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This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in 1995; any technical information is probably outdated.

Re: Another first post.


Article: 7474 of alt.hackers
From: btomlin@crl.com (Bruce Tomlin)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Another first post.
Date: 3 Mar 1995 10:44:24 -0800
Organization: San Antonio, TX
Lines: 17
Approved: nobody
Message-ID: 3j7o28$lfe@crl12.crl.com
Reply-To: btomlin@aol.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: crl12.crl.com
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
Status: RO

someone@somewhere.org wrote in alt.hackers:
>The old Color Computers (Coco's) could not display lower case, instead it
>used inverse video to symbolize lower case characters. A new revision of
>the Coco's had a Video Display Generator that could support lowercase, but

ObMyHack:

I did a software solution.  I went into graphics mode and painted the
characters on the screen, plus I got black text on a white background
(sort of... NTSC artifacting gave blue and red edges to vertical lines).
The only hard part was scrolling, in which I learned my first lesson
about fast memory moves on Motorola processors.  I used the PSHU/PULU (or
maybe PSHS/PULS) instructions to use all the registers I could to move
as much data as possible in one instruction.

I think I even wrote an OS/9 driver to do this.  The downside is that
screen memory took up 6k, and this was long before the CoCo3.



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