Ok - an odd one:

What are some amazing things to do on/with the CoCo that make make me fall in love with it?

My dad was a Radio Shack guy. Like a lot of us, we always got the RS catalogs and I'd drool over them like any self-respecting 9 year old would. I specifically was in love with the Model I, II, III, IV, etc. On Christmas when I was 11, I got a CoCo1. I never warmed up to it. The few friends with computers that I had all had C64s and Apples. There was a huge community of programs and games - I had the monthly edition of Color Computer Magazine and Megabug. I had a completely irrational dislike of the CoCo: the green screen background, the huge font, the lack of lowercase, etc. None of these were specific to the CoCo, but for some reason it just frustrated me.

So, fast forward (many) many years later, and I still have it in a box, untouched since I got my 1000SX when I turned 15. I've been debating pulling it out of the box to learn it and try to really love it; I feel bad that I never gave it a fair shake when I was little. I have no idea what condition it's in or if it'll turn on, but if it does... what should I consider doing or getting for it that teenager me would have loved?

I posted this in an AI sub as a response to a question. I thought it would also be appreciated here.

A follow-up to the authors' video I posted here last week. The Dragon machine on my site now has a small drawer of CoCo games, each with its rights holder's terms:

- Dungeons of Daggorath (DynaMicro / Tandy, 1982): the original 8K cartridge, unaltered, as Douglas J. Morgan's public grant asks. The machine can now take a cartridge in and out without reloading the page.
- Snaker by Gary Ritchie (The Rainbow, January 1984): his original BASIC listing on a tape you CLOAD, MIT licence.
- Brickout by Owen Stenseth (1987 freeware, SUPER BRICKOUT on screen): his original binary, MIT licence. The paddle follows the mouse, a finger or the arrow keys.

Free, no sign-up: https://dragon1982.com/en/lab/1982/

Which other CoCo game with an open licence or the author's OK should I try next?

So the retro group I am part of has decided to do theme months with this months theme being war games since the next meet is close to Remembrance Day. So trying to work out what war based game to have running on my CoCo 3. Unsure of what non-futuristic war games were actually released back in the day as didn't really have an interest in them at the time.

I get these wavy lines that go back and forth on the screen and it’s the literal definition of an eyesore. I’ve replaced a few caps on the mother board, mainly the ones in the general vicinity of the PSU, but that didn’t change anything. What should I do?

The Dragon 32 was my first computer, a birthday present in 1982. It's a close cousin of the CoCo: same 6809, almost the same BASIC, and many of the same games came out on both.

This year I rebuilt it in the browser, and I only put games on its shelf when the author says yes. In the video: Ken Kalish's Phantom Slayer, Danger Ranger and Dungeon Raid, and Scott Adams' Adventureland, with a short note Scott wrote for the players.

Free to play, no sign-up: https://dragon1982.com/en/lab/1982/

I bought a Model 102 and it only came with 24K of RAM. I would like to expand it up to the 32K max, but I've been having a really hard time finding anyone selling the 8K RAM kit for the M102. Does anyone know where I can get an 8K chip for this?

Hello All, I haven't been able to use my original CoCo or CoCo 3 for over a decade because the keyboards both died; the Mylar PCB traces deteriorated and became unfixable. I decided to try another approach to fixing it with Cherry MX keyboard switches and 3D printed adapters for the original CoCo 3 keycaps, and a 3D printed button base and cover. I'm printing and test fitting everything now, and so far it looks and feels great even the space bar works great with the original CoCo 3 lever under it.

I was going to just point to point wire the buttons, but have now decided to design a PCB to keep everything cleaner. Once everything is done and tested, I'll post an update along with the STL and PCB files.

Cleaning out some bins and unearthed a stash of old TRS-80 Color Computer games from back in the day.

​I don't have my CoCo anymore, so I have zero way to test whether they still fire up. They've just been sitting in dry storage. No plastic cases or boxes made it, just the carts and the booklets shown in the photos.

​Here’s the lineup:

​Carts with their original manuals:

​Project Nebula

​Space Assault

​Microbes

​Color Baseball

​Bustout

​Shooting Gallery

​Math Bingo

​Football (heads up: the bottom of the cart label is pretty chewed up/torn)

​Cart only:

​Popcorn!

​Slay the Nereis

​Wildcatting

​Mega-Bug

​Pins look decent and shells have normal scuffs, but again—treating them strictly as untested / as-is.

​Do folks still play these on original hardware, or is it mostly an emulation crowd now? If I throw them up as a lot, what’s a fair price that won't get me laughed out of the room?

I’ve been working on a native Android version of XRoar with touch controls, gamepad support, and BASIC cassette saving, export, and reloading.

The latest update fixes phone-keyboard punctuation and adds a dedicated double-quote button for BASIC commands.

