[Coco] RAINBOW vinyl records?

[Christian Lesage]

Arthur Flexser wrote:
> my recollection is that the bugs were neither all that numerous nor
> particularly serious.  It is definitely coded more sloppily than the
> Microsoft CoCo ROMs, true, but that mostly takes the form of wasted bytes
> rather than bugs.
>   
Well, circles that don't look like circles was a very obvious and 
annoying bug. I dont't remember precisely what were the other ones, but 
I do remember I used to run a patching program upon start-up to correct 
the most annoying ones. All in all, it seems to me that the SECB 
patching project had not been taken very seriously be either Tandy or 
Microware... or both.

> Microware made the decision to have Super Extended Basic run in RAM, above
> Disk Basic.  Given that decision, the 6K space used for the picture could
> not be used for Basic code;  it is accessed from the internal rom by
> switching memory modes, and is not normally in the memory map at all.  

Well, you're right, the CoCo was not able to directly use that 6KB 
memory space, but it could have been used to hold more (and better) 
patching code! And why did they choose to kill the DLOAD command? It 
would be a highly useful command to have in the CoCo 3 nowadays -- 
perhaps the most useful one. For instance, if it were still there, one 
could DLOAD DriveWire from a PC or Mac into the CoCo 3 instead of being 
forced to LOAD it from disk or having to put it in a ROM-Pak or a disk 
controller. Any CoCo 3 would be DriveWire-ready out-of-the-box if the 
DLOAD command were still there.

> None of this has any bearing on people buying OS-9,  which makes no use
> whatsoever of the Microware code.
>   
Well, well... Why didn't they (Tandy and/or Microware) made SECB capable 
of using the whole 128KB (or 512KB) of RAM? I'm not talking about being 
able to LPOKE/LPEEK all the address space, but being able to load larger 
programs and hold larger strings. To use the CoCo 3 memory to its full 
potential, you HAD to buy another product... like OS9, for example, or a 
third-party product. I'm not saying Microware was responsible for the 
lesser quality SECB. It could as well be Tandy. My point is that I (like 
some other people I guess) was quite disapointed with SECB and came the 
conclusion that BASIC-09 was the way to go. So I gave Radio Shack 
another $500 in exchange of a floppy disk drive and OS9... just to find 
out that I would also need to buy a 512KB memory board if I wanted to do 
serious work, hence my deception.