CoCoIRC is a native Internet Relay Chat client written from scratch in 6809 assembly language for the NitrOS-9 operating system. I started on this project a little under a full year ago and it has been, by far, the most complicated CoCo program I’ve ever written. It currently requires DriveWire in order to make the TCP connections to IRC servers, however I do plan to support other coco networking solutions in the future provided there are SCF drivers for it. Also, it only currently will run a Color Computer 3 since it is hardcoded to use the built-in 80-column text mode. Again, in the future I may be able to add support for other text modes allowing it to potentially run on a CoCo 2 as well. It also DOES work on MAME as long as you have the Becker interface setup with a DriveWire Server to talk to. NOTE: This release is very much BETA and I’m sure there will be bugs or things missing, but the best way for me to discover them is for others to mess with it. Please reach out to me if and when you find any of them so I can squash them.
I have been active on various IRC networks on and off since I was in high school in the 90s, and in fact, it helped get me through one of the toughest times in my life. It allowed me to connect and socialize with people in the mid 2000s when I was too ill to go out and see people in person. I really love to dream up ways in which our CoCos can be used not just for games or retro nostalgia, but also be useful in modern everyday life. We use our PCs/Macs/Phones/Tablets all the time to chat with fellow CoCo enthusiasts, but what if you could do the same thing using the CoCo ITSELF?! Well, you see where this is going. Now you can! Of course, by no means are you limited to just chatting about CoCo stuff. There are practically an infinite amount of channels you can join to talk about anything and everything.
I put together a quick demo video showing CoCoIRC in action which you can watch below. There are also links to download it for yourself and give it a try. If enough people are interested, I could perhaps make a tutorial video in the future where I walk people through process of setting everything up and connecting to a server, etc. Enjoy!