i had the ultimate Coco Setup... Coco 2 with 2 DSFD and an 80-column dot matrix printer ... I ran OS-9 at one point and some drafting software. That machine was amazing and the setup even today would have taken care of a LOT of our daily chores. And of course subscription to Color Computer Magazine which brought TONS of programs to be coded by hand in basic and absolute GEEK fest for us... the community was spectacular.

I wrote 37 video games for Tandy from StarBlaze to Tetris, and I loved this machine. I recently donated all of my Color Computers (1 through 3+) to the Oklahoma Historical Society / OKPOP museum as well as expansion interfaces, parallel printer interfaces, floppy disk interfaces, 15mb hard drive interfaces, and more. Many thanks for this video! Greg

I remember these sitting at our Radio Shack store in 1992 collecting dust! I really should have bought one back then.

I had a color computer 3 in 1998 and 1990 and loved it. I would type in games and save them on a tape drive... I learned some basic programming from it.

That's great. I agree that the Coco3 is so much more capable than the one or two that you really cannot lump them together. I think Tandy missed the boat on this line though. They seemed to assume the 1000 to be a natural upgrade path, but $799, is a lot more than $199. There are Coco user groups even today. I don't know anyone who actually used an MC10. It was like the machine Grandma would buy at Christmas because it was in her budget, and you never had the heart to exhange it. I recently got a Timex Sinclair 1000, and inside the front cover of the manual in shaky writing was "You can buy the programs for this at Kmart, dear."

I recently made a trip back to the US after being gone since 1991. My Coco3 made the trip back to Japan with me. It has a place of honor all it's own.

I had a Coco 2 and Coco 3. Great machines. Dungeons of Daggorath was my game.

I just took home my dads CoCo3 he bought somewhere in the late 80's. It had sat in his garage for 20-30 years. It initially didnt want to boot but for some reason it decided it wanted to work and has not stopped since. The only thing I had to fix was the keyboard circuits. Some of the keys didnt want to work so I bought a circuit pen and took wrote over the spots that didnt beep on the continuity meter. Almost all the 5.25 floppies still read and write. The tape drive still works and loads programs. The monitor works. Just had to ebay some joysticks. We were HARD on those joysticks as kids. I remember going through a bunch of them. I know we had a dot matrix printer which is probably still in his house somewhere... Hell can you even get dot matrix paper anymore?!!? LOL ... I wanted this for one main reason... to play Cashman and I was not let down.

I cut my computing teeth on the CoCos. They were powerful, versatile computers but Tandy/Radio Shack didn't seem to want to support them because of their like of "business" computers (Tandy 1000, and so forth). Thanks to the late Lonnie Falk and his gang at Rainbow Magazine, we Coco nuts KNEW what these little machines were capable of doing.

It's really cool just how much the Color Computer 3 was punching above it's weight class. You can get it set up with a hirez mouse, a GUI based OS/9 multitasking envorment, and have a ton of options for hires resolutions.

And the story continues, with new games being published almost every year. And the OS/9 system is being maintained and improved too.

Had a CoCo 3 when I was a kid back in the 80s and loved that thing!

CoCo 3 was my first computer. I went on to run a c++ software development company many years later and am grateful for my parents giving me this head start.

Who still wants one of these ? I have the silver Coco 4k with the tape recorder. Remember typing in line per line in BASIC to create games ...LoL

LGR found a CoCo 3 at Goodwill for THREE BUCKS, and it worked fine. Lucky SOB....

There is a story behind the boot RON. Three developers made a cartoon image of themselves in a a Three Stooges style and imbedded it on the chip. The inventory was built and shipped befirevRadio Shack discovered it.

This machine determined the path of the rest of my life. Thanks Radio Shack! lol

I started with the TRS-80 Color Computer with its "chiclet" keyboard and 16K memory. We installed a weirdly-soldered 64K upgrade on it. It worked fine enough until I broke it. I was fortunate enough to skip the CoCo 2 and directly upgraded to the Color Computer 3, whose performance far outperformed even the NEC V22 8086 PC clone my brother owned. I installed a 512K upgrade on the CoCo 3 and ran the multi-user OS-9 (and a dial-up BBS) on it for a while with a third-party 6-cartridge interface. It was completely awesome. Then came the Amiga and my computing life changed again.

