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

[Roger Taylor]

At 02:29 PM 12/30/2006, you wrote:
>Cool! How about a disassembler of the same class as "The Source III"
>for the CoCo?
>
>Cheers,
>Fedor


A partial and incomplete interactive disassembler exists in the 
current Rainbow IDE versions, but no documentation or support is 
provided because it's totally useless at this point.  It's easier for 
me to just hide those features for now while I keep working on it.

The idea is to let the IDE import a binary such as a CoCo game, which 
produces a .dsm file containing intermediate code (not .asm source at 
this point) that the IDE can understand and display in an 
editor.  The dsm editor will let the programmer set label points and 
names, mark data sections, etc. then the disassembler can be called 
again and again on this intermediate file to produce more correct dsm 
files.  The dsm files will be turned into asm files in the end, and 
if they can be reassembled with CCASM and run then the disassembly 
process was successful.  I want to make the whole process seamless... 
binary to dsm, dsm to asm, asm to bin, in one click of the Disassemble button.

While the intermediate code editor is up you can make on-the-fly 
changes and then try to rebuild each time until you see the game or 
program running in the emulator.  Keep in mind that the game or 
program that you see running is not the original binary, but the 
disassembled and reassembled binary.  Wow.  If it crashes then 
something is wrong in the intermediate code.

Ofcourse, I'm talking in the future tense on some of these ideas 
because that is what my goal is and where it's heading now.  I'll try 
to put as many automatic features in the intermediate code generator 
as possible, but anybody who's tried to disassemble code before knows 
that it's 50% elbow grease no matter how ya cut it.  :)


-- 
Roger Taylor