[Coco] gime

[Rogelio Perea]

On Wed Jul 16 2014, Luis Antoniosi (CoCoDemus) wrote:

In what exactly the 1987 is better than the 1986 ?
>

Far from being the hardware expert, I read that the '87 GIME corrected at
least two minor flaws on the '86 edition: a keyboard interrupt issue and a
12-bit timer one. In the early days of the CoCo 3 there was a lot of talk
on regards of the BLOB (OS9L2 "Boot List Order Bug") on which weird
behaviour ensued when trying to boot OS9L2 where the order of the modules
that make up the boot list was affecting the outcome (boot/no boot) - I'm
not sure if this was a result of the differences between both GIME chip
editions or not, all I can say is that my first CoCo 3 had the '87 version
and I never ever saw the BLOB on the many boot disks I configured.

Then there were also the "sparklies" issue when running programs on the
hi-res screens where one would see little flashes randomly appear all over
the screen (hence the sparklies name) - I believe this problem was in
direct relation to the timing idiosyncrasies fixed on the '87 GIME chip;
going back to my experience I never saw those sparklies on my '87 GIME CoCo
3, but have seen them on a '86 GIME equipped CoCo 3 I got not too long
ago... can grow to be an annoying effect.

Perhaps someone on the list with better hardware experience will clear
things out between the GIME chip versions.

-- RP