This is a homebuilt programmer that uses my  Power Pak  for its controller. I have transferred Edtasm+ and the all machine language control program onto the Power Pak eprom, which allows burning of assembled programs directly into eprom, and a return to Edtasm with the edit buffer intact. The other handy feature is the cartridge port, and the dual eprom sockets which allows the source information for the eprom to come from another eprom, the CoCo's memory or a Color Computer Program Pak. This is old technology, I originally wired this up in '86, supporting 8K and 32K devices. I added support for 16K devices a couple of years ago, and added FLASH capability using ATMEL 29C256 28 pin devices this past winter.  A screen shot of the opening menu;

On computer powerup, the above program is auto-booted. The eprom programmer software is about 5K, starts at decimal address 49152. Luckily cartridge Edtasm is position independant, and is approximately 10K long, so everything fits nicely in the available 15.75K space. If I am writing my own program for the eprom, Edtasm is started from the programmer menu, and the program is assembled. To return to the programmer, I have a  interrupt button on the programmer hardware that restarts the programmer software. I could have patched Edtasm to do this with a command also, but I went the hardware route instead to leave Edtasm intact. The interrupt method of switching back and forth between Edtasm and the programmer works well as Edtasm's edit buffer is left intact, no need to save and reload the ASM file every time Edtasm is started.
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Page last updated May 22 / 2002