[Coco] Color basic and available RAM

[John Guin]

There were some tweaks that would move the Color Basic and Extended Basic ROMS around to give around 39K of free memory on a 64K machine.  I may not remember the specifics correctly - maybe one of the early years in the Rainbow had this?

Never saw it used much, though.  I was always jealous of C64 owners for this (weird) behavior.  When they booted, they had much more free memory than the Coco.

John

-----Original Message-----
From: Coco [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On Behalf Of William Astle
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2015 8:07 AM
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Subject: Re: [Coco] Color basic and available RAM

Roughly 24K is right for a fresh boot on 32K.

To support more than 64K in a way that MEM would return a larger value would require a complete re-engineering of the entire ROM. The ROM is designed with the idea of a completely flat memory space including the ROM area. A surprising number of things would need to be modified substantially to work with a paged memory space.

On 15-02-11 08:41 AM, Joe Grubbs wrote:
> Throughout its life, was Color Basic never tweaked to utilize more than ~32K of RAM? It seems that on the 64K and 128K Cocos, ? MEM always spits back ~24K (which I presume is what the original 32K machines would say).
>
> I apologize if this has been answered before. My original CoCo2 was a 16K machine so it's something I never considered before. It isn't until recently that I upgraded it to 64K and acquired new machines, all 64K+.
>
> -Joe
>
>
>
>   		 	   		
>


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