[Coco] 1 or 2 meg upgrade

[L. Curtis Boyle]

I have to say Bill and I needed our 1 MB RAM in the Coco we used at work. We were running multiple terminals, and multiple printers (each with their own software, in their own windows), plus we were working on NitrOS-9 source in the background (using ASM, SCRED, VED, etc.). Even at home, on my TC-9 (which had the Disto DAT board and 1 MB of RAM), if I was running a fair number of full screen graphics windows, I regularly went past 512K (OS-9 allows up to 16 screens, and 32 windows - If you were using multiple screens of 320x200x16 or 640x200x4, which required 32K each, you could easily eat that up). As others have mentioned, having fonts, other get/put graphics buffers (including overlay windows), etc. also used a lot of RAM. And then, there were programs that used well beyond a single 64K workspace. Some of the graphic viewing programs (VIEWGIF by Vaughn Cato, VIEW by Tim Kientzle, etc.) used 2-3 full graphics screens to page flip images with mixed palettes to better represent 256 color GIF images, etc. The PLAY command (including the version I modified to handle some Mac, Amiga, Windows and Unix sound formats) could play sound files up to the maximum remaining RAM in the machine; I played 700+K sound files fairly often when fiddling with it. The modified version of VIEW that I did that created separate get/put buffers for each frame of an animated GIF could also quickly eat up RAM if you had a lot of frames in that GIF (I did it this way to make full speed animation, which is impossible on a Coco do with real-time LZW decompression, unless the size of the frames was really small).
We also did use RAM drives for fast C compiling and ASM use, but honestly, I didn’t use a very large one unless I wanted to duplicate floppy disks faster (which is when I would make a RAM disk the exact size of the floppy I was copying/duplicating, so that it could copy it one pass). I think I usually had a RAM drive max out at 180-192K.

L. Curtis Boyle
curtisboyle at sasktel.net