SysInfo: My New Tool For CoCo 3 Hardware Detection

I had some inspiration the other day when a friend showed me a linux script called “Neofetch” that collects information about your system and then displays it in the terminal in a snazzy way. I thought it would be cool to be able to do something similar on the CoCo 3, and so I started looking into it. I know there have been other programs written that detect which version of GIME you have, or how much RAM is in the system, but I wanted to combine all those ideas into one program for fun. In addition, this tool I wrote also tries to figure out what Disk ROM variant you are using by doing a checksum on it. If it doesn’t recognize the value, it will just print the 3 byte checksum value in hex instead. I would love it to be able recognize as many ROMs as possible, so please send me an email with the unknown values it gives you and the type of ROM you are using so I can add it to the database for future versions. 🙂

I had tons of fun writing this and a huge thanks to everyone who helped me puzzle out how to implement this stuff, especially the people I mention in the credits of the program 😁 I’m sure there will be some bugs and auto-detection is a tricky process, so please let me know if it gets things wrong so I can try and correct it. Unfortunately for the time being, it is a CoCo 3 only program though I do have plans to support CoCo 1 and 2 in the future! You can watch a demo video of my program in action below. If you want to try it out for yourself, there will be a download link as well. Just extract the DSK image from the zip file, mount it (or write it to your favorite storage medium) and then type LOADM”SYSINFO” and EXEC it. (UPDATE: For the new version 1.2, use LOADM”SYSNFO12″ instead). Have fun!

Download Links:

Download SysInfo v1.0 (Original)
Download SysInfo v1.2