[Coco] The Quest for Almazar

[Salvador Garcia]

Hi all,


A few days ago Bill provided us with a link to a text game called Search for Almazar. I was curious enough that I wanted to see how it looked. I downloaded the file. Then it hit me:


1. I don't have a CoCo
2. I have not done anything CoCo since the 80s
3. What am I supposed to do with this DSK file?


Of course you all came o rescue retroactively. I have been reading this list since May 2014 (except for Dec - Feb) and I had read about emulators and DSK images. The Becker port for VCC came up rather frequently so I searched for the VCC emulator, found it and installed it. (v1.43b). After poking about I found the way to mount a disk image, used it and discovered that it happily mounted the DSK file that I downloaded.


Once mounted I typed LIST and nothing happened.


I tried DIR and got a directory listing that went off screen. I did not remember if there was a way to view the files such that the top one would not go off screen. No luck with that. After listing the files a few time I managed to see that the file name was almazar.bas. No problem. I typed in LOAD ALMAZAR.BAS


I got a TM? error.


Did I need to specify a drive unit?


Was there a way to "switch over" to the drive?


Google here I come. I search for disk basic load and got a few hits, this being one of them: 


http://www.cs.unc.edu/~yakowenk/coco/text/diskbasic.html  


The syntax described was:


LOAD file and LOAD file, R


Ok, I did that. Did not want to run it, so I did not use the R option. 


I had a second look at the page and found this text:


" Note that filenames must be either string variables or string constants in quotes."


Ah! The quotes.


Tried LOAD "ALMAZAR.BAS" and no error!


Tried LIST and got a listing of the program. Tried RUN and I was off to the races!


So a long story short, thanks all for your help! Salvador