[Coco] SECB discussion...

[Frank Swygert]

If Tandy had been paying any attention to the CoCo users at all, they wouldn't have went to Microware in the first place, they'd have went to Art Flexser. His ADOS was the most widely used alternate "DOS" for the CoCo. I always thought the original and ADOS 3 were a work of art (nice pun there too!) -- they managed to maintain 95% (or better) backward compatibility while greatly enhancing functionality. 

SECB WAS just a kludge to get some slight enhancements into the existing DECB without going back to Micro-Soft. It wasn't, and couldn't be a big jump. Tandy wanted to maintain maximum backward compatibility. In that they succeeded, but it wouldn't have taken much to include support for 40 track drives (all Tandy drives were by then!) and even double sided drives. Plug in a 35 track and it would just error out when an attempt was made to read the back side or a track beyond 35. Lots of things they could have done! If you want an enhancement, get a copy of ADOS3, customize, and burn into ROM. You won't regret it! Art allowed the code to be posted and downloaded for free some time ago, not sure if it's on the archive site or not. 


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Date: Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:47:55 -0500
From: Christian Lesage <hyperfrog at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Coco] CoCoNet beta release
Gene Heskett wrote:

> > On Saturday 02 January 2010, Roger Taylor wrote:
> >   
>   
>> >> If you keep on the path I did, eventually, you'll get mad at Mark
>> >> Hawkins and the gang for screwing up a way to take a bare CoCo 3
>> >> running software from over a 2 or 3-wire cable.   :) 
>> >>     
>>     
> >
> > If I can be so audacious as to mention it, I have wondered if they were more 
> > concerned with getting their trio image into it than with preserving 
> > functionality.  OTOH, that might have been the shacks way of trying to get 
> > everybody over to the pc.  Us peons will likely never really know though.
>   

I've always thought SECB didn't live up to the expectations, especially 
since ECB was good compared to the competition back in 1980 or 1981. In 
my opinion, SECB was a kludge. And, yes, I'm mad they managed to screw 
the only BASIC command that would be really useful nowadays. Some people 
say the space occupied by the picture was wasted anyway, because this 
range of addresses is also used by the disk controller ROM, but I 
disagree. That space could have been used to store more and better 
patches. Or a scheme could have been devised to switch between different 
ROM/RAM modes.



-- 
Frank Swygert
Publisher, "American Motors Cars" 
Magazine (AMC)
For all AMC enthusiasts
http://farna.home.att.net/AMC.html
(free download available!)