Bulletin Board

Curtis Boyle says yes — and tomorrow, the CoCo show

Two answers arrived today from Curtis Boyle, who maintains the EOU distribution Prism runs on. Asked whether the portable Prism package may bundle EOU itself, his answer was: “That is fine!” And the planned submission of Prism to the Color Computer Archive: “Not a problem at all.” Both doors are open — thank you, Curtis.

Curtis has also offered to present these project pages as a preview on tomorrow's CoCo show — The CoCo Nation / CoCoTALK, Saturday, 7 November — and to invite viewers who would like to help test Prism to get in touch with him there. If you're watching: testers are genuinely wanted. And you can always reach us directly — suggestions, change requests and criticism are all welcome at keithclark1966@gmail.com.

For the record, so nobody has to guess: the build pictured across this site is v0.2.6, with fresh screenshots taken today. The exhibit itself now runs v0.2.7 — the menus release, installed and verified on 6 November (see Changes). The downloadable release remains v0.2.1 with its boot package, on the GitHub releases page, until a newer public release is published.

The library arrives — and the goal gets its name

Keith has named what this project is building: “a complete CoCo 3 with all available software and our own programs.” Prism is the face of that machine — and today, its library came home.

The Color Computer Archive's SDC card image — the community's whole preserved library of CoCo software, packed in SD-card form — has been downloaded and verified: 5,367 files, 5,282 disk images. The library is the Archive's work, and the credit is theirs; what will be ours is what comes next.

Next major piece: the Librarian — a Prism program to browse, search and launch that entire collection from inside the machine. Honest status: in design — library in hand, index next. Not built, not released; pinned here so the record shows when it started.

The design rule: use the whole machine

Keith has set Prism’s design rule, and it is now the project’s north star: bring out the true power of the CoCo 3 — the software it should have had in its heyday. In his words: “We're going to use every capability of this little baby.”

First consequence: Prism will use the full 2 MB, page-swapped, in everyday operations. The GIME’s memory management swaps 8K pages; two megabytes is 256 of them. Directory and icon caches, font caches and per-window backing stores will live in those pages and be mapped in on demand, so the desktop runs from RAM instead of re-reading disks. The design target is the maxed machine — 2 MB, HD6309, Multi-Pak, Orch-90 — the setup that was out of reach for most owners in the machine’s heyday and that emulation now gives everyone for free.

Honest status, as always on this board: the pager is a directive and a design, now at the top of the roadmap — not yet a shipped feature. The verified build remains v0.2.1. Watch this board.

Prism v0.2.1 — a typeface of its own

Prism’s interface now speaks in Prism Sans, a font drawn specifically for the shell. Before drawing it, the builders tried every stock font EOU carries — each one was found wanting: spindly, blobby, small-caps, or clean but in a cell too wide for Prism’s layout. So a new one was made by hand: five-pixel glyphs, drawn seven rows tall inside the standard cell, with a dotted zero.

The difference is visible everywhere text appears — menu bar, directory windows, status line, clock. The previous font remains available: pick Narrow Font in the View menu any time; Prism Font brings the new face back. This is v0.2.1, verified running on the project’s test rig.

Prism v0.2 — double-click fixed, programs launch

The big one. Double-clicking works — on drive icons, on folders, and on programs, which now launch for real instead of sitting there as pictures. The bug was found the honest way: hands-on testing at a real desk said double-click did nothing, and the hunt ended in the mouse driver’s click count, which reports three after a double-click, not two. The fix defers the selection highlight until the double-click window has passed.

Also in v0.2: windows drag by their title bars, a genuine shell window from the Special menu, the Prism launcher button at bottom-left, a menu-bar clock showing hours and minutes, and a new identity that is Prism’s own — flat colours, drawn hardware icons for floppy and hard drives, an amber signature band. The screen settles at 640 × 200, the widest mode EOU offers.

Prism v0.1 — first light

The shell’s first working version, running on NitrOS-9 EOU: a menu bar (Prism, File, View, Special), drive icons down the right of a 640-wide desktop, directory windows listing a drive’s real contents, and a mouse pointer driving all of it. Two themes from day one — a curated colour theme and Classic Mono — switchable live from the View menu.

Program launching was still a stub and the icons were simple line drawings, but the shape of the thing was on the screen and verified: the CoCo 3, wearing a desktop.

A desktop for the CoCo 3 — the project begins

Keith Clark of Rodney, Ontario commissions a Finder-style graphical shell for the TRS-80 Color Computer 3 — written from scratch, in the open, as a free gift to the CoCo community. The brief came from the polished graphical desktops of the CoCo's era — and the conviction that its hardware could wear one just as well.

The project is called Prism. Its source will be published under the MIT licence when the first release ships, and this site is its home. Welcome — mind the pins.