POKE 113,0:EXEC 40999 (and DLOAD)

If you recognize this, you must have been a Radio Shack Color Computer owner. If not, these two instructions would reboot a CoCo, starting it back over at the boot up screen just like when it is first powered on.

When the CoCo 3 was introduced, a different shortcut for rebooting was discovered thanks to a hidden easter egg. The egg was a hidden graphic showing a digitized photo of there three programmers who worked on the BASIC ROM. To make it display, you held down CTRL and ALT while powering on the machine. (A nod to Ctrl-Alt-Del reset on a PC, perhaps?)

We quickly discovered that the easter egg would also show if you held down CTRL+ALT and hit the reset button. Once the image was on the screen, pressing the reset button would reboot the computer back to the startup screen!

Thus, on a CoCo 3, POKE 113,0:EXEC 40999 was replaced by “CTRL+ALT+RESET, RESET” saving much typing.

But I digress…

Have you ever wondered just what that POKE and EXEC were doing? Neither did I, but I decided to find out anyway.

POKE 113,0

To figure this out, I turn to the book Color BASIC Unravelled by Spectral Associates. This book contains a disassembly of the Color BASIC ROM, fully commented with explanations of what everything does.

113 in decimal is hexadecimal &H71, which we need to know because the disassembly uses HEX instead of decimal for memory locations. Looking at memory location &H71 shows us this:

Spectral Associates named it RSTFLG (Reset Flag) and based on the value there, the system will either WARM start or COLD start when the reset button is pressed. By default, this value has &H55 there:

When the reset button is pressed, the CoCo’s 6809 processor jumps to a reset vector that is in memory at the last two bytes — &HFFFE-&HFFFF. Whatever address is stored there will be where the 6809 starts executing code. This address comes from the last two bytes of the 8K Color BASIC ROM at memory location &HBFFE-&HFFFF. For “reasons” beyond the scope of this article, the upper memory is ghosted so that value also appears at &HFFFE-&HFFFF.

Thus, when reset is pressed, execution begins at whatever address RESVEC is which you can see in the left columns of the disassembly is at &HA027 in the Color BASIC ROM. Searching in the Unraveled book for &HA027 (or better, the RESVEC label) shows us initialization code that eventually jumps to this:

There you can see an LDA RSTFLAG which is loading register A with whatever is at memory location 113 and comparing it to &H55. Based on the result, it either jumps to the cold start routine or warm start routine.

POKE 113,0 just puts the 0 in there so the code ends up jumping to BACDST which is what starts everything up and displays the BASIC copyright screen.

Thus, if you do POKE 113,0 and then press RESET, the CoCo will cold start.

EXEC 40999

By now, you may realize what code is at 40999. In HEX that is &HA027 … does that look familiar? That’s the address that the reset vector points to, which eventually leads to the routine at &HA00E which checks the RSTFLG (memory location 113) to decide what to do.

EXEC 40999 just jumps to the location that the reset button would causes the 6809 to jump to.

Thus, POKE 113,0 sets the “cold start” flag, and EXEC 40999 (or pressing reset) invokes the code that checks that flag and acts upon it.

You are welcome.

Bonus – DLOAD

There was another shortcut discovered on the CoCo 3 which allowed a cold start to be done without using EXEC 40999. Instead, you can type:

POKE 113,0:DLOAD

…and the CoCo 3 will cold start. Typing DLOAD by itself will cause the CoCo 3 to pause and then clear the screen. Any guess at what is going on?

DLOAD was a command that came with Extended Color BASIC, and it is a command I recall using exactly one time back then, though I later used it often on the CoCo 3 — just not for its original purpose.

I do not have a copy of the original TRS-80 Color Computer Getting Started with Extended Color BASIC manual for the CoCo 1, but since DLOAD is not mentioned in the 1984 version of the same manual for the CoCo 2, I suspect it may not have ever been documented in those manuals. (Leave a comment if you have information about this.)

It is, however, listed in the spiral-bound TRS-80 Color Computer Quick Reference Guide that I probably consulted more than any other book I have ever owned.

DLOAD was similar to the cassette CLOAD command, except it loaded via the Serial I/O port at either 300 or 1200 baud. If you had a serial cable connected to another CoCo, or a modem dialed in to another CoCo, it was possible to DLOAD a program that way.

And this is how I downloaded my first real terminal program on my CoCo 1 — someone sent it to me via DLOAD!

The only problem with this command is that there was no DSAVE command built in, so the only way to upload to DLOAD was using a special program. I no longer recall what that program was, or who wrote it, or where it came from. (If you know, please leave a comment.)

