now. As an alternate, you can make the game set up a RAM disk and load graphics/modules there IF it detects 512K, load from disk if it doesn't. Might require a loader program which can test for 512K, and if found set up a d0 RAM disk, which will divert all calls to load to the RAM disk. If saves are needed you can divert all saves to the actual drive, or have an option to copy the saved file to a physical drive (use D1 for this save, but have the loader redirect D1 to the physical D0 if 512K is detected). 

Just a thought... but don't ask me how to do all this!! It's been way to long since I programmed anything on a CoCo, and I used a lot of notes and a library of subroutines/program snippets then! Used a word processor to write initially and saved in ASCII format, easy to cut/paste/modify the subroutines to the program, then save and run to debug. I often used two computers -- one with the program code on screen in the WP and another to run and debug. That way I could make changes to the "source code" as I debugged along. Now it would be easy to do that using emulators on a Windows box or the Rainbow IDE. The second computer running a WP was my old XT (and later AT, then 386). I used a program from Rainbow (I believe written by Marty Goodman) to transfer the ASCII files to the CoCo. 

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 -original message ----------------
Diego Barizo wrote:
> I was talking with "The other Bob" about program development, and we 
> were not sure if we should release versions of our programs that use 
> 512Kb of RAM.
>
> Do you have 128 or 512 in your CoCo?
> You can answer to my email address, to avoid "traffic jams" in the list, 
> but please, reply. You will be helping the development of new CoCo software.
>
> Diego
> http://coco.sclaudia.net