John_L

I think you misunderstand how it works, with the software, it creates a virtual drive on the pc. For the composite mod, look here: http://sparksandflames.com/g35.html

Yep

Best Buy is going under themselves. Best Buy is essentially Amazon's display case. People go to Best Buy to get hands on with an item, then go home and buy it cheaper on Amazon and have it in 2 or 3 days at a much cheaper price. Best Buy isn't going to last very long either. As for Radio Shack, they are a victim of the changing times. Years ago, you could go into Radio Shack, buy quality electronics, and if you ever needed service, you could drop off the unit, and Radio Shack would ship it, service it, and return it to your neighborhood store for you to pick up when it was done. This was very convenient when you considered that you had to pay for shipping both ways, and wait weeks longer to get equipment serviced for the major brand names. You also paid a premium when you bought the device because they alone offered this service. Also, they were the first to market with a home computer, and had the distribution system and servicing capabilities for computers as well. Over the years, as electronics continued to shrink, servicing became less needed as the electronics started becoming so cheap, when it broke, you tossed it, and bought a new one. Servicing equipment wasn't as needed or desired. So with the loss of the servicing business, they started servicing anything your dragged in, which destroyed the advantage of buying their brand name, and computers became such a low profit margin item due to competition from cheap PC makers that they sold off their computer factories and exited the computer biz entirely. They've always been a conservative company, and were late getting established on the web, which didn't help much, and they've tried to prop up the business by being a cellular dealer for all the major cellphone service providers, but there's tons of dealers like that out there, so while that helped, it's not carrying the business. They're also a victim being looked at like "Dad's" electronics store while the younger generation has looked elsewhere. Their recent Superbowl ad reflects that as they've attempted to re-image themselves as new and hip in a bid to attract younger users, but most younger users either get their phones through their parents, who generally go through the carrier directly, or buy prepaid crap in ghetto dealer shops that sell blunts, t-shirts and bongs. They've been on life support for the last few years, and they're going to run out of money soon. Their management is clueless at this point with what to do, their new boss wanted to re-image the stores and close a bunch of stores, but that's far too costly as re-imagine costs money, and closing stores involves buying out leases and shipping stock to other stores, so closing stores is more costly than one would think. I think several years of bad management, and not finding ways to keep up with the times as their old core businesses became obsolete or unprofitable is why they're on the verge of collapse. I've already accepted that they're done. I'm just waiting for the doctor to come out, shake his head, and say I'm sorry, but they're gone. Back in my day, we were business professionals, wore ties, and knew what we were doing, knew the product line, etc. A few years back, while servicing some DJ equipment for a friend I stopped in to buy about $40 worth of pieces parts that I needed, and the guy behind the counter offered to sell me the stuff cheaper if I didn't need a receipt. I told him I was doing work for a client and needed to produce a receipt for him, but the reality was that I was incensed that he was attempting to rip off the store. I knew the district manager from when I worked for Radio Shack years before, plus I grew up down the street from him, so I called him and gave him a heads up. Never saw that guy again...lol. It's too bad, because as a kid, I used to go there with my dad to test tubes when our tv took a shit, and as a young adult, I worked for both Radio Shack and Radio Shack computer centers. I cut my computing teeth on a Model I and Color Computer 2 and 3, and have many fond memories as both a kid and adult. So, it's tough as I have memories that stretch back over many years, and it's sad to see they were so poorly managed the last 20 years or so that they're all but done at this point.

Google is only going to have what's out there on the net. Google indexes the web, not supply information. If there's not alot on Google, there's just not much info on the web. Have you tried the publisher's website? Often times these days they offer up PDF versions of old magazines at a nominal cost.

I'm not saying it wasn't stylish looking, and I only had experience with a real physical unit once helping the kid of a friend of my parents. The unit was extremely small, and any computer keyboard is incomplete without a backspace key. Having to hit a meta key + another key for a function used as often as backspace was ridiculous, and I burned the shit out of my hand because I unknowingly touched the hot plate next to the keyboard. I don't mean to say it wasn't stylish looking, it was, but overall it was too small, the keyboard lacked keys, and you could burn yourself if you weren't aware of the coffee warmer. The computer did have a nice processor, but at the same time, it was poorly supported by TI. But, on the case of looks, it was stylish

I'll take a backspace key over style anyday.

