Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
The Way back at the dawn of time, around late 1982, a young man walked into a Radio Shack store at Town East Mall in Mesquite, Texas and was talked into getting his very first credit card, a Radio Shack branded one, in order to purchase a personal computer. With a whopping 16K of memory, Extended Color Basic for added power (especially increased graphics capability), and even a CCR-81 dedicated and specialized computer tape deck,along with a pair of joysticks, this machine was truly … a typical 8-bit computer of the time. And you’ve no doubt guessed, that young man was me. The package’s $500 price tag at the time was steep for someone like me who made just about $5 per hour, but I felt it would be a good investment. And I really wanted to replace the Timex Sinclair TS-1000, my first personal computer, that I had recently returned to K-Mart after it belly-upped on me after just a couple of weeks of usage (and it was my second faulty Timex machine, at that – takes a licking and keeps on ticking, not so much).
I enjoyed studying the manuals to learn BASIC, typing in and modifying programs from Creative Computing Magazine and its ilk, and just generally noodling around on it, even adapting a character generation program for Dungeons and Dragons that I had originally written for the aforementioned Timex Sinclair TS-1000. Really, though, I had a small handful of game cartridges from Radio Shack (some of which were reasonably fun), the tape adventure games Pyramid and Bedlam, and the few BASIC resource management games and simple simulation games I had typed in, and not much else. Nothing I had on the system was all that useful or interesting, except maybe the word processing cartridge Color Scripsit, which I used to do college papers for printout on my gigantic Centronics tractor-feed dot matrix printer. The machine was fun, sure, but nothing impressive or all that compelling. Until May of 1983. That was when The Rainbow entered my life, and I truly had no idea what a seminal moment it was going to be for me. It would truly accelerate my love of computing that served as the basis for most of my career, and still keeps me captivated to this day.
The Rainbow was a Color Computer magazine that had already been going for 3 or 4 years before I discovered it. It had started out as a single page newsletter, written by Lonnie Falk and photocopied for its distribution of just a few copies to Lonnie’s friends and acquaintances. Within that extremely short time span of 3-4 years, The Rainbow grew to a 300+ page magazine on glossy paper, with a great deal of advertising and a lot of really fantastic editorial content, including programs, tutorials, reviews, and more. That 300 or so pages showed me some of the little machine’s truly impressive capabilities, driven by the genuinely excellent Motorola MC-6809E microprocessor at its heart.
The CoCo, as it was affectionately nicknamed, actually had FOUR monthly print magazines around that time, Hot CoCo, The Rainbow, Color Computer News, and Color Computer Magazine, and that’s not even to mention that it also had magazines on tape every month, like Chromasette, and significant coverage in other non-dedicated magazines like Byte and 6809 Micro Journal. Ingenious programmers and hardware designers like Steve Bjork, Frank Hogg, Dennis Lewandowski, Todd and Brett Keeton, Dennis Bathory Kitsz, Bill Barden, John Fraysse, and many others were doing astounding work to show what this little home computer could do.
CoCo Games
I dove into that first Rainbow with relish and astonishment, particularly once I saw that there was an amazing virtual cornucopia of knock-offs of well-known arcade games advertised within its pages. There were never more than a small handful of licensed arcade games on the CoCo, but there was an absolutely staggering number of unofficial clones of games like Space Invaders, Galaxian, Centipede, Robotron, Defender, Asteroids, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Joust, Ms. Pac-Man, Mr. Do, Qix, Super Cobra, Moon Patrol, Missile Command, Q-Bert, Galaga, Tutankham, Monaco GP, Donkey Kong Jr., Popeye, Berzerk, and even pretty obscure arcade titles like Tapper, Avalanche, Bagman, Bosconian, Bump ‘n’ Jump, Crystal Castles, Lady Bug, Xevious, Omega Race, and Quantum. Many of these had multiple copycats, and the competitiveness of that marketplace clearly elevated the level of effort by the publishers, so that many of these clone games were genuinely exceptional duplicates of their arcade forebears.
CoCo Emulation
Given my history with the CoCo, I still occasionally load up the great Windows Emulator VCC (Virtual Color Computer), and pull up some of my old games to play, an activity I enjoy enough to make me wonder why I don’t do it more often. Well, one reason is obvious: I don’t have a CoCo emulator on my Ubuntu machines, and I barely ever boot up any of my Windows machines any more. Having recently located a cache of Color Computer games in virtualized format, I am now feeling inspired to find a way to run them on Linux. As is often the case, this is turning out to be a real Ubuntu computing adventure.
A Google search revealed that my best bet on Linux was probably going to be XROAR, an emulator for the (almost identical) CoCo 1 and 2 (there was a CoCo 3, but XROAR doesn’t emulate it), and the Tano Dragon 32/64 line of CoCo clones popular in Europe back in the CoCo’s heyday. I have installed the Mac OS X version of XROAR on some of my older Mac iBooks, so I have at least heard of it. However, it’s not in the default software repositories for Ubuntu, so we can’t install it using the normal install process (see Everyday Ubuntu on pages 29-30 of Full Circle Magazine #164 month before last for more general information on installing software). We’re going to need to explore some extended software management procedures for installing XROAR, but it still shouldn’t be overly difficult (he said, with no idea what he was in for).
Ubuntu Repositories
As an integral part of the software installation process in Linux, Ubuntu uses something called a repository. Repositories are on the ‘back-end’ of the software installation process, meaning when you tell Ubuntu that you want to install a piece of software, the information to do so, including the necessary files to download, is stored in a (typically online) virtual location where your system can go and retrieve those files and information.
