[Coco] Disk EDTASM & text files

[Willard Goosey]

I've been doing some groundwork for development with Disk EDTASM,
writing include files with all the various equates for ROM calls and
for "Color TRS-DOS," such as it is.

One of the things that had been bothering me about this is that if I
edited a file with my favorite CoCo3 word processor (Simply Better) I
couldn't get EDTASM to load it.

I finally took a look at the edtasm disk's directory with a disk
editor, and noticed that edtasm sets the record-length word.  This
isn't a DECB thing, but is something the DOS adds, using two of the
otherwise unused bytes of the directory entry.

So it was a fairly simple matter to hack up a little basic program to
"fix" a file's directory entry with a record-length of $0001.  

During testing of this, I also discovered that Simply Better doesn't
do anything with the unused half of a directory entry, leaving it as a
string of $FFs if that's what it was.  The usual thing is to fill in
zeros.  

So, while EDTASM doesn't require the record-length field to have a
necessarily valid value (0 works!), $FF confuses and enrages it. :-)

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
   --- Yacko