[Coco] emulator questions

[Roger Taylor]

At 02:02 PM 11/24/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>I just joined the list and was reading the archives.  The
>information on MESS looked really interesting, so I downloaded
>the software and it looks very promising.  I have most of my
>old CoCo games on 5 and 1/4 disks.  I owned a hard drive
>that connected to my CoCo using Disk Basic from Hard Drive
>Specialist.  I also bought a program called Xenocopy when I first
>switched to an IBM compatible from my CoCo.  It's supposed to let
>you copy CoCo files from a 5 and 1/4 to a PC's a: drive.  Was wondering,
>how do you get the games from a 5 and 1/4 or a hard drive into the
>MESS emulator so you can play them?  Most of my games are in Basic, but I
>think the majority of them are saved in binary instead of ASCII mode.
>Would also love to figure out how to convert the files from binary to
>ASCII so I can view them properly in a text editor on the PC.  If I
>remember correctly, there used to be a SAVE "filename.bas",A mode to
>save to ASCII, but that was with my 5 and 1/4 drive interface.  Any hints
>on how to do any of this would be greatly appreciated.  Am hoping to
>get most of my old BASIC CoCo games converted to ASCII and saved to a CD.
>My 5 and 1/4 disks are beginning to fail on me.

How'd you find this list?  Glad you're trying to keep your CoCo stuff 
alive.  That's what we're best at.

It's funny you asked about tokenized BASIC programs because I am adding 
this now to the Portal-9 IDE.  You'll be able to load in tokenized or ASCII 
BASIC programs, edit them, and save them to a floppy image in either 
format.  If you don't want to create or edit BASIC from within the IDE, 
then it's probably not for you, but since you mentioned you wrote a lot of 
your programs, I thought you would like to know.

The RETRIEVE.EXE tool in Jeff Vavasour's CoCo emulators works well for 
moving real CoCo disks onto virtual .DSK files on your PC.
I'm surprised nobody told you this already.  But, I'm guessing your PC's 
floppy controller would have to support 256-byte sectors and you might even 
need an older floppy drive, like one from your CoCo.  There's too many 
factors involved to give a sure-fire way of saving all of your CoCo 
floppies onto your PC, but I've managed to get 75% of mine moved over by 
using an older floppy drive and doing everything from the MSDOS mode or a 
Windows 98 startup disk prompt.