28 Aug
2004
28 Aug
'04
1:04 p.m.
Rumor has it that Tony Duell may have mentioned these words:
As there is no standard <shift> character for the zero key (parens were
<shift> 8 & 9), most (all?) software used <shift><zero> for
"cap-lock" --
It wasn't denoted on the keyboard, but it was rather prominent in the
documentation.
Granted, if you got your CoCo 2nd hand and somehow got it into "lower-case
mode" without knowing how & no manuals to reference, it could be a bugger
to find out how to accept commands again, as the basic couldn't handle the
lower-case characters...
I had no idea assembly language could be hard until I started looking at
books about x86 assembly... It just seems so "natural" on the 6809...
(altho I'd really like to try my hand at 6309... But first, I'd *need* a
6309... ;-)
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch(a)30below.com
What do you do when Life gives you lemons,
and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????
> > Eh? The CoCo 3 has all 4 arrows on it
(I'm looking at one). It's also
> > scanned in software (unlike the Apple ][) so can produce lower case if
> > required. The CoCo 2 can't _display_ lower case as standard...
Some could -- later versions had a "B" version to the chipset with updated
character ROMs that had true lower-case - it could be brought out with a
couple of peeks/pokes in RS-Basic, but OS-9 could automagically tell if it
was a capable machine & display accordingly.
Sorry. My
bad. But didn't it still lack something crucial, like a CTRL
key or something equally obvious? I remember bitching about this a while
The CoCo 1 and 2 lack a CTRL key (it was common to use the down-arrow for
this, though). The CoCo 3 has a CTRL and an ALT key (and, indeed, f1 and
f2 keys, but no more). There's no Caps Lock on any of the CoCos, but that
could be taken as an advantage :-) ago and you
coming to its defence :)
I will admit to having a soft spot for the CoCo. It was the machine I
used my first real OS on (OS-9, of course), and I learnt a lot from
writing device drivers, etc.