Was the Coco3 competing against the Amiga and Atari ST?

[+eebuckeye]

The sound is very lacking and the graphics are not comparable. That being said I really like the Coco3 but curious about its competition.

[+save2600]

Hahahaha, no!

Coco3 competition were the earlier CoCo and TRS-80 computers themselves.

Probably thought they were competing with the Commodore and Atari 8-bits of the time, but definitely not with Mac, ST and Amiga.

[Rybags]

I'd say not.

 

It was one of those twilight machines of the 8-bit era where you could almost say too late for this party in similar fashion to the likes of Sam Coupe, Commodore 128, MSX II and Apple IIgs.

Though in fairness it's an evolution of the TRS-80 CoCo which had been around for several years.

 

In some markets, 8 bit machines were still somewhat expensive so many of the latecomers got a foothold but in the US which was by far the largest market at the time, 8 bit machines were well and truly becoming overshadowed by the likes of Mac, ST, Amiga and IBM compatibles.

[Turbo-Torch]

The Tandy 1000EX (at nearly 4X the price of a coco3) would be a better comparison.

[+eebuckeye]

Seems odd to me that it came out in 86 when the Amiga, ST, Mac and others were already out. I guess Radio Shack was hoping to release the 8bit machine to the cheaper market as mentioned.

[Turbo-Torch]

Atari released the 130XE around the same time. Commodore also released the 64C in '87 (well after the Coco3). Nothing odd about Radio Shack producing the Coco3 in '86. They were all inexpensive computers in the $250 range.

 

The Amiga was a $700 computer vs. the Coco3 @ $219.00.

Compare the Tandy 1000EX to the Amiga 500. Look at the price, specs and physical appearance. If Radio Shack was trying to compete with the Amiga and ST, that was their answer.

 

Lastly...back in the day, did you look at a Coco3 and seriously see anything remotely comparable to the Amiga?

[random_rodder]

It's been discussed many times in the past that the CoCo3 was considered competition for the St and Macs of the day. Mark Siegel, who was in charge of the CoCo line for Tandy claims to have been assured by Motorola the 6809 in the CoCo could perform equal to the 68k series in the ST/Macs, if properly equiped With supporting hardware.

 

The 6809/6309 were outstanding processors, but, but as complete computers, on paper I don't see a true competition between the CoCo and the others. I'm just now getting my ST up and running. At this point I'll say the CoCo is far easier to maintain.

 

It's a tad unfair to say the CoCo3 was only competing with its predecessors, though. That's like saying the C64 was only competing with the Vic 20. Every system of the day had good and bad points and can be debated until the end of time.

[JamesD]

Are you talking marketing wise, sales numbers or capabilities?


The CoCo was always targeted as an entry level computer and nothing more.
The ST and Amiga were supposed to be the next generation.

The top selling Amiga was the 500 and it supposedly only sold around 1.2 million machines over it's entire life but sales figures in a magazine may be off.
Total Amiga sales are around 5.4 million.
What is more important is that at intro, you had to spend over 800 to 1000 dollars for an ST or Amiga where the CoCo 3 was around $250 to get started and ended up around $100.
The ST and Amiga also had little software for the first year and a lot of what was released was buggy or didn't really take advantage of the new capabilities.

All popular 8 bits continued to sell really well until '87 and then sales started to decline rapidly, so some time around that is probably where the ST and Amiga surpassed the CoCo 3 in yearly sales. It took over 2 years before Commodore announce they sold over 1 million machines if I remember right.
Some people just couldn't afford the 68K machines so they bought entry level machines. Once prices dropped, all 8 bits were doomed and the Amiga outsold the CoCo 3 in the long run anyway.