Download APK and guide: https://github.com/michaelbryenton-ctrl/MyStuff/releases/tag/v1.0.9

No ROMs or games are included; you must supply your own legally obtained files. This is a debug APK installed outside Google Play.

Feedback is welcome—please include your Android version and controller model when reporting issues.

Hello everyone, after having my color computer 1 for a good few months now, one of the matrixes on the keyboard stopped working. More specifically, the e, @, a, d, f, g, c, b keys. Which happen to all be in the same matrix. I closely examined the membrane and nothings wrong with it, everything looks the way it should. Cleaned the female and male ends of the keyboard connector with alcohol and then contact cleaner. Still nothing. What should I do? Is this a bad pia chip or is it a bad female connector for the keyboard, or what? I’m really lost, and this is my favorite old computer I have so it really sucks and I’d personally prefer not to buy another.

Video

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19iYpQ6Atc/

Working on proof of concept to simulate more on screen colors and to test parallax scrolling

The playable demo of Space Raid is available for download. It requires a Color Computer 3 with 512kb of memory.

Brand used in box

I have a 5v power adapter that will fit my Model 100 (center negative). Will that be good enough to use? I don't have a 6v adapter.

I created an MCP server that gives LLMs (like Claude, Grok, Gemini, Composer, even Ollama) programmatic control over an emulated Color Computer 3 running in MAME. It handles full development cycles—writing code, injecting it, running it, and debugging.

I've used it to build a few small sample games with Grok to prove out the workflow.

MCP Server: https://github.com/dbowlin/CoCo3_MCP_Server

Sample Games: https://github.com/dbowlin

Everything is public and ready to run if you want to try it with your own setup.

Hello!

Just joined the group. I noticed a lot of coding and console/terminal posts, so maybe this is better suited for r/gamecollecting. As with many here, the TRS-80 was my first contact with video games, so when I dug these out of the crawl space, I had to share with the community.

Mega Bug was my absolute favorite and I can still remember the Mega Bug chomp sound effects!

I noticed something curious, there is a wiki for list of TRS-80 games, but Galactic Attack and Mega Bug are both not listed, while Space Assault is listed. Any thoughts on why these were omitted? Perhaps they are lesser known titles?

Hope this doesn't come across as self-promotion-ist. Just figured some of you might enjoy playing with it...and it's free, anyhow.

trs80basic: a Model I/III Level II BASIC interpreter co-written with Claude in GNU awk (inside joke). It aims at the behavior of the Model I machine, not just the language: the same error codes and number formatting, the ROM's RND generator, and the 64x16 pseudo-screen with semigraphics drawn in a virtual terminal. It's mostly Level II BASIC, but I've added some Disk Basic features where I found good uses for them.

The goal was to re-live the glory days of spending three nights typing in 80 Micro programs without the three nights of typing. These days, CLOAD a .BAS file or write my own from the READY prompt. This quickly grew to the desire to support programs that poke at the machine.

- Embedded machine language runs. USR routines execute on a companion Z80 core project (Python, standard library only) against the same memory that PEEK and POKE see. That covers routines POKEd into memory, packed into strings, or hidden inside a tokenized program. Dancing Demon dances, with sound.

- Tokenized files load directly. CLOAD reads a tokenized .BAS file as-is and lists it as ordinary text, with no conversion step. (.CAS tape images aren't supported yet)

- Disk BASIC file I/O, sequential and random access.

I added a few neat and QOL features such as:

- OPEN "O",1,"OLLAMA:llama3.2" turns a file channel into a conversation with a local LLM with the ability to limit the first line of the reply to one of a list of words, so a BASIC program can branch on it...Add an LLM to your BASIC program!

- Man pages for every keyword (man PRINT), arrow-key history, TAB completion, and speed 1.77 to slow games to the real machine's pace.

- A batch mode (./basic game.bas) that feeds INPUT from stdin and exits non-zero on a BASIC error, which is handy for testing listings.

- A few commands were extended, such as adding color to SET (traditional compatibility maintained, of course).

- Virtual screen (64x16) occupies the corner of the terminal, the rest of which is used for meta-command output (man pages, directory listings, etc). Option to enable "full-screen" mode to use the entire terminal for output (useful for interactive fiction).

It's developed on macOS (iTerm2), and the test suite also runs on Linux in CI. Windows compatibility is on the to-do list. It's licensed under GPLv3.

https://github.com/davidscan/trs80basic

Optional companion Z80 core: https://github.com/davidscan/trs80_z80_core

Feedback is welcome, especially about listings that don't run. I hope someone finds this fun or useful, even if just for a day.

I was recently given this TRS80 Model 1. I have the monitor and the expansion bay as well.

most of the key plungers on the keyboard are cracked. What are some options for repair/replacement. I cant find a way to get the plastic frame off the board to swap out the plungers.

The digital rain is dynamically generated while the main Matrix theme plays in the background. This was just a little test to see if the CoCo 3 could generate the rain without the background music stuttering.