The Rainbow Vol. 09 No. 01 - August 1989 - TRS-80 Color ...

difficulty. Even at the lowest level, I had
trouble and pushed my troops too hard. It's
a good thing that thi s is only a game, or I'm
afraid that the good old United States of
America would be populated with lots of
red flags!
(SPORTSware, 1251 S. Reynolds Road, Suite
414, Toledo, OH 43615, 419-389-1515; $21)
1 Software
Nine-Times­
An On-Disk
OS-9 Magazine
-David Miller
OS-9 Level II I
OS-9 enthusiasts will be interested to
know that there's a new magazine on disk
devoted to the OS-9 operating system. It's
called Nine-Times, and it's published six
times a year. The magazine requires the use
of a CoCo 3, l28K or 512K RAM, and OS-
9 Level II. A joystick or mouse is recommended,
but the program will work with
the keyboard arrow keys using information
provided in the four-page printed
instructions. Nine-Times can also be installed
onto a hard drive if you have one.
Running the magazine is fairly straightforward,
assuming you have some operating
knowledge of OS-9 Level II. 512K
users will find it a lot easier than will l28K
users, who must go through several steps to
make room for Nine-Times.
If you have 512K, all you have to do for
starters is merge the STDFonts and STDPt rs
files contained in the SY S directory on your
OS-9 master disk. You will also have to
load the RunB, SY sea ll and In key modules
from the CMOS directory of your BAS IC09
config disk. Then after loading in any of the
window screens other than the standard 32column
screen, you enter at the prompt:
OS9 : mag. After a few seconds the colorful
Hi-Res main screen of Nine-Times appears.
Nine-Times uses the familiar point-andshoot
technique for selection of its options:
Print Files, Departments, Articles and
Programs. Each selection results in a pulldown
menu with a list of various options
avail able. Selecting Print Files lets you
send text files to a printer if you have one
hooked up. Departments has several files
that tell you all about advertising rates in
the magazine, subscription information,
ordering back issues and similar information.
The Articles selection contains various
newsworth y items of interest, as well
as tutorial programming examples. This is
also the section of the magazine in which
98 THE RAINBOW August 1989
you will find editori al comments. Selecting
Programs results in a li stin g of programs
available in that iss ue of the magazine.
Making a selecti on of a program li sted
gives you a preview of what the program
does and how to execute it, but you have to
run the program outside of the Nin e-Times
magazine environment. I think it would be
a nice feature to be able to run the programs
from within the magazine framework, but,
as it is, you can ex it the magazine to get
back to the OS-9 prompt. Because Nine­
Times is memory-resident, you can simply
type r unb ma gaz ine to get back into the
magazine environment. The rev iew iss ue
contained an assortment of l 0 ready-to-run
OS-9 utility programs. They all worked
fine and are currently enjoying a spot on my
hard drive.
Nine- Times is just the kind of software
the OS-9 community needs. If OS-9 is to
become a more popular operating environment,
then it must also lend itself to becoming
a little more user-friendly. Nine-Times
is certainly that. The on-disk magazine is a
nice idea, and editor Jordan Tsvetkoff is to
be commended for such a well-designed
program.
(JWT Enterprises, 5755 Lockwood Blvd.,
Youngstown, OH 44512, 216-758-7694;
$34.95 per year for six issues)
-Jerry Semones
1 Softwar-e·--_c_oc_o --'-- 1, _2 &_3_,1
Roots-
The Basics of
Assem.bly Language
One of the things that keeps most people
from programming in assembly language
is the amount of work it takes to do very
simple tasks. To print "he ll o" on the screen
in BASIC, one merely types PR IN T " HELLO " .
In assembly language, doing the same thing
requires many lines of code. That's why
GSW Software has written Roots. Roots is
an assembly language source code file that
contains over I 00 routines that take care of
everything from disk and cassette I/0 to
reading the joystick ports to clearing the
screen. Most of the routines will work on
any Color Computer, but some will work
only on the CoCo 3.
Roots comes on a di sk that contains two
files, ROOTS.ASM and FONT . DAT . The file
ROOTS. ASM is an ASCII file containing the
assembly source code. FONT . DA T is a font
file containing a font for printing text on
hi gh-resolution graphics screens. Theoretically,
the programmer who wants to use
some of the routines from Roots just puts a
line in his program that instructs hi s assembler
to include the ROOTS . ASM source code.
Then whenever he wants to use one of the
routines, he sets up the required conditions
and calls the routine with a J SR routine. For
instance, to clear the CoCo 2 text screen to
black, the following two lines are required:
L DA ItO
JSR CLSA
When I program , I use th e C compile r
and RMA under OS-9. However, before I
purchased OS-9, I used Color Disk EDTASM
for my assembly language programming.
So, I pulled it off the shelf and shook off the
dust. EDTASM would not load or include
ROOT S. ASM. Every time I tri ed to load it I
would get a bad line number error. I booted
OS-9 and did some checking. As I mentioned
earlier, ROOTS. ASM is a straight ASCII
file. EDTASM has its lines strictly formatted
with line numbers and tab characters.
After deciphering EDTASM's file format, I
wrote a program to convert ROOTS . ASM to
an EDTASM file. Once this was done, the
file loaded and assembled perfectly. I then
set out to write some programs.
I have a natural bent toward graphics, so
I attempted to write a graphics program .
Almost immediately I had problems. It
seems to me that many of the CoCo 3
graphics routines were written specificall y
for a 128K CoCo. Since my CoCo has
512K, this caused problems. The routines
would not allow me to set up the graphi cs
screens where I wanted them, and would
only clear them if they were within the 64K
address space of the program. From my
examination of the code, I believe they
would work in 128K, but I had to modify
them so they would do what I wanted them
to do. The other routines I tried worked
fine. The manual documents them quite
well, so any programmer should be able to
change things to suit hi s own tastes.
I found Roots to be a well-designed
package. The 35-page manual provides
complete descriptions of all the routines
and variables used in the source code file,
and also instructions for calling them. I
recommend that the author include an
EDTASM version of the file because I'm
sure many people still use it. Also, the
routines such as LPEEK, LPOKE , LPUT, LGET ,
etc. , should be generali zed to 512K. Aside
from these criticisms, I thought Roots was
very helpful and a great timesaver. If you
plan to program in assembly under Disk
BASIC, this is for you.
(GSW Software, 8345 Glenwood, Overland
Park, KS 66212, 913-341-3411; $25)
-Robert L. Marsa