[Coco] DM3 development was Re: deskmate help

[Willard Goosey]

On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 08:16:38PM -0500, Roger Taylor wrote:
> What I always wanted to see for the Desk-Mate programs was a way to 
> include other apps.  All these years and all we got was the few 
> included apps.  

I think it could be done.  You'd have to:

1) follow the configuration given in CONFIG.DESK.  This hasn't fully
been decoded, but the user-settable parts are pretty obvious.

2)Add icons to the dmapps file.  See
http://www.sdc.org/~goosey/os9/dmapps.lzh for full info about this file.
I also documented what I knew about CONFIG.DESK there.  Unless of course
DM3 won't support more than the 6 apps already there.

3) Use the VDG screen.  I've never seen any programmers info for using
VDG on CoCo3 screens, only LI stuff for the PMODE screens.  This may be
the first big problem.  I don't know if things like fonts are handled
through a standard interface like Windint has or if are  DM3 specific
hacks.

4) The mouse *should* be handled normally, since OS-9 takes care of that
for us.  OTOH DM3 is Tandy software and they liked to cheat.

If I was interested in developing for CoCo Deskmate, the first thing I'd
do is test to see if icons added to dmapps are recognized.  This could
be done by adding an icon structure for one of the utilities normally
reached through the menu.  DMDSKINI comes to mind,  though it might be a
tad dangerous to play with.  DMTIM might be better, the only thing it'll
mess up is your clock.

If that works, and you know how to handle hi-res VDG screens, the next
big thing to test would probably be, does DM interfere with the OS-9
mouse?  If it doesn't, you're probably home free.

Since DM3 was designed to run on a 128K machine, I doubt there's a lot
of shared module action going on.  If there is, then you start getting
into "some disassembly required", and I'm not going there.

>The ones included were nice but too low-res for serious use.

What, 160x192 16-color isn't good enough? ;-)

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.
  -- R.E. Howard