[Coco] Portal-9 projects in work

[Roger Taylor]

At 10:20 AM 1/25/2004 +0000, you wrote:
Thanks to Roger's help I am now using Portal-9 on a regular basis. My first
project is to put onto a .dsk all of my ham radio related programs that I
have in various places. Most of my programs are in BASIC. I am curious if
anyone else is using Portal-9 and if so what kind of projects are you
working on right now? I will make my ham radio project/s available as soon
as I finish.

73's de Alan
W8OAJ (ex AA4ZI)
Amateur radio operator since 1971

Speaking of 6809 assembly projects, I will be creating some of my own over 
time. It really doesn't take long at all to make a neat CoCo game 
especially when you have so much other source code you can cut and paste 
routines from. When this much work is already done, it makes it a lot 
easier to develop something. I like to load up a bunch of .asm files then 
look through them for useful code that can be copied into my main source 
window. When support for a disassembler is added soon, you should be able 
to take a ROM Pak, turn it into source code, edit the source, click Build, 
and watch it run with your changes, all in one session, with everything 
saved as a project you can reload (ofcourse).

Also, like Alan was saying about moving files to a .dsk image. Here's how 
easy it is...

click Create New Project, enter a project title
click Project - Add Target Floppy Disk
enter a .dsk name
 From the main work screen
Load/Add each component (file) to the project
these are files you want to end up on the .dsk image
as you load each file, enter the word "same" into the 'output filename' field
select the 'file type on disk' from the drop-down list
continue until all files are loaded
click Build

there ya go, a .dsk image with all of those files on it, and the project is 
saved for later building

As you see, Portal-9 is not only an "assembler" but can assemble virtual 
disks out of an arbritrary set of files. If they won't fit, you'll get an 
error message. Not only this, but your projects can contain multiple target 
disks, so you can do the same to a set of 4 or 5 disks and the whole 
session is saved as a project file. In other words, your work is not lost 
and can be recalled later.

So, you can tackle the 'imgtool.exe' program at the command prompt, or you 
can let Portal-9 do the work for you. Ah, now I have to add the ".dsk 
import" option so you can take files from a virtual disk as well.

cheers



----------
Roger Taylor