knudsen@ihnss.UUCP (04/03/84)
Old Cocos never played the cassette data thru the TV speaker, unless you said AUDIO ON, or unless you had the tape player's volume turned up way too high. Nothing new there. Also, there always was a cassette relay, a very important feature of Coco's cassette "OS". The old one was a little reed job that was fairly quiet, but I could hear mine release. They didn't last very long, tho, so I replaced mine with a real relay from the Shack, which now gives a satisfying "clunk" on each release. I use Disk almost exclusively now, so a few comments on assemblers. The best disk assembler by lightyears is MACRO-80C from The Micro Works, DelMar, CA. It has features I never heard of in 20+ years in the computer field, plus local labels, foreground/background location counters, etc. Best of all, its SCREEN EDITOR will make you HATE Basic, OS9, EDTASM+, or any other editor you use except for some of the word processors. I *think* that OS9's assembler just gives nasty warnings when you use non-position-indeptd instruction operands, so you can still use them, but I'm not sure. For producing code to work under plain old ROM Basic, you want MACRO-80C or the Shack's, although FLEX assemblers should work also. mike k