The bad part (and one could argue this being a "good" part as well) for the VIC-20 and C64 was that if you wanted to do anything useful and reasonable in BASIC on those machines, you almost HAD to delve into some deep areas; the BASIC they used wasn't even as sophisticated as what was available on the Apple IIe (which was pretty nice). The best versions of BASIC (in microcomputer land - there were BASICs out there for business purposes on much more sophisticated 16-bit machines of the time that were amazing) were on Radio Shack's offerings (mainly because they were from Microsoft). Compare, for instance, BASIC for the C64 and the Color Computer 2, and you'll see a great difference (especially in the areas of sound and graphics generation).
That said, the C64 forced you to use either arcane commands to access internal ROM routines for certain graphics or sound generation, or you had to resort to machine code of some form or another. So you if you wanted to do something beyond the "basics" (so to speak), you had to get down and dirty with the hardware. This led to some amazing things being done by people with that machine; it was much more popular than Radio Shack/Tandy's offerings - it was much cheaper, plus it had built-in sound (SID) - whereas it's Radio Shack competitor, the Color Computer line - everything was done by the CPU.
These tradeoffs had their own implications, of course - there wasn't much like OS-9 available for the C64 (a multitasking, multiuser operating system for 8-bit machines of the time - which was ported very successfully to the Color Computer, and still lives on in the open-source version called NitrOS9). But the 6809 chip (which facilitate the OS-9 conversion, as that chip was also used in a lot of embedded and industrial controllers, which was the primary purpose for OS-9) was an expensive chip that, while really powerful compared to what was in the C64, ate into the bottom line, and was part of the reason why a sound chip wasn't included on the CoCo.
Radio Shack/Tandy later came out with expansion offerings for sound (the Speech/Sound and Orchestra-90 cartridges), which could be plugged into a multipak interface (MPI) along with the floppy drive controller, and give great sound - but it was too little, too late, and both were expensive upgrades (if you had a floppy drive, in order to keep everything you had to spend several hundred dollars more just for better sound).
There were ways to get better sounds out of the Color Computer, but they consumed a lot of the CPU resources, and so they were mainly only used for music generation software (Musica and Lyra were two of the popular ones; the Rainbow also published a long program to type in that gave a really sophisticated "tracker" style four-voice system, where each voice could be defined with an envelope and waveform). Some ML coders learned to combine some sound generation realtime with graphics for some games, but it wasn't great, though toward the end of the heyday of the CoCo it got better. Recently, people have made greater strides with sound and music for games, graphics, etc - heck, I think there is even a SID emulator for the Color Computer...
> That said, the C64 forced you to use either arcane commands to access internal ROM routines for certain graphics or sound generation
C64 ROM contains no graphics or sound generation commands. Unless you count text mode scrolling as such.
Graphics and sound was either POKEs and PEEKs or 6510 machine language.
> These tradeoffs had their own implications, of course - there wasn't much like OS-9 available for the C64 (a multitasking, multiuser operating system for 8-bit machines of the time
That said, the C64 forced you to use either arcane commands to access internal ROM routines for certain graphics or sound generation, or you had to resort to machine code of some form or another. So you if you wanted to do something beyond the "basics" (so to speak), you had to get down and dirty with the hardware. This led to some amazing things being done by people with that machine; it was much more popular than Radio Shack/Tandy's offerings - it was much cheaper, plus it had built-in sound (SID) - whereas it's Radio Shack competitor, the Color Computer line - everything was done by the CPU.
These tradeoffs had their own implications, of course - there wasn't much like OS-9 available for the C64 (a multitasking, multiuser operating system for 8-bit machines of the time - which was ported very successfully to the Color Computer, and still lives on in the open-source version called NitrOS9). But the 6809 chip (which facilitate the OS-9 conversion, as that chip was also used in a lot of embedded and industrial controllers, which was the primary purpose for OS-9) was an expensive chip that, while really powerful compared to what was in the C64, ate into the bottom line, and was part of the reason why a sound chip wasn't included on the CoCo.
Radio Shack/Tandy later came out with expansion offerings for sound (the Speech/Sound and Orchestra-90 cartridges), which could be plugged into a multipak interface (MPI) along with the floppy drive controller, and give great sound - but it was too little, too late, and both were expensive upgrades (if you had a floppy drive, in order to keep everything you had to spend several hundred dollars more just for better sound).
There were ways to get better sounds out of the Color Computer, but they consumed a lot of the CPU resources, and so they were mainly only used for music generation software (Musica and Lyra were two of the popular ones; the Rainbow also published a long program to type in that gave a really sophisticated "tracker" style four-voice system, where each voice could be defined with an envelope and waveform). Some ML coders learned to combine some sound generation realtime with graphics for some games, but it wasn't great, though toward the end of the heyday of the CoCo it got better. Recently, people have made greater strides with sound and music for games, graphics, etc - heck, I think there is even a SID emulator for the Color Computer...