[Coco] Rainbow IDE

[Roger Taylor]

Just some news,

I plan to add more building options to Rainbow such as direct 
cassette audio output.  What's this?   Imagine building a 4k machine 
language game, or ASCII BASIC program, and upon the click of the Go 
button you get a successful build and a prompt that says, "Type 
CLOADM on your CoCo then click OK here", or something similar, and 
away goes your program right into the CoCo ready to run.

Most Rainbow users I know of make heavy use of the M.E.S.S. emulator 
launch feature which shows your program run right away if it's 
test-built as a ROM image, then later can be converted into a 
LOADMable binary quite easily, but for the ultimate test on some 
critical programs, you might want to port it into a CoCo using some 
means of serial communication.  That's why I am coming up with 
several ways to do this and I'll also provide the cables for hooking 
your CoCo to your PC.

One cable I have sold and will be making more soon is the PC Link 
serial cable that currently works with standard terminal programs 
between the CoCo and PC.  I'll be adding probably the Xmodem-CRC 
protocol to Rainbow so that your programs can be directly sent upon 
building, to your CoCo using Ultimaterm or some other terminal program.

If you'd like to use the cassette audio method, you can try that as 
well.  One of the reasons this is not a lost cause (since the PC Link 
cable is good enough), is that I am also testing several MP3 devices 
like the iPod and the cheap ($49) RCA Voice Recoder device (small MP3 
recorder/player) to see if they work well with doing CoCo cassette 
file I/O.  Ofcourse, without motor control, things won't be exactly 
as nice, but it's still possible to do away with cassette tapes and 
go digital if you want to preserve cassette programs or even have a 
huge archive of CoCo cassette games and programs on a digital device.

My goal is to make the Rainbow IDE support these digital audio 
devices to help give more ways of dealing with the various CoCo file 
formats that are now being emulated, and even written on a PC and 
stored in such formats as MP3.  That's right, click Go! in the IDE 
and end up with an MP3 of your program that can be CLOADMed into any CoCo.

Does all of this sound "a little too late"?  Maybe to some, but if an 
IDE offers so many portation features, limits are removed and the 
possibilities are expanded tremendously.  By connecting your CoCo to 
your PC using a serial cable or custom cassette audio cable (which I 
am working on now), you can do some serious playing around, or 
actually serious developing.

I hope that the Rainbow IDE will end up being one of the best CoCo 
preservation tools available in our ever-changing world of new 
digital devices.  Tapes are rotting.  Disks are rotting.  There 
really is no hope to stick with these forms of media forever, so I 
think it's time to support the digital audio devices as another storage option.

What's the advantage?  You can put a CoCo in 2mhz mode and CSAVEM a 
program at double the speed, and CLOADM them back just the same with 
no errors.  Use a good quality bitrate and you should be ok.  I did 
this with a MiniDisc recorder for years.  A 74-minute MiniDisc held a 
LOT of cassette programs.  It's not the memory size - it's the TIME 
that will fit on the media that counts.  So, a 32mb MP3 device that 
has a capacity of 13 hours of storage at the lowest compression 
format can hold probably all the cassette programs you can round 
up.  One such MP3 device I am testing now has built-in memory, so the 
small box is self-contained and has the audio in/out jacks for 
hooking to a CoCo.  Cool!

If you have any other ideas for the Rainbow IDE that you think might 
benefit the CoCo community, please let me know.

-- 
Roger Taylor