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CRTGAMER
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Re: Tandy Color Computer - A Brief Introduction

by CRTGAMER Tue Apr 16, 2013 11:34 am

BoneSnapDeez wrote:I realized that I didn't include instructions on how to load a game from a disk (or disk image). Like the C64, the Tandy Color uses some non-intuitive commands - you won't be able to "guess" them on your own.

Does the Tandy have full cursor control? On the Commodores you can arrow move the cursor block ABOVE the command prompt. If the Tandy can do this, maybe a shorthand way to load a game off a multi program disc?

For example, on the Commodore a LOAD"$",8 lists a disk directory on the screen. Follow this by arrowing up to what ever game you want to load and add a LOAD before the game name followed by a ,8: at the end. The colon ignores anything listed to the right. There is also a trick to autorun the load with the RUNSTOP key.
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BoneSnapDeez
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Re: Tandy Color Computer - A Brief Introduction

by BoneSnapDeez Wed Apr 17, 2013 10:40 am

I'm not quite sure CRTGAMER, I'll have to experiment with that. Good tip.

I did learn about the C64 RUNSTOP trick at PAX East this year. I was blown away! :lol:
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by 3703 Thu Apr 18, 2013 1:21 pm

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Last edited by 3703 on Sun May 07, 2023 11:21 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Tandy Color Computer - A Brief Introduction

by BoneSnapDeez Thu Apr 25, 2013 9:49 am

3703 wrote:This is...sensational! Amazing stuff bone


Thanks!

Here's a great website I had planned to link to in my original piece, but it was inexplicably down for some time.

Sock Master's Tandy Color Computer 3 Page

The website designer is a programmer who ported Donkey Kong to the Tandy Color. It's amazing and essentially arcade perfect.

Released in 2007, it looks quite a bit different than the Donkey Kong clones that came out in the early 80s:
Donkey King
Dunkey Munkey
Monkey Kong

Since Donkey Kong is a 2007 homebrew I don't believe there's an official physical release. Though if you're really motivated I suppose you could copy the image onto a blank 5.25" floppy. The disk image is available on the Sock Master's site and functions perfectly in an emulator.
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Re: Tandy Color Computer - A Brief Introduction

by noiseredux Fri Aug 16, 2013 3:54 pm

dood, I can't believe I managed to miss this when you first posted it. EXCELLENT guide, Bone! I had a Tandy 1000 growing up, and have a lot of fond memories playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a Tetris clone, MTV's Remote Control, some golf game and all kinds of weird stuff via that 2 button joystick. Man, we even subscribed to the Tandy magazine which back then would have pages and pages of code for you to type in to program your own games. Good times. :D
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Re: Tandy Color Computer - A Brief Introduction

by BoneSnapDeez Fri Aug 16, 2013 5:47 pm

noiseredux wrote:dood, I can't believe I managed to miss this when you first posted it. EXCELLENT guide, Bone! I had a Tandy 1000 growing up, and have a lot of fond memories playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a Tetris clone, MTV's Remote Control, some golf game and all kinds of weird stuff via that 2 button joystick. Man, we even subscribed to the Tandy magazine which back then would have pages and pages of code for you to type in to program your own games. Good times. :D


Glad you liked it.

I was actually planning to revise and partly re-write this piece sometime once my semester ends. I wrote this during a couple of lunch breaks at work and was never thrilled with it.

The Tandy magazine was pretty cool. I inherited a bunch from a dude last year, but I ended up tossing them because they were smoky as all hell. :?
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Re: Tandy Color Computer - A Brief Introduction

by colorcomputerstore Fri Aug 18, 2017 4:56 pm

Thank you for covering the CoCo.

Ugly grey?

Some people love their battleship grey

Under Color Computer 2, you may want to add that the initial version had a 'melted' keyboard and it was later switched out to a more full-travel design.

Under OS9, might want to add that it was rewritten/released as "NitroOS"

Under joystick, maybe add that there are numerous simple circuits floating around to adapt Atari to CoCo joysticks. Also, there is now a SEGA Genesis to CoCo adapter.

Under games, towards the bottom, maybe it is good to note that there are some SD Card solutions for storing games. Some you can build and some you can buy. They are cheap and strongly recommended.

Also would be cool to mention that there is a CoCo on a Chip using FPGA project (actually, two FPGA projects)

Other tidbits....
* Annual CoCoFest and Tandy Assembly conference
* CoCoCrew Podcast
* Original gamer YouTube Channel
* Facebook group for CoCo

Thank you VERY VERY much for this post !!!!!!
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Re: Tandy Color Computer - A Brief Introduction

by GreenLion Fri Nov 11, 2022 6:30 pm

Thanks, overall a good introduction. But I need to point out a couple of things that would otherwise trip up newcomers.

First, you use the incorrect term “Model 3”, which can lead to confusion between the Tandy Color Computer 3 and the TRS-80 Model III.

The RadioShack TRS-80 Model III, introduced in 1980, was an all-in-one machine that contained the computer, a keyboard with a numeric keypad, a 12-inch black-and-white computer monitor, and slots for two 5¼” floppy disk drives. While it had some limited game capability and some games were sold for it, it was mostly intended as a practical tool for business, education, or home users. Here’s a Model III:
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The Tandy Color Computer 3, introduced in 1986, combined the computer and keyboard into one unit, with any display or disk drive used being separate machines connected via cables.

Here’s a typical CoCo 3 setup:
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Although the two machines were usually compatible with the same hardware peripherals, especially those from RadioShack, such as computer cassette recorders, printers, plotters, modems, external hard disks, and more, they were NOT at all software-compatible owing to having CPUs from completely different hardware families. I would hate for someone to buy a Model III game expecting to be able to run it on a CoCo 3, or vice versa.

