[Coco] unARC for the PC?

[Roger Taylor]

Come to think of it, since it's so easy to add command-line tools to 
the Phoenix IDE, I'll be on the hunt for some cool tools.  Again, I'm 
not sure if anyone is really ARC'ing things up these days, but 
unARC'ing the files to get them onto your PC for preservation and 
such sounds like a good idea and it would be fun doing it from an IDE.

I'd also love to see a BASIC compiler, CUTS utility, and a C 
compiler, but I couldn't possibly work on all these wishes since I've 
got to focus on the actual IDE.

However, I'm working on the picture/image converter (.exe) so we can 
directly add JPG, GIF, BMP, etc. pictures to our CoCo games and 
programs by converting them into formats such as HSCREEN, 
PMODE/loadmable, CoCoMax and other CoCo formats.  Think of the image 
converter command as sort of a Projector-3 for the PC.  Adding a 
graphics title screen to your game would be as easy as loading a JPG 
image, choosing the builder to be 'ImgConvert' and the object type to 
be 'CoCo HSCREEN', and then reference the HSCREEN object file from 
your assembly source code using CCASM's MMU Include command and the 
picture will be added to your program code automatically in a way 
that when you LOADM the game/program, the graphics screen is loaded 
as well so you just have to set the graphics mode to display 
it!  This is how I did it in my Jeweled game, only I had to manually 
convert the image back when I wrote the game.

-- 
~ Roger Taylor