Is the Original Tandy Color Computer Worth your Gaming Time?

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Tandy Corporation's first home computer was the TRS-80, released in 1977. The TRS-80 was fairly affordably priced for its time but limited to monochrome text and extremely blocky semigraphics. 1979 saw the release of the TRS-80 Model II, a business machine with an 8" floppy disk drive incompatible with the previous computer or the budget of a middle-class family. With color computer systems like the Atari 400 and TI-99/4 being released in the late 1970s, Tandy realized that if it wanted to have any chance of capturing the growing home market for personal computers, it would need to offer a low-cost model with colorful graphics and a family-friendly appeal. Fortunately it had an ace up its sleeve in the form of the thousands of Radio Shack company and franchise stores dispersed across the United States and Canada that could sell a lower cost computer. That computer turned out to be the TRS-80 Color Computer, released in 1980. Having recently acquired one, let me go over some of its features and quirks.

Sierra's Short-Lived Tandy Color Computer Support

In 1980 Radio Shack released its budget line of computers with the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer.  Originally priced for $399.00 for the base model, it came with a 6809 CPU running at .894MHz, 4K of RAM and could display only upper case characters.  It could be expanded to 16KB, then 32KB and finally 64KB.  It had a built-in BASIC, a cartridge slot, two joysticks and a 53-key keyboard.  Its most often used graphics mode was a 256x192 artifact mode capable of four primary colors (black, white, blue and orange). It used single sided, double density 5.25" drives that held 156,672 bytes per side for user data using Radio Shack DOS.  Its sound hardware was a 6-bit DAC and it had a serial port and a cassette port.  The Color Computer 2 was essentially the same machine with a better keyboard.  Later CoCo 2s supported lower case text characters, unofficially.  Both of these early CoCos were essentially limited to 64KB of RAM.

In many ways, the CoCo 1 and 2 reminds one of the Apple II+.  Both machines really had a widespread maximum of 64KB of RAM.  They used 8-bit processors running at speeds close to each other.  Both machines can produce low resolution direct colors but really show detailed color images with NTSC composite artifact colors. If you subtract the purple/green combination from the Apple II, the graphics of a CoCo and an Apple can look very, very similar.  Both machines had somewhat limited (pre-IBM layout) keyboards and did not support lowercase characters officially.  Both came with ports for analog joysticks and cassette storage.  The sound hardware for each machine was rather crude and neglected.  Disk storage was only slightly better on the CoCo.

The CoCo 3 was a much more significant upgrade.  It came with double the CPU speed, 128KB of RAM and could be officially expanded to 512KB of RAM.  There were four extra keys on the keyboard.  It had new RGB-based graphics modes which could support 16 out of 64 pure colors and supported several higher resolutions in 2 colors (640x192), 4 colors (320x192 and 640x192) and 16 colors (320x192).