CoCo Products

See also: About, CoCo, MM/1 and Perl.

Updates:

  • 2002-07-06 – Updated description for Invaders09 and added link to online playable version.

BOOK

RS-DOS (Disk BASIC)

  • Checkbook+ by Joel Hegberg – called “the CoCoMax of checkbook programs” due to its graphical user interface.
  • InfoPatch by Terry Todd – a patch for Infocom text adventures to make them run in 80 columns on the CoCo 3.
  • MiniBanners by Allen C. Huffman – print single or multi line banners with multiple fonts on any printer, including daisy wheel.
  • MultiBasic by Terry Todd – use the full 128K or 512K for BASIC programs by splitting them up in to modules.
  • ShadowBBS by Terry Todd – one of, if not the, most elegant bulletin board systems ever produced for the CoCo.

OS-9/6809

  • Atlanta92 by Allen C. Huffman – a graphical adventure game which had dozens of digitized photos from the 1992 Atlanta CoCoFEST! A full game was planned, but never completed, which would have involved the search for the OS-9 Level 2 upgrade.
  • EthaWin by Allen C. Huffman – a high speed, low memory “graphical” user interface that worked on the hardware text screens and provided pop-up dialog boxes, pull down menus and more. The library and source code was made available free.
  • Invaders09 by Allen C. Huffman – an assembly language Space Invaders-style game. You can play it online right now :) For the 25th anniversary of Sub-Etha Software, it has been made available again as a downloaded self-booting .DSK image. See also: Jamie Cho’s Macintosh version.
  • MiniBanners09 by Allen C. Huffman – Sub-Etha’s hit banner printing program ported to OS-9.
  • MultiBoot by Allen C. Huffman (OS-9 portion) and Terry Todd (RS-DOS portion) – store as many “os9boot” files on a single floppy as will fit, then select the one to boot with from a menu after typing “DOS”.
  • Towel by Allen C. Huffman – an EthaGUI based file utility.

Vaporware

Over the years, several other products were mentioned, but never completed. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

  • Atlanta 92 Adventure – a full graphical adventure game was planned which would have taken the player through a virtual CoCoFest as they tried to find a copy of the OS-9 Level 2 upgrade.
  • CoCo Answering Machine – a device was being sold cheaply at Wal-Mart which enabled a telephone line to be hooked to a computer. Audio could be recorded from the phone line, or played to the phone line. The interface would have hooked to the cassette port (for audio in/out), and serial port (for controlling answering and hanging up the phone), and software would have been able to act like an answering machine or voice mail system. The prototype hardware still exists, but software never made it past the planning stage.
  • CoCo VR – a plan was made to hook up a VictorMaxx Stuntmaster VR helmet to the CoCo. This helmet provided a composite video screen (compatible with CoCo 3 video output), and a shoulder sensor that tracked the wearer’s head turning left and right (which could be adapted to the CoCo’s joystick port). Vaughn Cato wrote a 3-D demo, which rendered a maze in lines, and it was hoped this would be part of the CoCo VR project. The user would have been able to look left and right, and use the joystick button to move forward and navigate through the maze. The original prototype still exists in Allen’s storage room.
  • Don’t Panic – an RS-DOS video game proposed by Terry Todd, which would feature the green planet character featured on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books (US editions). It is unknown if any code was ever started.
  • Phantom’s Lair – An OS-9 3-D line maze game inspired by the classic MED Systems game Phantom Slayer.
  • RS-DOS OS-9 Terminal Program – Terry Todd had a working RS-DOS terminal program which supports OS-9 display codes. It allowed dialing in to an OS-9 system and running programs that made use of text screen overlay windows and other features. The EthaGUI was modified slightly to allow them to run across a modem using this terminal program (less mouse support). Terry had planned to implement remote mouse support and even graphics, but the project never made it that far. (Update: I found labeled and serial numbered disks. I guess we did sell this.)
  • 3-D Pac Man Game – An OS-9 game using a simple 3-D line maze, replicating the original Pac-Mac maze. Walk through a 3-D maze avoiding ghosts and picking up dots. Similar to the RS-DOS game Phantom Slayer in concept. This made it to a playable prototype stage.

Before Sub-Etha

Here are some things Allen worked on earlier in his programming “career”:

  • Commodore VIC-20 days.
  • *ALL RAM* BBS – 1983 BBS package that ran from a 32K cassette based CoCo. A disk conversion of this package ran in Houston, Texas as Cyclops Castle (Sysop: Graham) where it loaded the message boards from disk rather than tape, and had dozens of message areas — all on one floppy drive. There were efforts to get this program sold by a CoCo company (Mark Data Products comes to mind?) but that never happened. I was working with an adult CoCo guy who was trying to find a distributor. The system was uploaded as shareware around 1987 and in 2013 was converted to run on an Arduino as an experiment. You can also download the original sources from the BBS Documentary website.
  • Huffman K1 Librarian (1989, CoCo 1/2) – Published by Rulaford Research. This was a MIDI librarian program for the Kawai K1 synthesizer. Allen also updated their Casio CZ-101 Librarian product to use the same improved user interface, but it is unknown if it was ever used. (Received and certified, Rainbow November 1989, page 111.)
  • CoCo & MIDI = MUSIC (1989?) – Technical document for the Rulaford Research CoCo MIDI interface (thanks to Rogelio for reminding me I created this).

See also: MM/1 Software

3 thoughts on “CoCo Products

  1. Pingback: Greetings from the Sub-Etha! « Sub-Etha Software

    1. Allen Huffman Post author

      Look for “Roy Justus” – he is a regular in the CoCo mailing list and at the CoCoFESTs. He has a custom converter he designed, built and often sells, which is what most of us are using these days.

      Reply

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