[Coco] DW3 WireBug mode

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 1:15 PM, Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote:

> Aaron had suggested at one point that maybe someone could alter the basic roms so that the "PRINT#" statement be extended beyond -2 (-3, -4, etc) to reflect the dw ports (N1, N2 ~ N14) so that "PRINT#-3 $DWCMDSTRING" would result in the string being sent to the represented DW port. I think it's a good idea, the problem is finding room in the rom area to put the code. This would allow any DW cmd string to be sent directly to the DW ports from a BASIC program. You could even write a BASIC MIDI program and send the MIDI bytes directly to N14 (DW's midi port). The routines to actually send and recieve the bytes are already in the HDBDOS code. This is how the DW version of Lyra writes Midi data to DW. There's just no way of accessing the routines except through ML.
>
>  I personally would be willing to drop cassette and printer routines to gain the "PRINT#-1" thru "PRINT#-E" to make all the ports equal in naming convention. I can always use Vcc to transfew tape programs to disk and who (but Gene) uses a real printer with the Coco these days?
>

I'd love to see support for the dw channels in HDBDOS.  You could
write a telnet BBS or even a web server in BASIC :)
Giving up cassette support would be fine by me.  That makes me wonder
about other possibilities too.. any BASIC tokens that take up a lot of
space and could be done without most the time?  Maybe PLAY or DRAW...
I think SOUND needs a small table of the waveform too.  The idea would
be that this ROM would be for people interested in exploring new
software using the new capabilities, so perfect backwards
compatibility could be abandoned.  After all, one can always load the
"pure" rom as needed.
It's interesting stuff.

-Aaron