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

[Michael Furman]

Back in the day we had a ROM disassembly which was NOT the “Unravelled” version (ours was rather poor quality, so possibly a photocopy of a photocopy) and I would occasionally peruse the various routines and I did actually find the DLOAD RX and TX routines in there. Using those routines I wrote a little BBS system. All of the logic was in Basic and it used the DLOAD ROM routines for communication at 1200 baud. I should look again but I don’t believe this code turned up on any of my old floppy disk images.


> On Feb 4, 2023, at 05:47, Allen Huffman via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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