Negative Space: Color Computer
- 8 (bit) Days of Christmas
- Eight holiday images created on the TRS-80 Color Computer, from the early to mid eighties.
- 8 (bit) Days of Christmas: Day 0 (Go Tell It On the CoCo!)
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Day 0 of the 8 (bit) days of Christmas. Christmas Eve, and the cattle are lowing.
- 8 (bit) Days of Christmas: Day 1 (Do You Hear What I Hear?)
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For day 1 of the 8 (bit) days of Christmas, John Mosley’s “Do You Hear What I Hear?” from the December, 1987, Rainbow Magazine. Mosley coaxes four-voice music out of the CoCo 1 and 2 using a machine-language program.
- 8 (bit) Days of Christmas: Day 10 (Up on the Rooftop)
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In the December 1986 Rainbow, J. D. German presented us with this game, involving flying and landing Santa to deliver presents!
- 8 (bit) Days of Christmas: Day 100 (Hearth)
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Lower resolution graphics were more appropriate for animation, because you could page through up to eight screens like a flip book. This is Eugene Vasconi’s Holiday Hearth from December 1986.
- 8 (bit) Days of Christmas: Day 101 (Rudolph)
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An early form of musical ebook, without scenes illustrating the progress of the song—in this case, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Along with the secret world of POKE.
- 8 (bit) Days of Christmas: Day 11 (O Christmas Tree)
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Day 11 of the 8 (bit) days of Christmas is the graphic accompaniment to “O Tannenbaum” from Robert T. Rogers “Holly Jolly Holidays”, from December 1984.
- 8 (bit) Days of Christmas: Day 110 (Snowman)
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Day 110 of the 8 (bit) days of Christmas is Arron Branigan’s snowman, from December 1986. One of the strangest features of home computers of the era, including the TRS-80 Color Computer, was the use of “artifact colors” to produce more colors than were supposedly possible on the machine.
- 8 (bit) Days of Christmas: Day 111 (Dual Greeting Card)
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Day 111 of the 8 (bit) days of Christmas is Joseph Kohn’s dual greeting card, from December 1984. How do you create text on a graphics screen that doesn’t accept the PRINT statement?
- BASIC tokenization examined
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Why do old BASIC programs have strange characters in their .BAS files? Why do they look like they’re compiled code?
- CoCoFest! 2021
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Forty years later, I finally make it to CoCoFest!
- Color Computer binaries from decimal values
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I ran across a really nice Galaxian/Space Invaders-style program that used decimal data in DATA statements to POKE the program into memory. So I updated cocobin to handle that, too.
- Convert PCBASIC code to TRS-80 Extended Color BASIC
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If you have a book of code written in PCBASIC, it usually isn’t hard to convert it to other Microsoft BASICs, such as on the TRS-80 Color Computers.
- Hunt the Wumpus: Conditional code and include files in SuperBASIC
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Hunt the Wumpus can talk to you if you have a speech synthesizer.
- New, improved rcheck+ for Rainbow Magazine code
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I’ve added several features to rcheck, including verifying the checksum against an expected checksum, and providing possible reasons for checksum discrepancies.
- Radio Shack advertises the Color Computer vs. the Model III
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This Radio Shack ad, from the January 1981 creative computing is a good example of their strange ideas about what would sell.
- Rainbow Magazine BASIC program preflight tool
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This script takes 32-character lines typed in from Rainbow Magazine BASIC listings and assembles them together into full BASIC lines, doing some rudimentary error-checking along the way.
- Rainbow Magazine preflight tool enhanced
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I’ve added several features to the Rainbow Magazine preflight tool, including a check for references to line numbers that don’t exist.
- Read BASIC out loud
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Reading BASIC out loud is a great tool for verifying that what you’ve typed in from an old-school magazine or book is correct.
- Reversi in SuperBASIC on the Color Computer
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One of the ubiquitous games of the early computer era was reversi. Very simple rules, very simple board, very complex play. It’s easy to see why it was so popular.
- Simple game menu for the Color Computer 2 with CoCoSDC
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This simple menu provides one screen for cartridges saved in the CoCoSDC’s flash ROM, and any number of screens for your favorite games for your friends to play.
- SuperBASIC for the TRS-80 Color Computer
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Make BASIC Fun Again. Use loops, switches, and subroutines while writing Extended Color BASIC code for the Radio Shack Color Computer.
- The TRS-80 Color Computer 2
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The TRS-80/Tandy Color Computer 2 is a fascinating bit of computer history. It was the direct ancestor of the first inexpensive home Unix-like computer, the Color Computer 3.
- TRS-80 Color Computer Programming Tools
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The TRS-80 Color Computer was a fascinating implementation of the 6809 computer chip, and was, from the Color Computer 1 through 3, possibly the longest-running of the old-school personal computers.
- TRS-80 Color Computer RCHECK+ in Perl
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I much prefer to use a modern keyboard and modern windows to type in programs. But Rainbow’s RCHECK+ was too useful to give up. This script will run RCHECK+ on a text file in the macOS Terminal or any Linux/Unix command line.
- What are the 8 bits in 8-bit computing?
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Retro computing is often called 8-bit computing. This is because the bytes that these computers use are composed of eight bits, and much of what the computer does is operating on these individual bits, not on the byte as a whole.
More Information
- CoCo SDC
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Ed Snider and Darren Atkinson’s SD card program pak for the Color Computer 1, 2, and 3 allows you to store all of your code on an SD card, emulating a disk drive so that the DSK files are compatible with any CoCo program that uses disk drives. It is phenomenal.
