[Coco] Color basic and available RAM

[Allen Huffman]

> On Feb 11, 2015, at 10:07 AM, William Astle <lost at l-w.ca> wrote:
> 
> 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.


Very true. Sub-Etha Software was formed to offer a product called "ModuleDOS" (renamed MultiBasic by the time our ad hit Rainbow and our appearance at the 1990 AtlantaFest). It did just that. It added an extension to existing commands so you could GOTO and GOSUB to different banks, all sharing the same block of RAM for variables. You could load/chain blocks in, too, so you could have a 128K machine but still load in blocks from disk. It was used for our ShadowBBS.

I will be getting a DSK image of it and a scan (or .TXT if I can find it) of the manual, shortly.

--
Allen Huffman - PO Box 22031 - Clive IA 50325 - 515-999-0227 (vmail/TXT only)
Sub-Etha Software - http://www.subethasoftware.com - Established 1990!
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