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1980 4K CoCo Programming Challenge
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This page was last updated on 12/14/2014. Total Pages: 751. Total Files: 999.
Home / Special Projects - 1980 4K CoCo Programming Challenge
It is July (or August, depending on which source you use) 1980, and you wandered in to a Radio Shack store and saw the brand new TRS-80 Color Computer. Unlike the TRS-80 Model I, this machine had color and sound built in, and used a normal color television for the display just like an Atari 2600.
You quickly plopped down $399 (plus tax) to buy your very own Color Computer, plus spent a little more for a cable that will let you hook up a cassette recorder to load and save programs to cassette tapes.
You get home, hook the machine up to your television, and power up the machine to be greeted with:
You have 4K of RAM available to begin writing your first program. What will you write?
Contest Concept
The goal here is to write something as if you were using the original 1980 CoCo. There was no Extended Color BASIC, and you couldn't afford to upgrade the memory past 4K. You only have a cassette recorder for storage... Were joysticks available when the machine was released? If so, you can use them.
I (Allen Huffman, alsplace@pobox.com) am working on this idea. Feel free to organize and edit this page with more ideas.
