Negative Space: The Rainbow magazine
- 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?
- CoCoFest! 2021
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Forty years later, I finally make it to CoCoFest!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