 

Capability wise...
The 6809 can hold it's own vs a 68000 of a higher MHz largely due to the 68000's microcoded 16 bit ALU. But it's easier for a compiler to generate fast code for a 68K and advances in compiler technology pretty much skipped 8 bits for the most part. As developers moved from assembler to compilers performance differences widened. Languages themselves were mostly designed for 16 bit processors at that time anyway which was a strike against all 8 bit CPUs from the start.
The 6309 offers around a 20% speedup on 6809 code and it adds additional registers, better 16 bit support and even 32 bit support.
With that the CoCo 3 might have kept up with an 8Mhz 68000, but once the 68020 and 68030 were introduced at higher clock speeds there's nothing 6x09 wise that could compete.

Graphics wise the CoCo 3 isn't bad but it doesn't offer as many colors, sprites, a blitter, etc...
Had Motorola released it's advanced chipset then the CoCo 3 might have had a larger palette, sprites, more RAM and other hardware toys, but I think the price point was greater than what Tandy wanted and Tandy had no interest in creating a 68K line which was the other target of the chipset.
I think with that then maybe the CoCo could be considered a competitor, but it would still have always been the budget machine.

Ultimately without better support from Tandy and software houses the CoCo 3 would never be a real competitor.

If they had even paid to have Printshop ported to the machine they probably would have increased sales by 25%.

Really, the only things the CoCo 3 had over the ST and Amiga were price, existing software, existing users wanting to upgrade and RadioShack stores everywhere.

It's existing software was for the CoCo 1/2 and wasn't that flashy, a lot of existing users upgraded to the PC because GW-BASIC was almost identical to Extended Color BASIC and a lot of the stores didn't have anyone that knew anything about computers. So pretty much price.

[JamesD]

Seems odd to me that it came out in 86 when the Amiga, ST, Mac and others were already out. I guess Radio Shack was hoping to release the 8bit machine to the cheaper market as mentioned.

The CoCo 3 was cheaper to produce than the CoCo 2

[Mr SQL]

The Amiga was in a class by it's own; the video toaster was reminiscent of modern technology, ushered it in.

 

ST didn't have many support chips for it's 68k; 6809+GIME did pretty well against it graphics wise - both machines have awesome versions of Gauntlet but the CoCo3's version edges out the ST IMO due to the GIME. OS was also much better on the 3 with OS-9. ST had the midi market though, the 3 just had that same DAC.

[+eebuckeye]

All great information. I really enjoy the Coco3 and never had a Coco computer until recently.

[JamesD]

In the CoCo 3's defense, OS-9 was similar to Unix and the CoCo had been multitasking for years before the Amiga came out.
It had C, Pascal, Fortran, Cobol, Forth, BASIC and who know how many other languages before the ST or Amiga existed.
BASIC-09 compiled to i-code (another P-Code) and ran much faster than UCSD/Apple Pascal.
Mainframes had a BASIC that is almost identical and several companies caught on they could use CoCo 3's as development boxes for their mainframe.
OS-9 had an existing range of business apps. There were word processors, accounting packages, databases and Dynacalc which was as good spreadsheet as on any machine at the time.

With OS-9 it's easy to support 3.5" double sided drives or hard drives. Due to the way the CoCo's DOS was designed, it's also pretty easy to move a lot of games to a hard drive under CoCoDOS.

In the hands of the right coder, you could probably make the CoCo 3 run a lot of the games from the ST and Amiga with little or no speed loss.
Even with only 64 colors it could come pretty close to the graphics of the ST.
The fast interrupt of the 6809 + the programmable interrupt timer lets you duplicate just about any sound the other computers or video games can make.

CoCoSID pretty much proves that but you'd probably use strait samples to use less CPU time than CoCoSID.

If you compare the CoCo 3 to the early Mac, the CoCo 3 came with just as much RAM and it had applications that were almost exact copies of MacPaint and MacWrite called CoCoMAX and Max-10. You could even use the APIs to create your own applications with a license. Too bad they never added that interface to Dynacalc.
There are a couple videos about CoCoMAX on youtube but they only show the CoCo version rather than the CoCo 3 version so it's running at 1/2 speed of the CoCo 3 version and at a lower resolution. The CoCo 3 actually supported higher horizontal resolution than the original Mac. Mac was 512x342 and the CoCo 3 supported up to 640x225. Documents were often scrolled up and down so the lower vertical resolution wouldn't be much of an issue and the CoCo 3 could support color at lower res, something the Mac couldn't do.

