[Coco] CoCo BASICS - clarification on the differences?

[Deny Wilson]

Sadly, my poor CoCo 2 only had Color Basic. A couple of my friends that had
CoCo 2's had ECB, and I was very jealous. There were a few games that they
could play that I couldn't. Plus, my poor little machine only had 16k. We
did eventually upgrade it to 64k. And then the CoCo 3 came out. And a whole
new crop of games that I couldn't play came out. Luckily, when I became an
adult, and got a job that game me lots of disposable income, I picked up
both a CoCo 2 and a CoCo 3... and a multipack... and a cassette drive...
and a floppy drive... and some joysticks. And some games... and a bunch of
Rainbow magazines.... I may have a problem.


On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 8:35 AM, Steve Strowbridge <ogsteviestrow at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I think you got all the answers, but here's what I think I know/remember.
>
> The first CoCo had two options, Color BASIC and Extended Color BASIC.
> Color BASIC would run with as little as 4K, but Extended Color BASIC
> required 16K of RAM because I think the ROM itself was 8K
>
> I think the MC-10 had Micro Color Basic, a hybrid of the two CoCo versions
> (Jim Gerrie could give you a better explanation)
>
> And the CoCo 3 had a "Super" Extended Color BASIC that was enhanced by
> Microware.
> At this time, Microsoft had no interest in further developing for non
> MS-DOS machines, and Tandy was not able to alter the ROM BASIC they already
> had a license for.
>
> Microware took the original Extended Color BASIC ROM, then loaded that into
> RAM, and added all the extra commands to take advantage of the CoCo 3's
> capabilities (pretty clever!)
>
> I think there are a lot of compatibilities between "Standard" Color BASIC
> and "Micro" Color BASIC (MC-10), however, the "tokens" or binary
> translations of the commands are not the same, so the saved ".BAS" files
> are not directly compatible, you'd need to save them in an ASCII format to
> transport them, again this is something I think Jim Gerrie could give you
> much better input on.  I think the command to save a BASIC program in ASCII
> format is something like SAVE "PROGRAM.BAS" ,A
>
> Hope that helps, it was interesting learning some of this stuff only
> recently, between reading the CoCo underdog book, and listening to the CoCo
> Crew Podcasts, this old dog was able to learn new information.
>
>
>
> Steve Strowbridge, aka
> The Original Gamer Stevie Strow
> http://ogsteviestrow.com
> ogsteviestrow at gmail.com
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 8:54 AM, John Lochey via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com
> >
> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> > I'm a little confused about the Tandy Basic versions.
> >
> > What does the MC-10 use?  Color Basic I believe
> >
> > What does the CoCo2 use?  Extended Color Basic I believe (at least that
> is
> > what I see in XROAR)
> >
> > What does the CoCo3 use?  Extended Color Basic/Disk Basic I believe
> >
> > I'm trying to determine how much the BASICS differed between the CoCo2
> and
> > CoCo3.
> > I have searched the internet for the main differences between Color Basic
> > and Extended Color Basic, but cannot quite find a definitive list.
> > I would imagine it is just a few commands?
> > It also appears that any CoCo could be upgraded to Extended Color Basic
> as
> > well.
> >
> >
> > Also dare I even ask what OS-9 and NitrOS-9 are?  ;)
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> >
> > John
> >
> >
> > --
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> >
>
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