[Coco] [CoCo] Atari and Amiga Comparison (what if Tandy had...)

[L. Curtis Boyle]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 20:22:04 -0600, <farna at att.net> wrote:

> Part of the reason the MM/1 and TC-9 never caught on is that they  
> weren't CoCo compatible. If Tandy had just been a tad smarter and had  
> the GIME designed for 4MHz or faster operation, then added the extra bit  
> or two for more memory, there could have been a CoCo4. Even a 4MHz CoCo  
> with 2MB of RAM would have been killer! A more standard monitor would  
> have been nice too. There were other affordable OSK capable 68K machines  
> before any of those, the Star Kits machine is the first to come to mind.  
> I think in the end the price to produce and support a CoCo was getting  
> to close to the low end PC compatibles, and the profit margin to low.

Not entirely true... the TC-9 was partially compatible (OS-9/NitrOS-9, and  
Chris Burke actually did complete a first version of BASIC ROM boot disk  
for it). As long as you had an OS-9 boot disk with the proper TC-9 drivers  
(for the joystick, keyboard, serial ports and parallel port), the rest of  
the drivers were the same (it had a GIME, the Disto 1MB board, used  
standard Coco floppy and hard drive controllers like the Eliminator, B&B).  
So, any commercial software for OS-9 that used legal calls to hardware  
worked fine. DECB BASIC programs, as long as they didn't poke around withe  
non-compatible hardware, worked fine as well, and even a few ML programs,  
if they used the "system calls" that Tandy put in the ROM's for keyboard  
and joystick (rather than accessing the hardware directly) would work as  
well, but most DECB ML programs didn't do that,and would need to be  
patched.


-- 
L. Curtis Boyle