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Hi all! I got a bargain Tandy CoCo3 recently, and it's an intriguing machine.

My first reaction was how much I would have loved this machine 'back in the day'. It's like a 'Super Dragon' - I would have felt right at home with this device, much of what I'd learned about the Dragon architecture and 6809 programming would have been transferable. But then you type 'WIDTH 80', and get an 80 column display, or you see text in true lowercase, or you draw a shape at 640x192 in four colours, and my reaction is that I would have killed for this computer once upon a time. Oh how I wished for things like this on my Dragon!

But would I really have killed for it? A bit of digging tells me it came out in late '86 - I would have had my Dragon for four years by then. In 1986 I would have been dreaming about an Atari ST, and wouldn't have given this 8 bit machine another glance. But now it's a neat little bit of history - and I wish there'd been a Dragon equivalent.

Tony

A subject that's been covered on the coco list - and is apparently in that recent book - is how the only reason Tandy released the CoCo 3 was because they could build it cheaper than its predecessor. Would have been possible earlier, but not profitable enough for Tandy, so it didn't happen.

Dragon Data have the excuse (?) that they went bust, of course. They were working on better machines - but "better" as business machines, not necessarily as something you'd have been able to brag about to your C64-owning friends

That said, put a working, fully-developed Beta next to a PC of the time and I know which one I'd have chosen.

Is there any chance you could check if CoCoDragon 2.0 works OK on your real CoCo 3?

It works OK on a real CoCo 1/2 and under VCC CoCo 3 emulation.

Happy to volunteer my COCO3 up for testing stuff on - what's involved?

Thanks! Download CoCoDragon 2.0 and record the sound from the two included .wav files onto a good quality audio cassette (Audacity is one of the best apps for this task). Then load the programs from cassette with CLOADM, then enter EXEC at the command prompt when loading has finished. At this stage (if all goes well) you should now have a working CoCoDragon.