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Hi all - has anyone used RainbowIDE to program the Dragon? http://www.rainbowide.com/

I thought I'd give it a go, but I'm failing at the first hurdle. I'm trying to compile the 'hello world' for the Dragon, rather than the Coco which is the default. The problem appears to be with the disk that gets mounted, which the Dragon can't read. I get an '?IV Error' - I never owned a Dragon with a floppy in the old days, so I don't really know what this means. Anyone have any ideas?

Many thanks in advance ...

It'll be generating RSDOS format disks; sadly different to DragonDOS. I imagine as the CoCo is its primary focus you won't be able to target Dragon disks (though the cassette format would be the same).

I think it's closed source too, so we can't even hack in support. A shame, people say good things about it (though I'm a sucker for makefiles myself).

It uses the imgtool from M.E.S.S to do the disk image - shame this doesn't support the DDOS format. There are a couple of ways I can think of to save to a CoCo format disk and load into a Dragon - none that easy to do though.

Thanks for your feedback everyone. Of course, if this were a perfect world, Rainbow would produce something I could load into my (diskdrive less) Dragon via the cassette port, but I don't see any options for this.

I guess, if I want to find a solution that at least works with the Mess emulator, I should make the output a ROM and treat as if it were to be loaded on a cartridge. All this goes to remind me just how rusty I am on this machine - I need to dust off my old books and Dragon User magazines and try to work out how cartridges work again.

Out of interest, is anyone else out there still programming for the Dragon? What sort of environments do you use?

Thanks all.

I don't think it would be difficult for the author to call a program to build a Dragon disk image. The image building programs are all external and it's just a multiple choice drop down box to pick which one.

I've built a few things with Rainbow IDE and I do own a license... but it has some annoying quirks with getting the settings right.
If it's an all in one file program it works ok but if you want to link several together I have my doubts about it's usefulness.
I'd rather configure an editor to call a makefile.

I use Notepad++ to do editing but you need a custom syntax highlighting language configuration for the 6809.

I presume the sensible route is to edit your assembler code in the editor of your choice on your PC, assemble it with a standalone assembler (I see one written in Perl on the Xroar site, plus there's the one used in Rainbow which I presume I could use standalone) and then load it into an emulator (or a real dragon) to see it work. It's this final stage I'm not sure about - how do you get the assembled binary image loaded?

I thought I'd found a wonderfully hacky route this morning - I thought I'd use the new Ascii loading feature in Xroar to load up assembly code I'd written quickly in notepad into the Alldream assembler running under Xroar - an approach that works wonderfully with Basic programs. Alas, there must be something up with the tokens or something, as I get mostly gibberish. Ah well, shame, back to the drawing board.