[Coco] Fooling around with assembly in RS-DOS environment

[Arthur Flexser]

I also seem to recall that there were published patches to Rompack Edtasm
to overcome the shortcomings you mention.  One, by Roger Schrag published
in Rainbow, greatly enhanced its program storage space by allowing storage
to the RAM above $C000 with the ROMs switched out.  (The name Superpatched
Edtasm comes to mind.)  I'm pretty sure there were also one or more
versions that added disk operations, via published free or commercially
sold programs.

Art


On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 2:49 PM, William Astle <lost at l-w.ca> wrote:

> On 2016-04-11 12:37, Arthur Flexser wrote:
>
>> I seem to recall that unpatched Edtasm supports 80 columns as well, if you
>> go to width 80 before booting it up, though my memory may be mistaken
>> here.  Possibly there is an initial prompt whose response must be typed
>> blindly before the 80 column screen comes up.  I might be confused between
>> Disk and Rompack Edtasm versions, also.
>>
>
> Unpatched Disk EDTASM does work fine in 80 column mode if you do "WIDTH80"
> before running the "DOS" program. There is a blind prompt you have to
> answer to start it, but it's easy enough. You can "patch" it to autostart
> EDTASM without the prompt easily enough. (It involves editing or adding a
> single line in a basic program but I can't recall the details.)
>
> The ROM version cannot work with the 80 column mode because the SECB
> support routines for 80 column mode are not present when the EDTASM ROM is
> so even if you disabled the autostart on the ROM, set WIDTH80, and launched
> it manually (EXEC&HE010), it will crash.
>
> For anyone thinking they can fudge things by loading it from tape into the
> C000 range and then running it with the SECB stuff there will need to
> rethink that, too. The EDTASM ROM is larger than 8K so it won't fit in the
> C000-DFFF range.
>
> The EDTASM ROM can, however, be saved as a disk file and loaded into, say,
> low RAM. A very minor patch to it to set the bottom of RAM and possibly the
> top of RAM (I can't remember the details there) will allow it to work. It
> turns out the ROM is position independent so the code itself runs fine. I
> used to do this back in the day. However, running this way you don't have
> the ability to save to disk so Disk EDTASM is still likely a better option
> if you have it.
>
>
>
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