Articles by Sub-Etha Software

Although I was “this close” to having my ALLRAM BBS sold by a well-known CoCo company back in 1983 it wasn’t until 1989 that something I wrote appeared for sale in the pages of Rainbow Magazine. Rainbow Magazine, November 1989, Page 111. I had gotten my first musical …

I feel dumb for not knowing this, but I was under the impression that today’s Visual Studio only built things like C#, C++, etc. — since those are the things listed when you make a new project. I happened to ask ChatGPT about building C in Studio, and it told …

Awhile back, I posted a note about some weird behavior with DATA statements in Color BASIC. The issue was that you really couldn’t have anything else on a line after the DATA keyword other than data. I recently mentioned this to Alex Evans so he could make sure his BASIC …

The later model CoCo 2s used an upgrade MC6847 video display generator chip. This chip provided an updated font with true lowercase, as well as the ability to change the border color and inverse the video. The original 6847 had a hardware pin that could inverse video, and I recall …

Normally, I would say that “optimizing” a program could mean two things: Making the program as fast as possible (even if it was larger) Making the program as small as possible (even if it was slower) There is always a compromise. Loop Unrolling In BASIC, this will print …

I am posting this in case someone else with the same issue is searching for a solution.The Canon Camera Connect app can record GPS locations, then later upload them to a supported Canon camera where they get embedded in the photo files. Unfortunately, the V3 app has a bug. It …

See also: part 1 or part 2. In the first installment, we began exploring the anatomy of a Disk BASIC disk and how it is made up of tracks and sectors. We also took a peek at the file allocation table (FAT) and a simple program was shared that would …

See also: part 1 or part 2. I know I must have learned at least some basic stuff about the layout of an RS-DOS disk, because I had a directory searching routine in my first commercial CoCo program – Huffman K1 Librarian sold by Rulaford Research. That product was …

I’ve mentioned the BASIC Utilities from Alex Evans quite a bit lately. These Python scripts can be run on any system that has Python. I have used them under Windows 11 and macOS. In addition to having scripts that will tokenize and de-tokenize BASIC programs, it has some other interesting …

Or… An easier way See also: part 1, part 2 and part 3. So far, we’ve explored how BASIC programs are stored in memory, experimented with moving a program somewhere else in memory and making it run, then finally creating a stupid one line program that features over 1700 bytes …