[Coco] M.E.S.S. ain't so messy afterall...

[Roger Taylor]

If any of this IDE project info sounds boring to some of you, I'll soon 
have a demo that might just blow you away...  maybe, maybe not. :)

more info on the 6809/6309/CoCo IDE...
I now have the IDE performing a quick alteration of the M.E.S.S. .ini files 
for your system so that any mounted ROMs or floppydisks are unmounted 
before the IDE kicks you into the emulator with your project mounted.  The 
problem before was that if a past ROM was never unmounted from the M.E.S.S. 
window, and you went in with a .dsk mounted, there would be conflicts.  I 
am making it possible to avoid having to manually unmount your project ROMs 
or disks over and over again.  You build it, you see it.  No interruptions, 
from the edit window to M.E.S.S. popping up with the nuclear green screen 
and your software mounted and ready to go.  If it's a ROM... it's already 
running.  :)

I am now building virtual disks and ROMs with still work to be done.  The 
process will involve cycling through all of your project component files 
(.asm, .txt, .dat, .any) or whatever, and just get them to the virtual disk 
in the way you specified once.  Not all .asm files are to be assembled, but 
are for inclusions in other .asm files, yet you can mark any number of .asm 
files to be assembled.  This means a project can actually contain as many 
single programs or modules as a floppy disk can hold.  When you click 
Build, you could watch 10 different games assemble and build to a .dsk in 
lightning time (theoretically).  Or perhaps the P-3 system streaming from 
ASCII source right onto a virtual disk ready to run.  I've been doing that 
from a batch file for months now.  The idea is to be able to build CoCo 
floppy disks and ROMs, not just to assemble files.  That's part of it, 
though.  The current ROM/EPROM sizes are 8,16,32,64,128,256k.

If you choose to build a ROM image of your software, naturally only one 
.asm file can be assembled, while any other files in the project could be 
.asm includes, data embeds (CCASM's 'includebin' directive), etc.

ok, back to work