Color Computer Magazine (November 1983)

darth-azrael (67)in #retrocomputing • last year

_{Cover of the November 1983 issue of Color Computer Magazine}

The Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, also known as the Tandy Color Computer or the Coco was a series of mostly compatible home computers produced from 1980 until 1991. It was the only common computer I am aware of that used the Motorola 6809 CPU. This was an 8-bit CPU but had some 16-bit features and was powerful for its time.

The Coco wasn't really as popular as Commodore, Apple or Atari computers but it was supported by Radio Shack for a long time and still had a magazine or two dedicated to it, including Color Computer Magazine.

The November 1983 issue included the following:

Features

Super Spiro! – A type-in program for generating spirographs, including parameters for several different ones.

Color Computing for Kids – A programming article for kids. Included is a tutorial on FOR/NEXT loops in BASIC with math examples and an example printing a Thanksgiving message.

Star – A simple type-in program for drawing a star-like object on the screen.

Sorcerer’s Puzzles – A type-in game that features several puzzle challenges.

Slither – A type-in machine language game. This game existed on may computers in many forms. You control a snake as it goes around the screen eating things. As it eats it grows longer. If you run into yourself, you die.
Unforgettable Characters – Creating custom characters on the Color Computer.

My MC-10 Speaks ML! – The MC-10 was a sort of cut down version of the Color Computer designed to compete with even cheaper computers like the VIC-20. Other than BASIC programs, it was mostly incompatible with the Color Computer and far more limited. It was not a success. This article covers machine language programming on that machine.

_{Table of Contents from the November 1983 issue of Color Computer Magazine}

Departments

PEEK (11,83) - An overview of the magazine's contents this month.

INKEY$ - Letters from readers covering topics such as piracy, machine language for beginners, productivity software and more.

GOTO School - A column on education and computers. This month, the advantages of monochrome monitors and how computer information services are beginning to supplement encyclopedias as a go to resource.

Reviews

Micron Eye - A digital imaging system for the 16K Color Computer.
Astro Blast - A Space Invaders clone for the Color Computer.
Colorkit 1.2 - A toolkit that provides a wide variety of programming tools for the Color Computer.
Kaleidophone - A program (and hardware) for creating visual effects based on audio input.

New Products - Some new products covered this month include a new Daisy Wheel Printer, a program for creating pie charts, and Infidel, the latest interactive fiction game from Infocom among a number of other things.