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CoCo Urbane

Load or Save

I’m trying to use GitHub. At one place my project saved properly but didn’t load. At another it loaded properly but didn’t save. The save and load are taken care of in two files. I copied the last versions of the two files into a folder to look at later. I moved the two files from the version that loaded properly into the last version. Lo and behold the load worked. The save didn’t work in the version I copied the files from, but once I copied the files to the latest version, the load and the save both worked. Hooray. I’m working on keeping the user filename in a file. Right now it prints the old filename, prompts for a new name then automatically loads the old user file.

Right now my wife’s exercise machine is in the communal living room. The parents want it out of there. We’re the grandparents. I moved furniture around to have a space for the machine in our room. I was just going to move the machine in. My wife wanted me to vacuum the space and spray vinegar on it so the cats wouldn’t be as likely to pee there. I vacuumed most of the room while I was about it. Just before I finished, the canister filled up clear to the top. I had the ask how to empty it. It was still making a noise. I cleaned off the rollers. It still made a noise. I cleaned a lot of cat hair out of the tubes. At that point it sounded like it did at the start. Our floor looks so fine. Well the exercise machine is too big for our door. We’re going to put it in the pantry. It’s quite big. Now I’m clearing out a space for the machine there. I find that when I work a while at chores then a while at my computer project I have the best results.

The weather is very cold right now here. It won’t be much above freezing until Saturday. No riding on my adult pedal tricycle. I miss doing that. I hope to be able to use my wife’s exercise machine in the future. Oh well, more time to work on my programs and projects.

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CoCo Urbane

I’m Back

I haven’t worked on my project for quite a while. My son has got me working with GitHub.. I plan to use it to publish my IMUrbane project when I get it back to working again. It was working when I quit working on it. Now the user can’t save his file. Oh well I’m having fun. As you may recall there is a full screen editor. It uses labels instead of line numbers and all the characters in variable names and labels are significant. I use lwasm from lwtools. I still use decb from toolbox. I still use Vcc, a coco emulator with a virtual hard drive. I guess I had better call it quits for tonight and get some sleep.

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CoCo Urbane

Bad Extract.bas

Extract.bas-001A

It seems like I had a bad extract.bas program in release.001 I think it won’t matter. No one will use my program. Let alone try to work on the system. Oh well. Here is a working version.

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CoCo Urbane

IMUrbane.001

ImUrbane.001

The purpose of this project is to make all of the characters in names significant in the Coco 2 basic language. It comes out of the box with just two characters significant. In addition line numbers are replaced by labels. E enters the full screen editor. D toggles debug mode. L loads the urbane file EARL.TXT and S saves it. Reset the coco or emulator before you edit ED2 to change the name. I’ve included all the asm and bas files I used to develop the system on Vcc, a coco3 RGBDos emulator, using EDTASM6309. I debugged as I went by writing one of my favorite programs using this project. go sub, return, on, for, to, step, next, and error messages remain, but I want to take a break so I think I’ll publish this on my blog nuts4cocos.org

Back when the coco 2 was new, a professor in California wrote a KARL program for it. A symbol moved around the screen picking things up and putting them down. He wrote an article about it in the Rainbow magazine, a huge national magazine devoted just to cocos. He showed how to add two distances. He said if anyone could show how to multiply them before the next issue came out he’d give them a copy of his program. It was very fancy. That was back in the days when you saved and loaded your programs on audio cassette players. I wrote a bare bones version and figured out how to multiply distances. I typed up what KARL needed to do to multiply distances. One of his assistants typed it in and made a couple of typos. Of course it didn’t work. I sent a tape in to prove that it worked. He couldn’t load it because the tape had a flaw on it. I never did send it in again. Ever since then have been writing KARL programs. Easy Assembler Robot Language. My name is Earl. If one substitutes b = bra for g = go to. s = bsr for go sub, and r = rts for return then one has an assembly language system, which I did when I wrote my first EARL program.

IMUrbane: arrows move around the screen. shift-left is bksp. shift right is del. enter opens a line. alt is shift-home on Vcc. I seem to have heard that is shift-clear on cocos. alt then enter deletes a line. shift-up toggles insert mode. shift down exits edit mode. alt followed by any key gives you what the coco would normally show for that key. Backup the floppy. RUN”ED”. Type L. It’s slow but well worth the wait. Now when you type RUN it runs the loaded urbane program EARL.TEXT Now you have a menu. L loads the famed add program. R and it runs. E and you can edit it with the same rules as IMUrbane. lines begin with a count byte. lines end with a zero byte. a star-line separates the file and the symbol table. symtab points at the byte count after the star line. there are two zero bytes at the start of the file. eof points at the final zero byte (zero length lines).

