[Coco] DLOAD: Wish I knew then what I know now.

[Allen Huffman]

The Extended BASIC DLOAD command, which was removed in the CoCo 3, takes up a large portion of the ROM for a serial file transfer protocol. When looking at it, I see it both sends and receives which means all those years ago there could have been a way to EXEC routines and get bytes from the serial port in BASIC. I had no idea there was any receive code in the ROM.

This could have allowed a very primitive “remote terminal driver” to be written in BASIC, allowing a fully BASIC program to write to the modem (PRINT#-2 with a disable POKE so it does not expect to wait for a printer), and EXECs in to this ROM routine.

If I had a way to hook up my CoCo 2, I’d be very tempted to try to get this to work. There’s something about doing completely useless things that appears to me these days.
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Allen Huffman - PO Box 7634 - Urbandale IA 50323 - 515-999-0227 (vmail/TXT only)
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