[Coco] assembly programming on a 16K CoCo 2

[Roger Taylor]

At 11:10 AM 6/27/2006, you wrote:
>Okay, so what are the pros and cons of ROM Paks versus floppies? What
>hardware do I need to get my PC to make ROM Paks and CoCo floppies? Making
>ROM Paks on the PC and running them on the CoCo 2 sounds good, since I'm not
>going to mass-produce them anyway. And with the floppy drive I just wanted
>to know if there was a way to get it to work with a 16K machine, using
>assembly language. Apparently you can't get at it through standard Color
>Basic but I thought you could maybe access it with assembly. Of course you
>wouldn't have a way to get the software going anyway, unless you could come
>up with a short program using POKE's that would load it from the floppy. Is
>there a way to do that?


I don't think anybody's producing ROM Paks for the CoCo nowadays.  :)  That 
doesn't mean people aren't burning EPROMs to go in Disk controllers, etc.

What I was actually suggesting was a trick within the Rainbow IDE which 
will speed up development of certain games and apps.  Since the IDE can 
assemble a ROM image (using CCASM), mount that image in M.E.S.S. and launch 
the emulator, you can go from source code to a running game in one click: 
IF you have the IDE set to 1) assemble as an 8K ROM, 2) mount the ROM in 
M.E.S.S., and 3) launch M.E.S.S..

Do you want to actually produce a final program that's meant to be an 8K 
ROM image?  Maybe not.  That's why you later change the program's main ORG 
statement to point to somewhere lower in RAM like 8192 or 16384, etc. 
before you produce your final copy of the software.  Set the IDE to 
Assemble as a Multi-Record binary, and you can then load your program from 
Disk BASIC.

A reason you might choose to develop programs as ROM images from the IDE at 
first is simply to allow you to go from source code to running in one click 
without the need to type anything at the CoCo BASIC prompt when M.E.S.S. 
boots into the emulator, such as LOADM "GAME": EXEC


-- 
Roger Taylor