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JamesD

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Posts posted by JamesD

  3. Posted · Edited by JamesD

    11 hours ago, rietveld said:

    You have to go, you will love it.

     

    My normal (pre Covid) routine was Cocofest and VCF East in the spring and VCF MidWest and Tandy Assembly in the fall.  Coincidently Cocofest and VCF MidWest are both in Chicago Land and are only a few miles aopart.  I stay at the same Motel for both in Naperville

    Well, my current job kinda requires I work when there's work, so it's difficult to get away, and the guys I work with have integrated me with their plans for a new company which could keep me very busy.
    If I go I'd probably drive and some of us could car pool.  There's at least 3 of us that would be along the same route.

    VCF MidWest might actually appeal to me more since I "play" with several old computers. 
    Atari, Apple II, Plus/4...
    I've even ported some BASIC to the C64.  I felt dirty afterwards but I did it. :D

  4. Posted

    The first one I saw was a Model I at a county fair in the commercial building.
    It must have been 1977,  so it would have just been released.
    I just remember it was rolling dice to see if you won a battery.
    It just printed the numbers you rolled, but I was fascinated by it.
    The guy said you could write your own software, and then he listed the program.
     

    • Like 1

  5. Posted

    On 2/14/2021 at 2:23 AM, Technical-Chap said:

    Hi everyone,

     

    I have been playing with a new purchase of an Tandy MC-10 PAL, I have the machine working and the 16K RAM pack, but wanted to get the VDG working with the higher resolutions modes, this requires you adding more memory internally. As I could not find anything on the web about doing this to the PAL version, I took the NTSC and and copied that. Now the only thing I can't find is were you need to change the VA12 line to line VA13 to allow the BASIC to see the extra 4K I have added. You will recall the Tandy had to make a mod to stop the BASIC from seeing more memory then was fitted, as it did not decode the address lines fully. But it looks as if on the PAL versions the MOD has been added to the motherboard. I have not been able to find a schematic for the PAL version or been able to trace were it might be on the motherboard. Any help would be gratefully accepted.

    Pictures of before and after MOD:

    ...

    Just be aware the original published mod for NTSC machines had a bug.  Some changes were published, and I think they are on Discord, maybe in a facebook group as well. 
     

  7. Posted

    On 11/20/2020 at 12:42 AM, carlsson said:

    If Tandy made the MC-10 more like a cut-down but compatible CoCo, it may have affected sales of those. That is always a difficult line to draw, does a system benefit or suffer if a cheaper model that mostly is compatible is released. I suppose the closest comparison I can make is the Acorn Electron which to some degree is a cut-down BBC Micro but I'm not sure it was priced to really undercut the competition. The Commodore 116 was intended to be very cheap and in the end was rather affordable but just like with the MC-10, it differs enough from e.g. the C64 to not being a compatible alternative.

    With no extended BASIC (not even an ELSE statement, some missing COLOR BASIC functions), no compatibility with the existing software library, and no floppy drive, I'm not sure how it could be much of a threat. 
    Saving/loading BASIC to/from ASCII would have let MC-10 owners a more clear migration path, and hi-res support would have at least made it a more viable product.
     

  8. Posted

    I haven't been on here since... November maybe. 
    Facebook is will get most of the announcements, but discord is where any technical discussion and live chatting with other CoCo fans goes on.

    • Like 1

  10. Posted

    3 hours ago, Bill Loguidice said:

    Absolutely. Our respective comments were about some people still preferring them today. There are few restrictions - other than self-imposed ones - like that today. Color is readily available if you want it.

    To clarify what I meant... it was some people's first exposure to computers, so they go mono out of nostalgia.

     

    • Like 1

  11. Posted

    On 11/20/2020 at 10:44 AM, Bill Loguidice said:

    I honestly never understood the monochrome preference when using an Apple II either, but it's definitely out there with some. Color is always better to me, even if the colors are usually not that great like in the case of the Apple II. People definitely use that as a reason, though. That, and the aforementioned nostalgia. I know when I was first exposed to Apple II's, it was with green monochrome monitors. With the Apple II portion of my collection these days, I'm strictly color.

     

    A pseudo-exception for me is I tend to prefer the monochrome displays of the classic Macs over the color ones, because that feels more like early Mac to me, and kind of reaching as an exception, much prefer the black and white monitors on the TRS-80 Model III's/4's versus the green or amber. 

    Color monitors were expensive back in the day so people bought mono, especially schools which were a lot of people's first exposure to computers.

