[Coco] Color BASIC 1.1 / memory detection

[Arthur Flexser]

Are you sure that your COLOR BASIC (not Extended Basic) is version 1.1?
You cannot readily detect the Color Basic version with Extended Basic
installed.  If in doubt, pull the Extended Basic chip and see what the
startup message reports.  (Though I would think an F-board CoCo would
indeed have Color Basic 1.1, not 1.0.)

Art

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 5:14 PM, jon bird <news at onastick.clara.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have just recently resurrected my old Coco 1 (it's a 26-3004A variant)
> and have been putting it back to an original (working) state (I had been
> plugging various additional cards & even a Dragon ROM into it at some
> point).
>
> The info I can find on this version of the CoCo was that it was shipped
> with 16K RAM, Color BASIC. It had an Extended BASIC 1.1 ROM fitted many
> years ago and as part of my various "upgrades", replaced the 16K RAM chips
> with 4164 DRAMs & also switched over the jumpers.
>
> What I am finding though is that having restored the original Color BASIC
> 1.1 ROM, it is only reporting a 16K memory fit. I'm pretty sure that when I
> had the Dragon ROM fitted, it could access the full 32K (and I'm also
> fairly sure I had OS9 running on it as well which suggests the full 64K is
> accessible). So this seems to be a feature of the BASIC ROM.
>
> I did come across this article from the archive:
>
> http://coco.maltedmedia.narkive.com/2DM5LvJ2/color-basic-1-0-1-2-differen
> ces
>
> which backs up some other information I found that the original 1.0 ROM
> did not support >16K memory fit but that the 1.1 ROMs do.
>
> Can anyone shed some light on this behaviour?
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Jon.
>
> --
> == jon bird - software engineer
> == <reply to address _may_ be invalid, real mail below>
> == <reduce rsi, stop using the shift key>
> == posted as: news 'at' onastick 'dot' clara.co.uk
>
>
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