[Coco] CoCo IDE update

[Roger Taylor]

At 08:59 AM 10/28/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Good show, Roger!.  It's projects such as this that provide extra options 
>for other projects.  Would it be worth it to burn to EPROM a complete 
>security system, or any other robotic application?  Probably, and to top 
>it off, with the application being upgradable, burning an upgrade ROM 
>would be easy.  It's this sort of "hacking" that the CoCo was all about in 
>the first place.

Heck yea, it would be worth burning any software to an EPROM because you 
having nothing to lose.  When you want to upgrade, you could just erase the 
EPROM and do it over.

Your software can be created as a .ROM image and tested from this IDE 
rather quickly (if M.E.S.S. is present).  Impressively quick, I might 
add.  On the other hand, software that uses hardware not standard with the 
CoCo setup would need to be tested further on an EPROM.  That is, M.E.S.S. 
can emulate most common peripherals, but don't expect it to recognize your 
home-brewed devices.

I think the ultimate addition to my system would be EPROM burning code to 
drive some popular burner that PC users like to use.

What I have to thank is the fact that M.E.S.S. is free for all to download 
and run on their PC.  My IDE can seamlessly interface with M.E.S.S. to 
provide immediate emulation of your software, whether it's a virtual disk 
or ROM you built.  It's all handled by a checkmark here and a checkmark 
there. :)

If you just haven't tried M.E.S.S. yet, you can still develop software and 
move it to a real CoCo using Vavasour's PORT.EXE and DSKINI.EXE tools, I'm 
sure, but you won't be able to test your stuff on-the-fly from the IDE 
unless you install M.E.S.S. (which is quite simple to do, and a highly 
suggested move to make!).