I'd never expect the CoCo 3 to outsell the Mac, but if people had actually gotten to see that, the Mac wouldn't look so special. The CoCo 3 was also almost 1/10th the price of the Mac.

Edited May 4, 2015 by JamesD

[random_rodder]

The CoCo 3 was quite capable when it came to MIDI. While not having MIDI hardware built in, there were a number of MIDI adapters which made it possible to connect the CoCo to a plethora of MIDI devices, and semi-recent developments (DriveWire 4) really show off what it could do. Bill Pierce wrote a software package called SoundChaser which utilized DriveWire 4's ability to connect to a PC and use the MIDI hardware on the PC to play MIDI music. I did a review a few years back, here's the video. My favorite has to be Enter Sandman by Metallica.

 

Bill also has a number of MP3 files featuring CoCo3 MIDI music, and Bill's own performance on guitars on his webpage, available here. While I'm sure many of the computers of the day could and can perform similar tasks, I think it's unfair to suggest that any one computer (ST or other) was the 'king' of MIDI music.

[random_rodder]

The Amiga was in a class by it's own; the video toaster was reminiscent of modern technology, ushered it in.

 

ST didn't have many support chips for it's 68k; 6809+GIME did pretty well against it graphics wise - both machines have awesome versions of Gauntlet but the CoCo3's version edges out the ST IMO due to the GIME. OS was also much better on the 3 with OS-9. ST had the midi market though, the 3 just had that same DAC.

 

The Amiga was definitely an excellent machine. I have no idea if it's true or not, but, I had heard the Amiga with video toaster was responsible for the CGI animation used on Star Trek: Voyager. I've never had an Amiga, but, would LOVE to get my hands on one at some point and add it to my collection.

[random_rodder]

The Tandy 1000EX (at nearly 4X the price of a coco3) would be a better comparison.

 

I would tend to disagree with this. The 1000 line was a more PC compatible (and successful) version of the PC Jr. I don't think anyone would consider the Jr. competition for an Amiga. While the EX's footprint was similar to an Amiga 500, 600 and 1200, I don't think the 7.16 MHz 8088 based architecture with CGA graphics (not much different from the CoCo 3's graphics) was sufficiently comparable to the Amiga line.

[Turbo-Torch]

The TGA graphics displayed far more colors than CGA and the built in sound was much better than a standard PC. The processor speed was over 7 mhz, similar to an Amiga. It also had a real keyboard and included a floppy drive. Most importantly, look at what the software selection was like back then for an Amiga, PC compatible Tandy and then the unknown Coco3.

 

Sorry, but the comparisons of a 1.7 mhz/128K Coco3 to something like an Amiga reminds me of the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon game.

[random_rodder]

I'm not saying either one were comparable to the Amiga, feature by feature. And I certainly never suggested the internal DAC of the CoCo 3 was comparable to the Amiga sound hardware or even the 1000EX. What I WILL say is the CoCo 3 is better compared to the 1000EX than the 1000EX is to the Amiga. As JamesD already stated, Tandy made many shortcuts on the way to the CoCo 3 - it could have been far more capable than it was/is. It was and is a very powerful 8-bit computer, and a talented coder can make it do amazing things, at speeds that equal or exceed the 8088's of the day.

[JamesD]

I'm not saying either one were comparable to the Amiga, feature by feature. And I certainly never suggested the internal DAC of the CoCo 3 was comparable to the Amiga sound hardware or even the 1000EX. What I WILL say is the CoCo 3 is better compared to the 1000EX than the 1000EX is to the Amiga. As JamesD already stated, Tandy made many shortcuts on the way to the CoCo 3 - it could have been far more capable than it was/is. It was and is a very powerful 8-bit computer, and a talented coder can make it do amazing things, at speeds that equal or exceed the 8088's of the day.

