[Coco] Re: emulator questions

[David]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 02:41:42PM -0500, Nathan Woods wrote:
> LM writes: 
> 
> >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?
> 
> For a 5 1/4" disk, you can use the RETRIEVE.EXE utility that comes with 
> Jeff's emulator.  This is also assuming that your PC has a 5 1/4" drive and 
> that you are running DOS/Win9x/WinME, and not WinNT/2000/XP (gee thank you 
> Bill Gates). 

Another alternative is to install a 3-1/2" drive on the Coco.  In Basic,
of course, you'd only use 1/4 of the disk, but for the purpose of moving
them to a PC, they could be rewritten.

FWIW, I had an old 5-1/4" HD drive lying around and installed it on my
PC.  I have W-98 and Linux on it, so I didn't have the problem of
accessing a 5-1/4.  It _reads_ the data OK - quite satisfactory for
making .dsk images.  I don't imagine it would work to write disks, but I
have a 3-1/2 on my coco's also, so if I need to move anything back to
the coco, I can use them.

Hmm..  I just thought of one way to utilize all of a 720 K for basic if
you have OS-9.  The best way would be to create a 35-tk, SS descriptor,
with a name different from "/d?", say b0, or b1 or whatever.  Now, one
could "merge /b1@ > image1.dsk" "...>image2.dsk, etc. Then you could
copy 4 of these images onto a 720K, retrieve this onto your PC and then,
under OS9 in the emulator, break them back out into individual images -
would save a lot of wear and tear on sneakers..

Or, if you have a serial connection between the coco and the PC, simply
upload the individual images to the PC.