I think you guys are misunderstanding 4 track tape decks. Back before we had digital, we had multi-track tape recording. Typically, in a commercial setting, professionals would work with systems that had up to 48 tracks. In the early 80's when technology permitted, 4 track decks were produced for commercial use. You could record up to 4 mono tracks on a standard cassette tape. We would typically use the highest quality tapes we could find as they produced the best results. The way it was used was you would record up to 3 tracks, then you could "bounce" tracks 2 through 4 to track on to track one. You could repeat this process, but only once or twice totally bounces as each bounce introduced noise and the quality would deteriorate quickly. When you were done, you would bounce 2 tracks to one output, and two tracks to another, and record those 2 outputs on a normal stereo recording tape deck. Technically, you could use all 4 separate tracks to record data, and either manually hook up one output to the computer tape input, but I doubt it would work reliably if at all. @ed1475... all regular mono tape decks have two tracks (one per side), the thing that was different about the Adam's tape was that it ran at higher speeds than normal tapes. Other than that, it's a typical mono tape deck.

It's interesting to note how modern games that entertain millions and earn as much, like flappy bird, angry birds, bejeweled, and candy crush can not only be faithfully recreated on a Color Computer 3, but done so without the 3 even breaking into a sweat.

I've actually been to that site a long time ago.. it's hilarious, the guy has a great sense of humor.

Color Baseball was the baseball game, it was good, and it played better with the deluxe joysticks too. Perhaps Dungeons of Daggorath was the 3D game...? There's also a PC port available online for download for free if interested in playing.

That's the original Color Computer. It was a larger form factor than the CoCo 2 and 3 and had the difficult to use "chicklet" keyboard. The joystick you're referring to was the better model joystick that was sold. There was a black model with a big red button on the forward face and had a silver joystick. The "Color Computer Deluxe Joystick" was quite a bit better and could be toggled between staying where you placed the joystick and "snap to center" by holding the joystick in the lower right and flipping some tabs on the bottom. Looked like this:

That's an image of a Color Computer 3 as displayed on a Color Computer 3. You're probably thinking about the Tandy 1000 EX which had a form factor similar to the CoCo 2/3....

TRS-80 did stand for Tandy/Radio Shack, and the 80 was referencing the Z80 in their first computers, but "TRS-80" became the brand name, so other computers like the Color Computer, MC-10, even the pocket computer carried the TRS-80 moniker. Once the PCs came along, and Tandy was in line jockeying for a position as a major PC maker, they drifted away from "TRS-80" and even "Radio Shack" to separate it from the home market and present a name more in line with the business market they were looking to be a big player in. Somewhere around 1983ish when the CoCo 2 hit was when the transition began, and eventually, even the descendant Model 4D and 4P computers as well as the arc of the Model II line, the Tandy 6000, all carried the Tandy name. BTW, if you ever owned an AST computer, that's who Tandy sold their computer factories to when they exited the PC biz.

The Matra & Hachette Alice was a clone produced by Tandy and marketed in France by Matra & Hatchette. It's my understanding that it did well there. There were also two follow ups, the Alice 32 and Alice 90, also, there's a super rare Alice 8000, only 250 units were produced in a test production run, many of which were destroyed, only a handful were given away to a school. The 8000 was an 8088 based computer, and it never went into full production... talk about a rare bird... By 1984, the Color Computer (white model) was still hanging on with a $400 64k Extended Basic version, but the Color Computer 2 (16k Color Basic) was much cheaper at $240. With the MC-10 selling for $120, the Color Computer 2 was double the price... but, double $120 is still only $240, which was still quite cheap and consumers were willing to pay $240 for a home computer, especially one that was alot more powerful and expandable. Also, for comparison, An MC-10 with the $50 RAM expansion ran $170 which is only $70 cheaper than a 16k CoCo 2 with Color Basic. For the extra $70 bucks, you got something comparable to the MC-10, but you had expansion options for extended color basic and disk drives, the multipak interface as well as other peripherals, not to mention a keyboard you could type on. Therefore, as neat as the MC-10 was, the $70 price gap between the CoCo 2 and the MC-10 was not a big burden to bear to get such a better system.

That's the CoCo for ya... when it needed to compute, it really stepped up to the plate. Other systems had faster processors, but at the end of the day, the CoCo would out perform those systems. I think it's a testament to how well the 6809/6853/6847 chipset was made by Motorola. Also, when chipsets are made, the chip maker would generally provide a sample layout of a typical system. I can't say for sure, but Tandy probably followed Motorola's sample pretty closely, and I think that's why the system performed so well. Motorola was good at designing efficient designs that allowed the system to perform so well, even when other systems had faster CPUs. CPU clock speeds are only part of the equation.

It was the same in the respect that you could hit control+key to get the machine to print the entire keyword, but in the case of the MC-10, you could go either way. You could type out the keyword manually along with the rest of the program, or use control+key, but on the Sinclair, you HAD to enter keywords with control+key. It also had this incredibly stupid cursor setup. The cursor was either an L, a K or a G. If it was an L, that meant you could hit control+key to basic statements, if it was a K you could type letters at will, and if it was a G the keys would produce graphical symbols. All these stupid modes were confusing, especially for a beginner, not only that, a cursor should be a cursor, and that's it, not a "mode" indicator.