I remember a benchmark in a magazine that ran the CoCo 1 at high speed with the video disabled and the 6809 benchmarked faster than a 4.77Mhz PC.

 

[JamesD]

When I said the 6809 could hold it's own against the 68000 I did not mean it as fast as a 7 or 8 MHz 68000.

I'm kinda guessing a bit here but the 6809 can run multiple instructions per single 68000 instruction so a 2MHz 6809 might be similar to a 4-5MHz 68000 depending on the code.

The more 16 or 32 bit code you use the bigger the advantage the 68000 has though.

Modern benchmarks are a bit skewed towards 16 or 32 bit support so they don't necessarily reflect the ability to redo some 16 or 32 bit code in a friendlier way to an 8/16 bit CPU like the 6809.

The 6309 might come pretty close to the speed of a 5 or 6 MHz 68000 on 6809 code.
It's prefetch knocks a clock cycle off of most instructions, plus the additional 16 bit instructions, registers, 32 bit support, divide should make a big difference.
After all, a 20% improvement on strait 6809 code alone should mean 25%-30% just by using the additional registers right?
The reduction in register swapping alone should cut the clock cycles and code size quite a bit.

[Bill Loguidice]

The sound is very lacking and the graphics are not comparable. That being said I really like the Coco3 but curious about its competition.

 

As we detail in the book, CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy's Underdog Computer, there were several behind-the-scenes attempts to advance each new model of Color Computer beyond what was ultimately released. Instead, those designs were either scrapped (Deluxe Color Computer) or gimped over what was originally envisioned (Color Computer 3). Tandy management kept the line on a very strict cost-to-profit ratio and that ultimately allowed for little room improving the feature-set.

 

The CoCo 3 was really just the last attempt to keep the CoCo line relevant in the low-end 8-bit space. Their competition for Atari ST's and Amigas was the Tandy 1000 series. Considering the CoCo line lasted from 1980 to roughly 1990, and much of their competition in that time evaporated, it did its job for the company while never blossoming into anything much more.

 

As for the relative value of the CoCo 3, the base unit was certainly a reasonable price, but, by 1987, once you added in a multi-pack interface, disk drive, and RGB monitor, you weren't that far off the price of a basic Amiga 500 setup. With that said, it was a nice upgrade if you were already invested in the CoCo universe, even if some of the line's basic issues, like the poor onboard sound capabilities, weren't addressed.

[The Usotsuki]

If I were going to say the Tandy 1000EX was competing with anything...

 

Apple //c, not Amiga.

[random_rodder]

Maybe in Tandy's view the 1000 line was competition for the Amigas and ST's, I doubt that included the EX and HX models which were seriously compromised when it came to expansion - and lacked most of the technology of the Amiga and ST. Really, any 1000 that ended with an 'X' had a 8088 processor until the RLX, I think. The SL & TL machines would be closer in capability than the 'X' versions of the 1000.

[Joe Stella]

it's fun to say. co co. co co.

[Turbo-Torch]

What I WILL say is the CoCo 3 is better compared to the 1000EX than the 1000EX is to the Amiga.

 

 

I bought an EX brand new and never felt it was seriously compromised other than needing to go aftermarket for a HD kit.

It came standard with twice the memory of the coco3.

Processor was 4X the speed of the coco3...damn near the same as the Amiga.

It had a built in floppy drive on the right side just like the Amiga 500....where did RS hide the floppy drive on the coco3?

It had a built in 90+ key keyboard similar to the Amiga. coco3 has a whopping 57.

I had a choice of 16 color TGA output and built in composite.

It had parallel, RS232 and a 2nd floppy drive port allowing another 5.25" or 3.5" external floppy.

Joystick ports, volume control and headphone jack.

