[Coco] Young programmers....

[Robert Gault]

Aaron Banerjee wrote:
> All,
>    My 8 year old son has taken to BASIC programming on the COCO.  He's 
> got the Coco 2 set up in his room, and we've got the Coco 3 downstairs.  
> While going through the Coco 3 manual, he noticed a grid worksheet for 
> the 64x32 text mode.  I thought we just had 32, 40, and 80 columns on 
> the Coco 3.

That's correct where 32 columns is Coco1 mode text and 40 or 80 is Coco3 
hi-res text.

>  He was wondering why "WIDTH 64" did not work.  I'm assuming 
> the 64x32 is just the set/reset (that uses text characters and is 
> therefore a text mode), but it never really says that.  There isn't some 
> weird or "Easter Egg" text mode on the Coco 3 (analogous to some of the 
> Coco 1/2 semigraphics modes) is there?

The manual is not very clear on this point. Most likely the worksheet 
would be used in conjunction with p. 292 where the characters obtained 
with CHR$(N) 128<=N<=255 are shown. These are what's left of the 
semigraphics capability on the Coco3.
If you look at these patterns, you will see that they are 2x2 squares. 
Put 32 of these across the 32 column screen and you have effectively 64 
columns of semigraphics information.