[Coco] Backup of HDB-DOS drives

[Mark McDougall]

On 12/02/2012 7:38 AM, Steve Ostrom wrote:

> Not many people I know would ever hand-assemble a
> program, including counting back to branch points, etc.

Years ago I worked for a company that produced traffic controllers. The 
system I was working on was based on a 68HC11 micro with banked memory, 
and the ROM code was well over 68KB.

The software wasn't written in-house, but rather the entire controller 
was written by someone outside the company. I ended up working with this 
guy for a few weeks on some hardware enhancements that required 
corresponding software updates.

We would discuss the changes in the office during the day, and he'd go 
home and work on the software overnight. When he came in the next 
morning, he'd have some patches for me to try. These weren't binary, but 
he'd have hundreds of lines of source from different banks of memory 
that he'd modified without even running an assembler over them. They'd 
assemble first go (usually) and pretty much work almost every time 
straight away. If something didn't work, he'd take note of it and fix it 
up that night.

They didn't have any sort of ICE or other debugging tool for the HC11, 
so he'd never really seen any advantage on developing or debugging on 
the actual hardware.

These days of course the first thing I'd do would be to write a MESS 
driver for it, but back then I don't think there was a 68HC11 core (is 
there one now?). The guy didn't have much of a clue about emulation at 
all - but he was pretty damn amazing at writing working code 'blind' 
without access to hardware.

Regards,

-- 
|    Mark McDougall    |  Error: witty remark not found!
| <http://pacedev.net> |