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Volume 1, ISSUE 7

OCTOBER 2005

Welcome everyone to the October issue of the CoCo Lounge online Magazine.

The Long Road Ahead : Confessions of a newbie PART 3. -by Glen VanDenBiggelaar

Its fall here in Alberta and over the last week the temperature has really started to turn for the worst. Most days it has been a cold drizel, and the leaves just sort of turn color and dropped overnight. Usualy, we get snow here by Halloween, but with the last week as an indicator, we could see snow any day.
Deskmate 3
September, I probably got a whole 3 days in on my CoCo. I was playing with both Multi-Vue and Deskmate. Multi- Vue is almost a Operating system, where as Deskmate is just a program, but boy are they simular in apperence. One thing I wish to warn you about though: Having one disk drive really SUCKS! Please excuse the language, but, I am finding out more and more as I get deeper into the CoCo, You really NEED 2 Drives to function with just about anything.
Deskmate need 2 drives, as it will crash if you try to switch into a program that is on the other disk, Although, it is posible after about 6 crashes to find out what disks you need in the drive before you click on it. Also, Deskmate is one of the few programs that LOOK beter on a TV then the CM-8 monitor. In the RGB mode, DeskMate is Pink and black, with a bit of playing , you can set the colors to something that looks ok, but you have to do that everytime you load it up, unless you made a custom boot file. After consulting with the message boards, I found out some fun facts about Deskmate. Tandy only made DeskMate for the 64K CoCo and then with the release of the CoCo 3, re-released Deskmate 3 to go with it, There was no Deskmate 2.
Multi-Vue
Multi-vue is a bird of a different nature than Deskmate. It was a windowing enviroment that alowed graphics. From the first moment with it, It proved to be a chore. This was not a program you could just run. You absolutly need the binder that came with it. There was a reason for a binder, and not an instruction book or sheet. First, you absolutely had to make boot disks for this program in OS-09, so you must have OS-09 to begin with, and you need some small knowledge of what you are about to do.
Tandy had no Idea of how to spell check their manuals (kind of like me and this website), so within 6 pages, you were lost and presented with errors. I luckly, had the help of the CoCo lists, but even then they diferent opnions came through. I ended up guessing and found it worked. A short time later, I was reading a Rainbow magazine and came across part of the answer:

Click here to see the above image bigger and better.
I also ran across another "fun" error, that is still unsolved, it involves tring to get full color mode. I will present more on that when I solve it.
Right now, as I am working on this page, I am finding out more on the "mystery" of using a 3.5" floppy drive on the CoCo. Some say it is no mystery, just hook one up and use it. We will see. I will bring you more on this next month.

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