It had one plus expansion port. I added the memory expansion card which brought me to 640K and added two additional ports; which weren't really needed as everything pretty much came standard on it. Also the plus expansion port was ISA and an adapter would allow a standard HD controller. An aftermarket 32mb RLL HD kit was only about $150 more than a disk drive 0 kit for the coco.

 

If the EX and HX were seriously compromised and lacking technology, then the coco3 was the equivalent of a pet rock.

 

it could have been far more capable than it was/is.

 

 

This entire thread has been coulda, shoulda, woulda.

The Aquarius could have blown away an A4000T had Mattel not taken so many shortcuts, shut down video when benchmarking and spread some chicken bones around it.

[random_rodder]

I said all along the CoCo 3 wasn't really competition to the Amiga - hell, a lot of CoCo game developers (Nick Marentes being one) used the Amiga to draw sprites for their games. So I'm not even going to address the Amiga comparisons.

 

TGA Graphics in the 1000 EX:

 

CGA compatible modes:

• 160×100 16 color mode
• 320x200 in 4 colors from a 16 color hardware palette. Pixel aspect ratio of 1:1.2.
• 640×200 in 2 colors. Pixel aspect ratio of 1:2.4
• 40×25 with 8×8 pixel font text mode(effective resolution of 320×200)
• 80×25 with 8×8 pixel font text mode(effective resolution of 640×200)

In addition to the CGA modes, it offers:

• 160x200 with 16 colors
• 320x200 with 16 colors
• 640x200 with 4 colors

 

_____________________________________

 

CoCo 3 graphics:

• Output to a composite video monitor or analog RGB monitor, in addition to the CoCo 1 and 2's TV output. This did much to improve the clarity of its output.
• A paged memory management unit broke up the 6809's 64 kB address space into 8 × 8 kB chunks. Although these chunks were considered to be too large by many programmers, the scheme would later allow third party RAM upgrades of up to 2 MB (256 × 8 kB).
• Text display with real lowercase at 32, 40, or 80 characters per line and between 16 and 24 lines per screen.
• Text character attributes, including 8 foreground and 8 background colors, underline, and blink.
• Graphics resolutions: 320 x 192 x 4; 320 x 192 x 16; 640 x 192 x 2; 640 x 192 x 4; 640 x 200 & 640 x 225 - I think the colors for these modes are 2 or 4...
• Up to 16 simultaneous colors from a palette of 64, depending on graphics mode.

No, not a huge difference between the 1000 EX and the CoCo 3 here...

Yes, the CoCo 3 came with 128k, expandable to 512k via Radio Shack and up to 2MB thru third party vendors like Disto. Disk drives and hard drives were available as well, and the CoCo line already had j/s and other ports as well as an expansion port on the side. The stock CoCo, regardless of the model, was never an audio powerhouse. Using sampled sounds, one could make a very complete game (Eric Critchlow's Gold Runner 2000 and Roger Taylor's Jeweled come to mind). You COULD buy an add-on pack, such as the Speech and Sound Pak to bolster the audio in software, but, not much was ever done with these paks, and you needed an MPI to use it with a disk system - certainly increasing the total cost of the CoCo system. The CoCo did lack a true RS-232 port. A number of hardware hacks were devised to add the capability internally, usually under OS-9. Or you could buy a serial to parallel adapter and plug it into the bit banger port.

JamesD already addressed the CPU differences and each one's capabilities. I'll add to his comment about the benchmark, though. I remember that as well as an article in Computer Shopper (I think) in the late '80's discussing machine language programming. It stated that moving from a PC to a CoCo was like getting out of a Pinto and climbing into a Ferrari. It was easier to code for and, and the code would execute faster. I'll let historians and programmer argue that one.

All of this is completely off-topic from the OP, though. No, I do not believe the CoCo 3 was a true competitor to the Amiga or ST. My other opinion still stand, though, as I've seen nothing in my 30+ years of working with computers to convince me that the entry level EX/HX were far superior at anything, except running MS/DOS software. Of course, that's my opinion, everyone else is entitled to theirs...