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

[Joel Ewy]

L. Curtis Boyle wrote:
> 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
>
And of course the MM/1 provided a reasonable degree of source-code-level
compatibility with OS-9 programs for the CoCo written in C or BASIC09.

JCE
> -- 
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>