Emulation just isn't the same, is it?

Way on back when I was a mere 13-years-old in 1982, I received a TRS-80 Color Computer (the famed CoCo) for Christmas.

That remains my favorite computer. Of course, it wasn't advanced by today's standards in that it came with a mere 16 kilobytes of RAM and hooked up to a television set (monitors were available, but most people just used their TVs). The Motorola 6809 CPU hummed along at a mere .89 megahertz, but a command could be typed in that would double that clock speed -- a trick that was used by a lot of game programmers. You got a 32-column screen, no lower case letters, primitive sound and a mere eight colors that could be displayed on the screen at any one time (some programmers got around that restriction, as I recall).

Programs were loaded from a cassette deck, but people wanting to get really advanced could shell out quite a bit for a disk drive. A lot of us relied on the cassette deck and fell back on "ROM packs" that plugged into the computer's cartridge slot for more advanced games.

I, like everyone else, subscribed to a couple of Color Computer magazines (Rainbow and The Color Computer Magazine were my favorites) and spent a lot of time typing in BASIC programs copied from those magazines and various books. I wrote a lot of basic programs on my own, too. One bit of trivia about those old Color Computer days is that the BASIC was from Microsoft.

That's right. Before Bill Gates took over the world, his company had a lucrative contract with Radio Shack to provide BASIC to the company's line of computers. Microsoft provided BASIC to a lot of other manufacturers, too.

I always have, by the way, admired the discipline programmers had back in the 8-bit era. They didn't have just a lot of memory to work with, so they were efficient out of necessity. A lot of games were in machine code because that ran much faster than anything else. Contrast that era to today when bloated software is typical because memory is no longer an issue and CPUs are fast enough that efficiency is no longer that important.

At any rate, I experienced the fun of putting in a 64 kilobyte RAM upgrade and soldering the jumpers necessary to make my CoCo recognize the expanded memory. I enjoyed that computer and still have fond memories of it, even if it was replaced a year later by an IBM-PC.

The point of all this is that I get sentimental every few years and decide to go the emulator route. I downloaded a copy of M.E.S.S., got the appropriate BIOS sets for it, found a few games here and there and ran an emulated Color Computer 1. I even wrote a very simple BASIC program for the heck of it and you can see the code and the result below:

Unfortunately, using an emulator isn't the same as actually owning some TRS-80 hardware. I reach that conclusion every time I get an emulator so I can feel like I'm messing with a CoCo again, so I'm not sure why I even bother.

The problem, of course, is that the keyboard layout is different, the controllers are different and shuffling disc images around is often more trouble than it's worth. Perhaps I'll break down and buy some hardware again one day.

Some people love emulation, however, whereas some people swear by the original hardware. All fans interested in the old CoCo should visit the Tandy Color Computer Supersite, one of the finest resources on the Internet for that kind of thing.