[Coco] CoCo Questions

[Dan Olson]

> That is right as far as it goes. The upper 32k on a Coco1 or 2 is the Basic 

> ROM area while the lower 32K is RAM. If the Coco has 64k RAM installed then 

> it could be used as follows.

>

> It is perfectly legal to write an ml program to switch the system to all RAM 

> mode and make use of the upper 32K of memory assuming 64k RAM is installed. 

> However, Basic can't make use of this area. If you want to use the extra 32k 

> for a Basic program, you would need to write some ml routines that access 

> this area of memory, transfer data back and forth between low and high RAM, 

> and then switch back to mixed RAM/ROM mode before returning control to Basic.


Thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for.  What I'm looking to do is 
just the other way around, I've written a few Basic programs and lost all 
of them due to a flaky cassette deck or tape.  So I've been thinking of 
making a little program to save the memory contents, I didn't think there 
was anything useful in the upper 32k to save, but wanted to be sure! 
Thanks.  I don't hold any hope of finding a drive controller any time soon 
and thought it'd be a fun project anyway :)

 	Dan