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TRS-80 programs and applications for the color computer
187 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
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October 17, 2019
This was a fascinating book with a very limited market. It must have come out at the same time as the original TRS-80 Color Computer. It’s aimed at Color BASIC models with 4 to 16k. I didn’t even know they made the Color Computer with only 4K. (As it happens, I’m watching the Tandy Assembly auction right now, and one went for $45, but only after a lot of prodding.)
But Baker manages to get some real games and utilities in 4k, though it’s tight—he’s continually telling the reader what they need to cut to get it to fit into 4k, usually on-screen instructions.
It starts with a Lunar Lander program with a nice on-screen display, and a very static asteroid game, in which the asteroids stay in place while the ship moves around trying to mine them.
From there he goes to adventure games, and he does a great job of explaining how text adventure games work using what is basically a four-room adventure. It’s short enough to fit in 4k, and complex enough to have what I’m pretty sure is an unplanned solution.
And then he goes into a music app and a drawing program. For these, he separates out some of the code into the appendix so that it can be used in other BASIC programs. Color BASIC lacked the ability to draw lines and circles. Baker’s drawing program even includes copy and paste functionality that would, in Extended Color BASIC need only the GET and PUT commands.
It’s amazing what he was able to get into 4 to 16k—and what he was able to do with the very primitive Color BASIC. A lot of what took dense code in this book would take a single function call in Extended Color BASIC. I immediately modified the Lunar Lander code to use PRINT USING for the on-screen display, for example. But this really shows in the calculator program. I originally thought I’d made a typo typing it in, because running roots and powers seemed to lock the program into an endless loop. In fact, it was calculating them in a long loop and I was being impatient. That complex loop would be unnecessary as soon as Radio Shack brought out Extended Color BASIC.
The book ends with a suite of simple financial programs for balancing a checkbook and managing a budget. Baker, who wrote (or is one of the authors of) Radio Shack’s Personal Finance program pak for the CoCo, provides good advice along with the code.
The only real drawback to the book, besides its focus on Color BASIC (which wouldn’t have been a drawback if that’s what you had) is that the font choice is a poor one. It’s not only difficult to distinguish between numbers and letters at times, it’s difficult to distinguish dashes and equal signs, and because the font is not monospaced, it’s also difficult to tell how many spaces go into strings.
Other than that, however, this was an amazing example of what a very early computer could do when programmed by someone who knew what they were doing—and who was able to clearly explain the logic so that the reader could duplicate the logic for their own software. This was especially true for the two different adventure models he provides; each of them is easily used for writing either a text adventure or an adventure of choices (what he calls an exploratory adventure).
But Baker manages to get some real games and utilities in 4k, though it’s tight—he’s continually telling the reader what they need to cut to get it to fit into 4k, usually on-screen instructions.
It starts with a Lunar Lander program with a nice on-screen display, and a very static asteroid game, in which the asteroids stay in place while the ship moves around trying to mine them.
From there he goes to adventure games, and he does a great job of explaining how text adventure games work using what is basically a four-room adventure. It’s short enough to fit in 4k, and complex enough to have what I’m pretty sure is an unplanned solution.
And then he goes into a music app and a drawing program. For these, he separates out some of the code into the appendix so that it can be used in other BASIC programs. Color BASIC lacked the ability to draw lines and circles. Baker’s drawing program even includes copy and paste functionality that would, in Extended Color BASIC need only the GET and PUT commands.
It’s amazing what he was able to get into 4 to 16k—and what he was able to do with the very primitive Color BASIC. A lot of what took dense code in this book would take a single function call in Extended Color BASIC. I immediately modified the Lunar Lander code to use PRINT USING for the on-screen display, for example. But this really shows in the calculator program. I originally thought I’d made a typo typing it in, because running roots and powers seemed to lock the program into an endless loop. In fact, it was calculating them in a long loop and I was being impatient. That complex loop would be unnecessary as soon as Radio Shack brought out Extended Color BASIC.
The book ends with a suite of simple financial programs for balancing a checkbook and managing a budget. Baker, who wrote (or is one of the authors of) Radio Shack’s Personal Finance program pak for the CoCo, provides good advice along with the code.
The only real drawback to the book, besides its focus on Color BASIC (which wouldn’t have been a drawback if that’s what you had) is that the font choice is a poor one. It’s not only difficult to distinguish between numbers and letters at times, it’s difficult to distinguish dashes and equal signs, and because the font is not monospaced, it’s also difficult to tell how many spaces go into strings.
Other than that, however, this was an amazing example of what a very early computer could do when programmed by someone who knew what they were doing—and who was able to clearly explain the logic so that the reader could duplicate the logic for their own software. This was especially true for the two different adventure models he provides; each of them is easily used for writing either a text adventure or an adventure of choices (what he calls an exploratory adventure).
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