Ubuntu has a pretty significant selection of software in its standard default repositories, but they certainly can’t cover absolutely everything. Since XROAR is not in the default Ubuntu repositories (meaning it can’t just be installed using the normal install procedure in Ubuntu Software Center, or even Synaptic Package Manager, a really good secondary software installation manager), we have to find a repository for XROAR and add that repository to the ones used by our Ubuntu software management system.
Adding a New Repository
A Google search revealed this support webpage for XROAR: https://launchpad.net/~sixxie/+archive/ubuntu/ppa. You can see on this page the proper repository for XROAR: ppa:sixxie/ppa. We can add it via the command line by invoking a terminal (for more on how to get to a command line/terminal window, see Everyday Ubuntu in Full Circle Magazine issue # 160, page 40). Once we’re in the terminal, we can type in the following:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sixxie/ppa
then hit <Enter>, provide your superuser credentials (for more on this, see Everyday Ubuntu # 160, page 40 again), hit <Enter> again, followed by:
sudo apt-get update
again hitting <Enter>. Once this is done, we issue the command:
sudo apt-get install xroar
hit <Enter> one last time, and the system will install XROAR for us. We can now run XROAR by going to the applications drawer at the bottom left of our screen.
then scroll down using the dots on the right side, clicking on the bottom-most to take us to our last page of installed software, where we will undoubtedly find XROAR. You can also hit the magnifying glass icon at the top to invoke the search function and search for XROAR, but it’s almost certain to be on the last page, considering the alphabetical order of the software listings. Click on XROAR and it will indeed launch. HUZZAH! But, there’s clearly a problem. Look at this screen:
Now, does that appear like even the most rudimentary functional computer? No, it clearly doesn’t, and indeed it isn’t. We’re missing something important here: the firmware. But first:
Basics of How to Load Software on a CoCo
The CoCo had its operating software, a version of Microsoft Basic, on a pair of chips inside the computer, a ROM (Read Only Memory) chip for Color Basic, and another ROM chip for Extended Color Basic, which mostly added graphics and sound commands. The machine did not have a DOS, or Disk Operating System, by default, as disk systems at that time were a VERY expensive add-on that many computer owners did not have. Instead, software often came in solid state cartridges or on cassette tapes.
The cartridges were plastic boxes containing a printed circuit board and a ROM chip, or chips, that plugged into a slot in the computer (in the CoCo’s case, on the right side), and basically turned the machine temporarily into a dedicated game console for a specific game (or rarely, a small handful of games on one cartridge), or an Editor/Assembler/Monitor (for those who wanted to program in the difficult but VERY speedy Assembly Programming Language), or a word processor (e.g., Color Scripsit), a database manager, a telecommunications terminal, a graphics workstation, a music composer, a spreadsheet, or other dedicated computing function. Interestingly, one of the more sophisticated offerings direct from The Shack was an Audio Spectrum Analyzer for use with your stereo, something I never saw on other machines of the same era, and a good reason many serious audiophiles selected the CoCo as their machine of choice.
Other software was frequently loaded from cassette tapes, via a cable running from a cassette deck to the computer. Cassettes were slow and cumbersome, but were much cheaper than diskettes. I myself purchased dozens upon dozens of cassette programs before I ever even considered getting a floppy drive, and I also had a fair number of CoCo cartridges into the bargain.
The CoCo did have a floppy diskette system that had a controller, in the form of a large cartridge, and the disk drive itself. These days, floppy disks are rarely-sighted dinosaurs even in the more utile and sophisticated form they eventually took on in the case of MS-DOS compatible and Windows computers. Many of them undoubtedly eventually wound up in landfills. When I bought my first ever computer floppy drive, for my CoCo 1, it cost $500. For reference, again, I made less than $5 an hour at my full-time job at the time, so it was a BIG investment. The floppy drive controller also had a ROM chipset, that stored a very basic DOS (Disk Operating System) for the CoCo, to manage and catalog the contents of your floppy diskettes.
Finding the Firmware (or ROMs)
In order to get XROAR to work correctly, we’re going to have to find and install all three of the system ROMs, particularly since the DOS ROM required Extended Color Basic as a prerequisite. Without the ROMs, XROAR, or even a hardware CoCo, does not know how to do anything at all.
There is a caveat here, the legality of using virtualized copies of the system ROMs in an emulator may be questionable, so we can’t advocate or recommend it. In my personal case, I still own a Color Computer 2, so it’s conceivable that I thereby have a legitimate license to use the ROMs for it, even in digitized format in an emulator.
Consequently, I did a Google search and readily found the three needed system ROMs, even finding them in versions specifically labeled for use in XROAR. I downloaded them and saved them to my Downloads directory under Home. They were in ZIP format, so I unzipped them after downloading was complete.
There was a time when unzipping files was something of a chore in Linux, but these days, on modern distributions, you can just double-click to get the Extract utility to open up:
Click the Extract button in the upper left, then navigate to the desired location to unzip the files into the desired firmware ROM format of *.rom.
(The screenshots show me unzipping a particular piece of CoCo software, not a ROM file, but the procedure is the same.)
However, when unzipping the system ROM files, I now faced a new challenge: after spending a not insubstantial amount of time searching for and reading documentation on XROAR, I could find absolutely NOTHING indicating where to put the system ROMs so that XROAR could find and load them. I found documentation online that was supposed to be specifically for the Linux version of XROAR, but it invariably only had firmware file location information for Windows or MacOS versions. I had the same experience when perusing the readme files that were installed by the Linux-specific version to my local drive. Now what?
Where to Put the Firmware Files
Well, I hate to end on a cliffhanger, but it looks like I’m almost out of space this time…