[Coco] Rainbow IDE 2.0 Basic and Gold in the works

[Roger Taylor]

Hello fellow programmers,

I've started work on Rainbow IDE 2.0 after months of idleness and 
feedback gathering.  An advanced version for the more hardcore 
programmers will also be created called Rainbow Gold.  The versioning 
scheme will be Rainbow 2.0 Basic and Rainbow 2.0 Gold.  Easy enough, 
and upgrading will be easy.

Lots of work in the M.E.S.S. emulator department will be done to help 
combat a serious problem I've had to deal with for years.  For some 
reason, the M.E.S.S. binaries and support tools such as imgtool and 
wimgtool keep CHANGING in ways that cripple my IDEs.  Usually, these 
changes are small and probably unnecessary, but for whatever reason 
the -options and -flags keep changing in imgtool.exe, I'm sure the 
author(s) have a good reason.

SO... what I'm doing is creating a smart system that should defeat 
the problem that the M.E.S.S. system keeps introducing.  In order for 
Rainbow to work seamlessly with the M.E.S.S. system on each release, 
I have to "outsmart" the system in several ways.  My goal is to 
devise a method of tickling the exe files in so many ways that it 
reveals it's new changes that could have otherwise crippled the 
Rainbow IDE from building virtual floppy disks or launching the 
emulator.  On top of that, a manual override will be provided so the 
programmer can set the IDE to use ANY version of mess.exe and 
imgtool.exe no matter what the authors did to break compatibility 
(not on purpose, ofcourse).  Nathan, are you reading this?  :)

A CoCo BASIC compiler is planned to be added as well, which should 
let BASIC programmers create super-fast binary games and programs 
using much simpler BASIC statements!

Please give me your feedback and ideas for the Rainbow IDE!

www.rainbowide.com

Thanks,
Roger Taylor



-- 
Roger Taylor