I had a TI 99/4A as a gift for Christmas 1983, when it went out of the market. Years later, I would buy an RLX 1000 Tandy with monitor, keyboard, printer all cables and mouse. i learned QBASIC, played "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy" and used "Print Shop" and went online!

Thank you, thank you, thank you - I'm now a subscriber! Outside of the CoCo community, the 3 is glossed over, lumped together, or ignored entirely (see LGR's recent video) - so your overview of the differences is very helpful. Btw, Deskmate 3 is essentially the same Deskmate as the CoCo 2, but with 80 column and RGB support. Those of us that expecting "Tandy 1000 deskmate" quality back in the day, were disappointed to unwrap a warmed up coco cash grab (squeezed, like most CoCo3 software, to run in 128K standard memory). OS-9-- you showed Level 1 for the CoCo 1/2 --- offers an opportunity to flesh out the windowing and multi-tasking CoCo3 features in a future video. Maybe a few more screen shots next time, but extremely well written and delivered! Try this 2020 16-color game, when you have a chance. You'll need VCC/MAME or (a 512K card from boysontech.com) to play it. hypertechgaming.itch.io/digger3 Also, to get a sense of the 640 4-color mode potential, take a look at Omnistar (though Omnistar is mostly text, future games may start to utilize the higher res mode more often, as a new FPGA GIME chip is due for release that offers additional colors and resolutions). rickadams.itch.io/omnistar

The CoCo3 is the harder to come by and will cost more - it's definitely the CoCo to have - the paged memory management built into the GIME chip was really clever and rather sophisticated for an 8-bit computer - competitors just had simple bank switching MMUs.

I'd have loved to see that 256 color mode in action!

I had one - played lots of games while everyone else had Nintendo. Did some basic coding/programming too--as a really young child.

With the max-10 software, you were able to do what macintosh did back in the day. It was way superior to wordperfect on pc, you were able to write your text with multiple fonts and insert image in your document on the fly. Tandy didnt allowed 256 colors to not compete with thandy 1000 but some guys later were able to activate it. See jonh linville plays movies in 256 colors on that computer.

Used to play sublogic flight simulator 1 on one of these when I was 6years old!

I upgraded mine to 512K with the memory upgrade. But you really needed to be running OS9 to make that worthwhile. I've often thought of pulling it out and trying to get a Zip drive working on it.

That's one dirty CoCo3...

The Color Computer 3 is awesome! Do you own one?

Where in Maine is Tandy?

My main machines in the 80s were Ataris. But I had fun programming CoCos and Apple ][s as well. As I recall, you could change the pointers for the screen memory of the coco to achieve "page flipping" which meant masking graphic redraws and getting a smoother visual experience. If I'd owned one of these rather than just playing around with the ones in the local Radio Shack, I would have navigated its memory map and done some real mischief like I did with Ataris and Apples and Commodore PETs (My experience with VIC-20s and C64s was limited.) Life so started to suck once PCs and Macs took over. Like the fall of Communism or even worse. Whole worlds died.

I bought a coco3 with 512mb after my regular unit died, but I do still have my mc-10 (my first computer)

My first "real" computer (other than gaming consoles and calculators) was the CoCo3. Good memories. Too bad people want so much money for these things, or I'd pick one up for a trip down memory lane.

Hit the bell for notifications? That seldom works.

I've never seen one of these systems in person.

Yeah your videos are nice and all but .. where is the footage? You can talk about graphics and capabilities all day long, but it's kinda dull without seeing it :/

Oh no...Take a Coco.....Newsmaker likes V-Tubers.

Yeah you might want to reconsider cleaning your stuff before filming it, just sayin

Could you guys not clean the CoCo 3? It looks terrible.