In Extended Color BASIC Unravelled, there is this note about DLOAD:

DLOAD is the most obscure command in the Color Computer and absorbs a substantial amount of space in the ROM. DLOAD is so poorly understood because Tandy has never made the necessary companion routine, DSEND. DLOAD will DOWNLOAD a file over the RS 232 line from another system, however there is no companion routine, which will transmit a file over the RS 232 line to another Color Computer. Once a DSEND routine is built and made available to the masses, DLOAD will be much better understood.

– Extended Color BASIC Unravelled, page 5.

From looking at the source, it appears there was both DLOAD and DLOADM variations, just like there is CLOAD/CLOADM for tape and LOAD/LOADM for disk, with the “M” version being for machine language programs. If this is true, then that Quick Reference manual entry is incorrect and DLOAD does not load a machine-language program — it may have loaded a BASIC program, with DLOADM being the way to load machine language over the Serial I/O port.

But I digress.

But what does this have to do with the CoCo 3 and resetting the computer? I’m glad you asked! (You did ask, didn’t you?)

The lack of a DSAVE command (or DSEND as Unravelled called it, not matching the other existing commands) meant that DLOAD really wasn’t that useful. Heck, without it being documented in the manual, how would anyone even know it existed? This may have something to do with this command being removed from the CoCo 3. The memory for that command was repurposed for other patches to Extended Color Basic needed to support new features of the CoCo 3’s hardware.

DLOAD started at &H8C1B in the Extended BASIC ROM. On the CoCo 3, this space is used for a different purpose. Super Extended BASIC Unravelled has this note:

The initialization routine for the Color Computer 3 begins at $8C1B. This code writes over the DLOAD routine that was in the original Color Computer . . .

– Super Extended BASIC Unravelled, page 30

In the disassembly, that location is still labelled as DLOAD, and the original BASIC keyword of DLOAD is still in Extended BASIC pointing to it. BUT, the CoCo 3 (which copies all the ROMs in to RAM on startup) patches that location with new code. It also modifies the Interrupt Vectors so the RESET vector points there instead of the original routine in the Color BASIC ROM:

Thus, on a CoCo 3, pressing reset jumps to the location in memory where the DLOAD code used to be, but which is now the reset routine for the new CoCo 3 hardware.

The complete quote from the Unraveled book is actually…

The initialization routine for the Color Computer 3 begins at $8C1B. This code writes over the DLOAD routine that was in the original Color Computer (actually, typing DLOAD will simulate pressing the reset button). This initial- ization routine is used for both a warm start (simply getting control of the computer back from a runaway program) and a cold start (where the computer and Basic have to be reinitialized).

– Super Extended BASIC Unravelled, page 30

POKE 113,0:DLOAD on a CoCo 3 performs the same function as POKE 113:EXEC 40999 on a CoCo 1 or CoCo 2.

But … there is something different. If you do POKE 113,0:DLOAD on a CoCo 3, you get a short pause before the system cold starts. If you do POKE 113,0:EXEC 40999, it quickly restarts.

This is because EXEC 40999 is still jumping in to the original &HA027 routine in the Color BASIC ROM code. This bypasses all the new cold start code for the CoCo 3! Doing the old style POKE/EXEC may look like it reset the CoCo 3, but it wasn’t actually doing everything and, possibly, there could have been some instances where hardware configurations had changed that this would not reset/restore properly.

I most certainly did not realize that back then. I suppose the use of POKE 113,0:DLOAD (or POKE 113,0 then reset) was actually the “more appropriate” way to reset the CoCo 3, which is probably how I learned about it somewhere.

And now you know … more than you wanted to … about POKE 113,0 and EXEC 40999 and DLOAD on a CoCo 3.

Until next time…

P.S. While researching for this article, I started walking through all the things that go on during the CoCo 3 startup. It’s quite a lot with all the ROM to RAM and patching going on. Maybe I’ll have to dig in to that and write about it someday.

6 thoughts on “POKE 113,0:EXEC 40999 (and DLOAD)

      1. Darren A

        Well, the last 3 digits are 867 and the first two digits reversed are 53 and it’s on a computer with an 09 processor.

        Reply
  1. William Astle

    An important note for anyone who wants to mess with custom ROMs: on the Coco3, the FFFx vectors come from the top 16 bytes of the 32K internal ROM. They do not come from BFFx, even if BFFx happens to have the same addresses.

    Reply
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