I don't think Tandy really did anything to prevent the MC-10 from competing with the CoCo, I think all decisions were based on cost because it was in that "super cheap" category. The short life of these machines was due to the fact that the consumers, as a whole, settled on a $200-$300 price point which killed the sub $100 market.

I seriously doubt that one could type in a program quicker using the keyword entry. You still have to type in the data that goes along with it.. for example PRINT "This is a long sentence that would have to be typed letter by letter on the Sinclair with the exception of the PRINT statement" Typed on a Sinclair, you would use the keyword function to enter the print statement, then manually type the rest. If keyword entry was so great, why didn't everyone incorporate that function. Why, because those computers had better keyboards. The keyword function was there to help with the crappy keyboard, and that's it, it wasn't done because it was faster, it was done because it was a bit easier. I doubt too that it had anything to do with saving memory, I figured it would have taken about 1/2k with the lookup table and code, so maybe it was done to save memory, but I doubt it.

It's funny, because you're talking about some of the lesser software written for the CoCo. Dungeons of Daggorath was a cool first person game where you fought various monsters in a quest to kill The Wizard, and speaking of 3D, Rescue on Fractulus was pretty cool as was Sub Battle Simulator which ran under OS 9. There were also a couple of Kings Quest adventures that were huge Sierra software hits. Although the titles you mentioned were fun games, they were pretty simplistic compared to other software that was written later on.

Can't even really say "IBM compatible" anymore since IBM doesn't make desktops, and hasn't for a long time. Eventually "Wintel" sort of won out with Microsoft and Intel driving the market, and at that, not even that is a big deal. Windows based PC sales have been flat while Apple is enjoying 30 percent increases in sales compared to years past. The behemoth iPhone has carried so much weight, alot of PC users are buying Macs these days because the huge software base that MS-DOS, then Windows had isn't as big a deal anymore. People "realize" these days why they own a computer. Back then, people bought one because everyone else was buying one, so gee, better get one too, even though they had less of an idea what to do with it back then. Now, people have "grown up" with computers, and know what they want out of them, and you can get it Weather you're running Linux, Windows, OS X, or whatever. The Amiga is starting what could become a big comeback for them, Apple is selling Macs hand over fist, and a good number of people fed up with Microsoft run Linux. Microsoft is loosing their grip on the market. They had a big piece of the mobile market before Apple came along and scooped it out from under them. One bright spot is that MS did a good job with WIndows Phone OS. Windows Mobile sucked, and although it took a few years, they did ok with it. Unfortunately for them, it didn't translate into the PC market very well because they wrote a touch screen interface for people who own mice, and WIn 8 sucks.

Back in 1980 when IBM released the IBM PC, it was the calling card everyone was waiting for. IBM was virtually synonymous with computers before the home computer revolution hit, therefore, the general public was sort of waiting for IBM to jump in the game because they figured IBM, if anyone, knew computers better. In certain respects, that was true, but the home computer was alot different than big huge mainframes, and in reality, The early companies like Tandy, Apple, and Commodore were miles ahead of IBM. IBM put out a workhorse, because that's what they were used to doing, but as a personal computer, it sucked, and took the better part of 7 years before architecture matured to the point where it was a decent computer, and another 7 or 8 years before graphics and sound fully developed. What this did was kill the likes of Commodore, who had an amazing computer with the Amiga line, Tandy with their I/III/IV, II/12,16, and Color Computer line, and the lower end of Apple's line. The only survivor still made today is the Macintosh line(s). My big disappointment was seeing the death of all these other systems. There was a worry that when IBM finally released a PC that it would take over the market weather it was a good machine or not, and that's what eventually happened. I wonder what would have been if the sleeping elephant hadn't rolled over.and these other systems would have been allowed to mature.

Are you using a modern monitor, or the one that originally came with the unit?

Emulate

Yep, the MC-10 is most certainly a "cousin" to the CoCo line. The device can do full "PMODE 4" graphics as long as you have the memory, the VDG register at $FF22 is located at $BFFF on the MC-10, other than that, the operation of the MC6847 VDG is identical to the coco as far as modes go, I'd assume even all the semi graphics are there as well, but I've not looked. The BASIC essentially covers the "Level I" BASIC in the CoCo (and others). No high res commands, no music functions, etc. Although the processors are not byte compatible, one could assume the '09 shares some DNA with the 6803. Luckily, there's an active community of users and developers making stuff for it, also, some guy out there has a working board that enables floppy usage, last I checked he was working on the dos extensions. Hopefully he's basing it on RSDOS. Would be cool to have at least a floppy drive for storage, although not sure why he wasn't going the flash memory route. Anyway, better than just cassette. BTW, that was me that posted recently about the MC-10, I just bought one, but need a power adapter for it, it's sitting for now.