[Coco] DECB or ECB Compiler

[Little John]

Roger,
There were programs such as Big BASIC (DANO Soft - Bill Daniels, who I seem 
to remember hand-coded without an assembler and had the entire 6809 
instruction set memorized (not just the mnemonics..)... but I could be wrong 
there...), and 512K BASIC, and others that patched BASIC on the CoCo 3 such 
that BASIC programs could span much of the 512K of RAM.

They weren't windowing environments though.

Unfortunatly, Window-Master didn't have a ridistributable runtime that I 
remember - anyone who wanted to use it had to buy a copy (sort of like 
Windows 1.0,2.0,3.0 - I think Bill envisioned it as an operating 
environment).

And... all of Cer-Comp's products were copy protectd, some more agressively 
than others, but most were eventually cracked I think. I wonder if when a 
copy is bought from his eBay auctions if this is still the case? $149 was a 
lot to spend for a disk that might get zapped eventually.. I think backups 
could be made that would make the original usable again somehow... but I 
just never liked the risk of losing say $149 because the Tandy Disk ROM 
assumes the heads are at Track Zero at a cold start... of course that was 
easily enough to patch... but Cer-Comp's software, I think, All did a 
cold-start on exit without restoring the heads to track 0 which I felt was a 
major oversight... that alone wouldn't kill a disk but head-banging 
eventually certainly hurts the drive aligment and perhaps the drive itself.

Big John


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Roger Merchberger" <zmerch-coco at 30below.com>
To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2010 11:22 AM
Subject: Re: [Coco] DECB or ECB Compiler


> On 09/29/2010 11:31 AM, Andrew wrote:
>> Responses inline...
>
> Mine as well...
>
>>> There was a very advanced system - I'm pretty sure it was a compiler -
>>> fpr the CoCo3; I believe it was called Window Basic 3 or WBasic3 --
>>> memory cells are froggy right now... I remember drooling over it back
>>> in the day because it was kinda like Basic09 for SECB on Steroids...
>>
>> The only one I remember (froggy here too) was Cer-Comp's Window Master,
>> as already mentioned...and what I will speak to.
>
> As others have found the aforementioned Cer-Comp webpage, it seems that I 
> was kind of mixing up the two different products... Thanks to you to 
> "straighten me out" and to the others that found the info to reacquaint my 
> webbed-up memory cells with the real info. ;-)
>
> However, I'm pretty sure there _was_ a product that advertised this:
>
>>> 2) It had built-in MMU support - so a DIM statement of an array too
>>> big to fit in 32K *worked* -- if you had 512K, you could DIMension
>>> almost all of the ram (minus program/video/etc. memory) for huge (for
>>> SECB) data support.
>
> Keep in mind that my idea of 'pretty' and 'sure' aren't nearly what they 
> were a couple decades previous... ;-)
>
>> Window Master offered a full GUI suite of commands for trapping events,
>> opening/closing windows, showing icons, building menus and dialogs, etc.
>> It was actually fairly advanced for the day. It wasn't a compiler, 
>> though.
>
> Did Window Master have a redistributable runtime? If not, it wouldn't be 
> very good for commercial programming (as in - someone else who didn't 
> purchase WM couldn't run what you wrote with the product)... Just random 
> thoughts, o'course...
>
>>> Anyway, if I get 'round to drumming up some time and finding my old
>>> Rainbows, I'll see if I can find an ad for it.
>
> I still want to do this but after yesterday's marathon (read: 5 hours) of 
> hauling, cutting & stacking firewood for the fireplace, rummaging around 
> in the attic today may not be on top of this old fat guy's priority 
> list... ;-P
>
>> One other note: As of several years back, Bill Vergona (owner of
>> Cer-Comp) would, every now-and-then, sell a copy or two of CBASIC-3 on
>> Ebay ... [ snippage ] ... [he]  told me he was (still?) a cantankerous
>> man who would hear nothing of the sort, and only sold the few copies he
>> did just to "keep up appearances" with the copyright office (his right,
>> I suppose).
>
> I wish he was "un-cantankerous" enough to at least throw a few more copies 
> on eBay for copyright's sake... ;-) Unless he still wants the $149; I 
> don't think I could allocate that much spare cash for a hobby.
>
> Laterz!
> Roger "Merch" Merchberger
>
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