     

    • Like 1

  12. Posted

    21 hours ago, Keatah said:

    If we can discuss software for a moment or as a natural progression of the thread, then, I would vote recipe keeping software. Along with checkbook balancing and early cataloging/database programs for inventory. Maybe even automotive repair records too.

     

    A lot of that type of software was more trouble than it was worth. Disk access (except for Apple II) was slow. And text menus we cumbersome because the industry hadn't had much UI experience for the layperson. Things were cryptic. The whole shebang was just tedious compared against the traditional file box and ledger.

     

    And yet there was an endless supply of these programs and advertisements for them.

     

    The complete opposite would be word processing. Granted there were hundreds of them in the 8-bit era and ONE of them was bound to fit your workflow and style of aesthetics. Most all of them did their job reasonably well.

    Add gas mileage trackers, biorhythm programs, astrology programs, lottery number pickers, loan amortization, etc... to that list.
    Yeah, there are people that would find some of that useful, but there were free versions of every one of those.

  15. Posted

    5 hours ago, jhd said:

     

    I had a Coco and a buddy of mine had an MC-10. He wrote this massive game that he wanted to share. We assumed that the two systems were generally compatible and, indeed, the cassette tape loaded just fine on my system. We were both tragically disappointed to discover that BASIC was tokenized differently. and so the program would not run.  

     

    This is a small change that could have made the MC-10 so much more useful, and created a logical upgrade path to the Coco.  

     

    At the very least, it needed to be able to save/load BASIC programs in ASCII like the CoCo can.
     

  19. Posted

    On 11/10/2020 at 5:33 PM, Bruce Tomlin said:

    The MC-10 was Tandy's ZX-81. Except even Tandy couldn't bring themselves to make something crappy enough to compete with Sinclair.

    Pretty sad when a power switch becomes a feature. :P
    The MC-10 has color, sound, it's a lot faster, etc... so it didn't have to compete directly with the ZX on price, it just had to be in the neighborhood of the magic $100 that people liked.
    A handful of changes would have made it a much better machine, many of which would have cost nothing, and the better changes might have cost under $5 in Tandy's quantities.
    Don't get me wrong, it's a cool little computer that runs rings around the TS-1000/ZX-81, and it's BASIC even benchmarks well against 1MHz 6502 machines out of the box.
     

    • Like 1

  21. Posted

    On 11/9/2020 at 11:26 PM, Keatah said:

    As a child I vaguely understood the implications of that - loading a language onto the 16K Microsoft Ramcard.. I initially used that 16K for Integer Basic. I became uber impressed when DOS could be put up there, thus opening up new avenues for BIGGER BBS stuff. And totally blown away when it could be converted into a small ramdisk.

     

    BTW: Did COBOL ever become available on the Apple II series? Or any other 8-bit micro of the day? TRS-80 perhaps?

    The Apple language system was really a port of the UCSD Pascal P-Machine.
    That had COBOL, Modula-2, ADA (I think), and maybe even more languages.  Not sure if any were made to work on the Apple.
    COBOL was available for the TRS-80 Model I, II, III, etc... business-ish systems, and the Color Computer via OS-9, and or Flex.
    I *think* I remember seeing an add for a COBOL for the Apple II, but... not 100% sure of that.

  23. Posted

    FWIW, Commodore supposedly sold around 7 million C128s, so it's one of the top selling 8 bits of all time.
    The CoCo 3 has a lot of software that doesn't run on the original CoCo, and it was on the market for 5 years. 
    The 8 bit market lasted around 15 years, so the CoCo 3 was on the market a full 1/3 of that time.
    With both of these machines, I think a lot of the unique software was more on the business side of things rather than games.

    The ADAM, is an interesting design mess. 
    The high speed serial buss (ADAM NET) and the fast tape drive had potential, but the machine was just too expensive to produce, and too buggy to be competitive.
    The MSX was fairly successful using the same graphics, so it's not like the ADAM didn't have a chance.
     

  25. Posted

    9 hours ago, Mr SQL said:

    No I meant the subscription software model from the 80's where you could actually buy a subscription to some of the larger computer magazines on Tape or Disk for specific home computers as well as from vendors who specialized in subscription software.

     

    You would receive a new tape or disk every month full of programs, including quality games and utilities.

     

    Because these vendors had no printing press overhead and only the cost of mailing a cheap Disk or slightly more expensive cassette these early subscription models had the room to pay programmers better fees or royalties generally resulting in higher quality games than the magazines.

     

    I subscribed to a cassette only magazine called Chromasette for a year.
    As a bonus, they included a complete accounting system written in BASIC.
    There were quite a few good programs, but quality varied a lot.

    • Like 2
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