CoCo vs. C64 duke it out

Rumor has it that woodelf may have mentioned these words: Don't blame the computer for something that's due to bad coding on the part of the programmer. ;-) Straight outta the ROM, one way, 9600 baud was *no* problem - I ran my Epson printer at that, and that made graphics "Fly." (for weird values of "Fly" but hey, it was one heckuva lot faster than 300/600 baud). I tried overclocking my serial->parallel converter & doing 19200, but the converter had issues... not the CoCo. You should see what they're doing *now* with the CoCo's bitbanged port! 115200 on a CoCo3 and 57600 on a non-overclocked CoCo1/2 for a product called "DriveWire." Head over to http://www.cloud9tech.com - I'm just a very satisfied customer. It's a tad slower (but not much so) than a standard floppy, but the ability of keeping your entire floppy (and emulated hard drive) library on a PC is wicked fun. A guy by the name of Roger Taylor of http://www.coco3.com fame has said that he's now gotten 115200 reliably on a CoCo2! His product (which should make lots of us oldsters happy, not just the CoCo fanbois ;-) is the Rainbow IDE (for Integrated Development Environment - not the hard drives) - it's a sweet environment for coding for any classic machine that can be run in M.E.S.S., speeding up development time by a few orders of magnitude. Write your code, click one button & the IDE assembles/compiles your code, formats a virtual floppy (or ROM), starts M.E.S.S. & mounts the floppy or ROM and in the immortal word of Emeril: "Bam!" Pair that with Drivewire to test your software on a real CoCo without having to format floppies... Schweet! Check out the "Jewelled" proggie for the CoCo3 he's writing... Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate." SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein zmerch at 30below.com |