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CoCo Urbane

I Fixed Hex and Oct

Sub, return, on, for, to, step, next, restore, read, data, binary save, binary load, and error messages remain to be implemented. A real drawback is before I load my drivers s a m acts like sam or s am. No distinction. I don’t see any easy fix. Maybe I’ll just ignore the problem. for-next and sub-return would be very hard to implement because of my decision to fix the $=” problem by adding a “+” changed where things are in my copy buffer from the file space when I execute things. I would have to have to count the “+” ‘s that I had added every time I came to a sub, return, for, or next. It could be done but I don’t think I want to. When I got done I wouldn’t have much. I would have 30k for the user program, but my EARL program is only 6k. It would fit nicely in the ordinary coco program space. I could use the upper 8k of ram, which is not used by the coco2 or coco 3 I think, for my program and the user leaving me with something worth while. I think I’m going to publish what I have and convert it over to this new system and then I’ll have something good. My next post is going to be the readme file for IMUrbane and a link to the disk holding all the files. Then I’m off and running for the new system.

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CoCo Urbane

A Better Solution

I copy lines from behind the Coco rom as I execute them. Unfortunately the real Cocos take advantage that their user’s file is always in the same place so if you say a$=”sam” it just puts a pointer to the “sam” in a$. When it executes my line it puts a pointer to where “sam” is in the buffer. When it comes time to use a$ it looks in the buffer and it has something else in it. I was going to tell everyone to say a$=””+”sam” to force Coco’s basic to put “sam” into the string area. I increased the size of the buffer and when I come across a $=” if there isn’t a “+” after it I supply it. It’s a little slower and and the buffer has to be a little bigger, but it works. Another problem I have to address is octal and hex numbers. If the Coco comes across an & it expects an octal or hex number. If you print &MEN it prints 0 and the value of the variable MEN. I change multi character variables in two character name. If I happen to make the variable MEN into HA the Coco sees &HA and prints 10. I’m afraid I can’t use A-F H or O. I guess I’ll drop G, too. I used some fancy programming to crunch and uncrunch variable names. I think I’ll rewrite those parts and make it very strait forward. KISS. Keep it simple stupid. And think about it some more. Time spent thinking about it before you start programming is time well spent.

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CoCo Urbane

IMUrbane Implemented

It’s 3am in the morning but I’m glad that I kept at it. All of the assembly language programming is done. When I was working on it before I had decided that I wouldn’t try to do rem and ‘remarks. And colons would come and go willy-nilly. The rem command works. The quote remarks work. No extraneous colons appear. I am so happy. All that’s left is the readme file and the label list for the EARL urbane program. And maybe a read program to help users read the readme file. Well I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow so maybe I should call it quits and go to bed.

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CoCo Urbane

IMUrbane Works

My son turned me on to the online book The Art of Unix Programming. It is really good. I’m having a great time using IMUbane to program and run my EARL program. Easy Assemble Robot Language. It edits and runs a small program to move a < and > character along a line. I’ve been fixing little things in IMUrbane to make it match my latest urbane. I noticed that quote comments crashed the system. I found a place where I had tried to fix it. I tested for $83. I called it the remark keyword. When I assembled and tried to run it, everything worked except the where I messed with the quote keyword. I went back to the first part where I worked with files and the screen. It worked. It was very fancy. I went back to where I tried to put in the multiple significant character feature, quote remarks crashed. Remark keywords worked and I did nothing about them, so I quit checking for the quote keyword. Everything seemed to be working. I have this debug feature where I can see crunched lines above the cursor and uncrunched lines below. and the first few multiple character names at the bottom. Multiple character names were being crunched to two letters before and after the remark keywords. I couldn’t make heads or tails of how I had made the fancy fix. The online book my son turned me on to talked about it. It said that if it was too complicated it would be hard to add features. That is exactly what I have done. But it looks and works fine. I think that I will leave it. I am so overconfident that I want to move on to a coco3 version. I think that I will talk to my son about it.

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CoCo Urbane

My Working Urbane

I was updating my menus and realized that I had never published my working EDTASM6309 version. I got back to where I was before I abandoned my urbane file in lo-mem version. In fact I even fixed the quote comment I mentioned earlier. Now when I uncrunch a line only the single quote appears with no colon before it. Hooray. So it’s back to my working version. Of course when I put them on a virtual disk they didn’t work. The last basic file kept giving me an undefined line error. There was an exec command in the line. That’s where I usually find that error. Many hours later I realized it really was an undefined line error. I had renumbered the file without updating the targets. Then I kept fixing files on the coco instead of fixing them in notepad++. As soon as I reloaded my files, the changes disappeared. Oh well. I’m going great guns now. I had forgotten how the programs worked. I decided to update the readme file as I relearned how the programs worked. Lo and behold I had already done that when I was working on them before. I’ve got the working version working again. Now I’ve just got to figure out how to put it here in my blog.

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CoCo Urbane

Almost Back to Start

I’m almost back to where I was when decided to go back to urbane file in hi-mem. All I have to do is connect edline with edfile and handle when the new line is the same length as the old line and when it is longer. I go plunging ahead and then I go back and rewrite something I thought I was done with. Right now I’m fighting the urge to rewrite kbd and edline. Kbd has this nasty habit of pausing every once in a while. And I want to make edline go up a screen line like notepad++ that I’m using to work on my .asm and .bas files instead of a file line like my urbane editor does now. I think it would be quite easy. One thing I have to fix is my fancy uncrunch routine which leaves the colon before the comment starting single quote. Right now it will add another colon every time I crunch then uncrunch. But first I’ve got to get back to where I was. And I am so thankful that my blog is working again. I was so despondent when it broke.