[Coco] cocotape.exe available by request

[Roger Taylor]

At 11:06 PM 1/9/2009, you wrote:
>i received both mailings - i guess the other guys email bounced his 
>back. man you are a genius. My dad talks about your projector being 
>the best coco program he ever saw :)

Tell him Thanks.  :)

When I fire up my Projector-3 program, I actually see 3 or 4 years of 
pain that has come and gone.  Let me explain.
There's actually a soul in P-3 made up of everything I'm about to 
mention, probably for the first time ever.

It took me a Long time to write Projector-3.  I slept very little 
during this time.  Some of my allnighters resulted in passing out at 
5am and having nightmares being caught in a code loop not being able 
to escape. You might not believe it, but I'd run or write routines in 
my head during my sleep.  I'd go through the code in my head trying 
to debug it, and wake up with the solution.

Most of P-3 was written during my wild days when I was around 25.  I 
had moved to Magnolia AR to take up a Coca-Cola route.  The city was 
kinda small and I experienced the New Guy in Town life that went on 
for years.  Many whores and even hard-to-get ladies found me out and 
I went through my you-know-what peak, becoming the alpha-male in the 
circle of friends that hung around me.  I went from a computer "nerd" 
(as they used to call anybody with a computer) with lots of good 
lifetime buddies to a low-profile computer programmer with the 
ability to get you-know-what'd as often as I liked, so I had this 
pulling effect between fun and my other fun which was 
programming.  So, P-3 was mostly written during my years of so-called 
town fame and I attribute the quality of the program to every woman 
that broke my heart.  To get my mind off of "her" I'd block it all 
out and fire up EDTASM and spend the next weeks coding heavily on a 
determined program that would be completed no matter what.  And so it was.

As for the program itself, P-3 actually started as "The Projector", 
not having dither capabilities and having less formats.  P-3 went on 
to decode and encode more formats making it a graphics interchange 
system + viewer.  P-3 is very close to an operating system with all 
of it's core routines and common hooks to call them from external 
programs that the shell can load.  The system recognizes programs you 
place on the disk ending with .EC* for the filename, with * being the 
letter you hit while holding down the ALT key.  This is how Mirror, 
Negative, and other functions work.

Robert Gault has written at least two codecs for P-3.  Using the 
global.asm include file, your codec or subprogram knows about the 
system calls to use if you want to.

As I explained back in the 90's, P-3 would live on because you can 
expand it with drop-in codecs.  These are *.fmt files containing 
decode, encode, and view routines, all able to call P-3 system 
routines to take the pain out of the work.  That's why these drivers 
are so small.  You basically decode the picture on your own and send 
the color stream to P-3's shell.  P-3 renderings the image 
automatically and displays it.  P-3 can encode a picture file by 
sending the screen's colors to the right codec, chosen by the 
extension you type for the Save Filename.

P-3 can also display text files and play music but due to the lack of 
assembly programmers, the system might not ever see it's full potential.
The CCASM source code is available as a Rainbow IDE project!  You can 
click GO and build the massive P-3 floppy disk in about 15 seconds.


-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com