[Coco] A Humble Proposal Re: M/L Disk I/O and CoCo Game "Construction Sets"

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Joel Ewy may have mentioned these words:
>First off, let me say that I'm well aware that computer culture is a
>meritocracy, and my few, feeble contributions to the CoCo / MM/1
>software library hardly qualify me to make grand proposals.

Sounds like me... I'm just an idiot in search of a village... ;-)

>Why not start building a collaborative, open source library of assembly
>language routines for the CoCo

I've actually started that, but last fall this thing called "Life" got in 
the way - and I'm not talking about the board game.

However, my little project was centered around "Getting rid of" SECB - I 
wanted fully autonomous routines that doesn't rely on the ROM whatsoever. 
This was not only "not portable" as it was designed around the CoCo3 
hardware only and prolly wouldn't be (easily) portable to NitrOS-9 - I was 
thinking more for embedded applications.

What I do have (admittedly not much) will create & clear a 80x28 screen, 
set screen colors & palettes, output characters & strings, and I started on 
a keyboard input routine - I got as far as scanning the keyboard matrix & 
getting "multiple unencoded character codes" (up to 5) out of the keyboard 
(where you could see both the shift, F1 & "Q" keys were pressed) - but I 
didn't have any lookup tables set up yet that would convert the character 
codes converted into ASCII, and I got rather "stuck" trying to figure out 
an algorithm for a key-repeat system.

The other "plus" is as I was writing it, I was commenting it as best as I 
could... with actually meaningful comments, not examples like:

loop at 1          LDA     #100    ; load A accumulator with 1
                                ^^^^^ Bad commenting practice ^^^^^

Each code module had overall comments for input/output parameters, etc... 
it was fairly modular the way I wrote it, but again, compared to 
Sockmaster's work, this was rather sophomoric.

This was all to be open source, but as it was nowhere near ready for 
primetime, I haven't published any of it yet. I would be happy to publish 
what I have done, if people would like to see it.

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch at 30below.com

What do you do when Life gives you lemons,
and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????