The key error is in your use of the term “Model” as part of the computer’s name. While using the word as just a word can be correct, such as “Tandy then released a new model of Color Computer, the CoCo 3”, it is not correct to actually call it the “Model 3”. The word “Model” as part of the actual name of the device is not only not part of the official name of any Color Computer, it was also never even used unofficially by any part of the CoCo community. The word “Model” in the name of a TRS-80 computer can only refer to a computer that is NOT a CoCo.

Second, newcomers, especially those who plan to use the actual physical computers and physical cartridges/tapes/disks, need to know that while the CoCo 3 had greatly improved graphics capabilities and was largely compatible with CoCo 1 and 2 software, there were two major exceptions to this software compatibility which were especially common with games. And I’m talking exceptions that are BEYOND the copy-protection schemes you mentioned.

The first compatibility problem came from a relatively rarely-used mode in CoCo 1/2 games called “semi-graphics mode.” It usually had very low-resolution blocky graphics, but had the advantage of being easy to program, having many colors available, and being able to be interspersed with standard CoCo on-screen text without additional programming effort. It was used most often in the very first years of the CoCo’s existence when available memory was very modest (4K), many programmers were using BASIC rather than having mastered CoCo machine language (although some semi-graphics games used ML), and the full capabilities of the hardware had not yet been fully explored.
"Pac_Tac", a Pac-Man clone:
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"Storm", a Tempest clone:
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"WormTube", an original arcade game somewhat like Defender or Vanguard:
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The Coco 3 simply cannot do this and cannot run these games. It’s a real shame but at least there aren’t too many commercially released games that used this mode in the game itself, perhaps a couple of dozen.

However, even as the 80s rolled on, semi-graphics mode continued to be used a lot, not so much in the actual games, but in their title or intro screens. Again, a shame, but fortunately this time it’s not a total compatibility-breaker. So if you buy and load a game that’s supposed to be CoCo 3 compatible (does not say “CoCo 1/2 only”) and the title screen looks odd or jumbled, check the instructions to see what the program expects you to do to get past that screen (such as typing your name, selecting “1” or “2” on the keyboard for the number of players, etc., and do that to get past the title screen. Then the game should work.

The second compatibility problem came from the fact that even though the CoCo 3 fully supported the original CoCo’s hardware-supported official color sets, those sets were a bit TOO colorful, with color schemes that were not very desirable or useful and were therefore rarely used especially after the first few years of the CoCo.

The first such official colorset had the colors green, yellow, red, and blue, which sounds fine, but the catch is that it had to be on a blazing nuclear/neon-green border and background. This was fairly commonly-used in the first few years of the CoCo, especially by RadioShack itself.
"Lunar Rover Patrol", a Moon Patrol clone:
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"Tennis":
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The second official colorset had a white border and background and the colors white, cyan, magenta and orange. Almost nothing ever looked good in this eye-blearing pastel mode and it was very rarely used by any game publishers.
"Cuber", a Q*Bert clone:
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"Chatwin Manor", an original adventure game:
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"Bagasaurus", an educational title fromthe Children's Computer/Television Workshop which owned Sesame Street:
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Again, these color schemes work with the CoCo 3 with no problem, but programmers, especially those outside RadioShack, and after the first few years of the CoCo, rarely used them.

Instead, the vast majority of CoCo 1 and 2 games use a programmer’s trick called “artifact colors” that take advantage of a quirk of the era’s North American hardware and software to produce what looks, on a TV set (the CoCo 1 and 2 were designed and intended to ONLY use a TV set as their “monitor”), like a much more normal and useful four-color scheme: black, white, red, and blue, with either a black or white background, and in a decently high resolution of 128x192.
"Donkey King", a clone of Donkey Kong:
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"Sailor Man", a clone of Popeye
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But, the trick to produce red and blue this way on a TV set does not work on a CoCo 3 which is (as intended and designed) sending an RGB signal to an RGB monitor. The trick produced red and blue by sending tiny white dots on a black background to the TV set, but on the higher-resolution RGB monitor used by the Coco 3, the result was simply a black-and-white image. I still shake my head that Tandy didn’t bother to include a feature to detect and “translate” this trick into actual red or blue on a CoCo 3 using RGB. This huge oversight forced many CoCo owners into the decision to either have TWO CoCos on their desks with TWO different screens, or to have to give up having color for the majority of their classic CoCo 2 games when played on the CoCo 3. And it’s not like the artifact trick was strictly done by third parties. RadioShack themselves did it with games like "Clowns & Balloons" (a clone of Circus and Circus Atari)
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and with the official port of Zaxxon:
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So, bottom line, your choices are:

One, rely on emulation with a modern PC, avoiding the problem entirely but missing out on the fun of using real hardware.

Two, use a stock CoCo 3 and RGB monitor (like Tandy’s CM-8 which was designed and intended for the CoCo 3) while understanding that semi-graphics games won’t work, semi-graphics intro screens will glitch, and CoCo 1&2 games that use artifact colors (as the VAST majority did) will be in black-and-white.

Three, use a CoCo 3 that is somehow hacked or modified to overcome the above problem.

Four, as you mentioned, get BOTH a CoCo 2 outputting to a TV set AND a CoCo 3 outputting to an RGB monitor. You’ll either also have to get duplicate disk drives and perhaps multi-pak add-ons, or in a very cumbersome fashion disconnect your only multi-pack and disk drive from the CoCo 2 to connect it to the CoCo 3 when you want to play CoCo 3 games, and vice versa.

I don’t want to sound like a downer! The CoCo was a great machine, the games were terrific, and it was all huge fun. I just want newcomers to know what to expect and not have an unpleasant surprise.
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