how to develop Dragon programms?

[jedie]

What is a good way to develop Dragon BASIC programs?

develop on real dragon or Emulator sucks, because of the poor "editor"...

My current way is this:
* edit ASCII .bas file (with lowcase letters) in a editor (SciTE)
* Drag&drop to a batch file to convert it into a .cas file (with case-convertion -> https://github.com/jedie/PyDragon32/tre ... convertion )
* load in xroar and test

The windows Batchfile looks like this:

Code: Select all

:loop
cls
python PyDC\PyDC_cli.py --case_convert %~1 --dst=%~n1.cas --verbosity=5
pause
goto:loop

It's work. But it's a little bit time-consuming...

Somewhere i found a IDE for CoCo projects witch used MESS. But no free software.

how do you do that?

[Rink]

I do assembly language on a Windows PC and transfer; but BASIC... well... I just use a Dragon to be honest. but that's normally only when I'm playing with external hardware so couldn't use an emulator anyway.

[tjewell]

Just checking I'm not missing something - why don't you load the ascii files directly into Xroar? why do you convert them to .cas files first? I'm sure it supports loading text files. I wanted to load a program from an old magazine so I scanned it, OCR'd it, tidied up the output, and I'm sure it just loaded fine into Xroar without further conversion. But excuse me if my old brain is getting fuzzy!

[jedie]

Hm! Sometimes it's much easier than i think. (If it's work: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4383&p=9361#p9361 Maybe i missed something...)

[sixxie]

I think being able to ignore case while coding is quite useful, also converting to a tokenised BASIC .cas file first will speed loading, even in the emulator, so it's worth doing!

[jedie]

I think being able to ignore case while coding is quite useful, also converting to a tokenised BASIC .cas file first will speed loading, even in the emulator, so it's worth doing!

What's about a case converting in XRoar while loading a .bas file?

It's pain to code on PC in upcases. That's why i have implement the case convertion in PyDC. But it would be faster if XRoar can this directly.