Coco Stuff

Introduction

I got my start with computers with a somewhat plain grey box with a sort of keyboard thing on it that connected to a TV and used a cassette recorder to save programs. This was an Color Computer with 32K RAM and Extended Color Basic 1.0 in ROM. This was really cool. It got me interested in the whole computer scene. In fact, I can attribute my path in life to having access to a CoCo1 and watching the movie Tron when I was barely into grade school. Since then, I’ve graduated to doing stuff in C on Linux but I still have the old CoCo1 and a few other models as well. And they all work. I love that architecture; I learned so much from it then and I’m still learning from it now.

For anyone who’s interested in knowing more about the CoCo, check out www.coco3.com. It’s a very good resource for the CoCo.

This page is dedicated to my exploits with the CoCo. Below is a list of projects and brief descriptions.

Machine Language Loaders

Loading machine language programs is a sticky problem in many cases. I have written a paper describing some ways of handling the problem. Interested parties can find the latest version of the Coco Loaders document.

Untitled Operating System

I have used RSDOS and OS9 over the years. Then I started using Linux and various Unix-like systems. I then realized that some of the things OS9 does are not quite ideal for a lot of things. It doesn’t make things impossible, really, but much of OS9’s structure seemed like overkill for a lot of things. So I decided to write an operating system. This operating system will be non-realtime and will be somewhat unix-like. I may even manage POSIX compliance at some level, but that is unlikely since I refuse to pay for a copy of the standard. In any event, we’ll see how much progress I actually make with this project.

LWTOOLS

LWTOOLS is a cross-development tool-chain for the MC6809 and HD6309 microprocessors.

After much development on LWASM and LWLINK, I decided to combine them into a single package. This became LWTOOLS. The LWTOOLS package replaces the separate distributions of LWLINK and LWASM.