[Coco] RE: [Color Computer] Re: imgtool.exe in M.E.S.S. 0.74b is bad

[Stephen Blunt]

I haven't played around with MESS for a long time. but I do have a stack of
tapes cartridges and disks all sitting around. Unfortunately I don't a disk
drive for any of my cocos. I certainly would loves to preserve my collection.
 
Has anyone else experienced this? My copy of Skramble (Tape) stopped working
once I upgraded my coco2 from 16KB to 64KB and hasn't worked since with my
coco3. All the copies I've found on the web don't work with any emulators
either. Is it all coincidence or is that program very picky about hardware?
 
Stephen Blunt
--- In ColorComputer at yahoogroups.com, Roger Taylor <rtaylor at b...> wrote:
> IMGTOOL.EXE in M.E.S.S. 0.74b is bad.  I have backversions of M.E.S.S. 
> since around .56 or so.
> The imgtool.exe in 0.68b works right.

Glad to hear it wasn't just me and there's actually some problems with
the program.

>  > writes my files.  Retrieve appears to be working fine in a DOS box
> > > Windows ME (which is good because I no longer have a dual boot to
> >DOS).
> 
> I hope it works like this in XP.  

I haven't made the switch to XP, but from trying the operating system
out on other people's machines, the DOS support seems really crippled.
In Windows 98, there was an ANSI driver.  In Windows ME, I have to
run a freeware ANSI program just to get ANSI support to change the
screen colors.  In Windows XP, the program doesn't work and I just
can't seem to get any ANSI support anymore.  Doskey is also gone in
Windows XP and is greatly missed.  Someone was recently telling me
about running Reactos (Open Source Windows NT compatible operating
system) inside of Bochs (http://bochs.sourceforge.net/).  Might be
possible to run FreeDOS inside of Bochs or a personal copy of DOS
inside of Bochs on a Windows XP system.  I'm really used to doing
everything through the command line and with their lack of command
line support, I am not looking forward to future upgrades of Windows.  

> I also keep seeing where some PC manufacturers are 
> planning to discontinue the floppy drives altogether.

I've been reading that too.  Computer companies seem to be phasing out
a lot of hardware whether it's necessary or not.  Was recently reading
about the switches away from floppies, parellel and serial ports
towards CD drives and USB, Firewire connections.  There's also the
switch from VGA to DVI and from Parallel ATA to Serial ATA.  I can't
help wondering how many of these upgrades are really improvements and
how many are just to make you go out and buy a new computer system to
resolve compatibility issues with the latest hardware.  I have a SCSI
with better specs than new Serial ATAs and I am having all kinds of
trouble finding devices that still work with SCSI since it's an older
standard.  

>I think it's a great idea to preserve all of your CoCo floppy disks
>(and tapes, for that matter), and store them on one or two CDs so
>they'll live forever... we hope. 

Been wanting to do this for a long time.  I could probably have done
it with Xenocopy but the restore and port tools seem to work much
better and are faster.  I really need to back up all my 5 and 1/4s and
3 and 1/2s (both CoCo and IBM) to hard drive or CD, since as you
mentioned they're slowly being phased out by computer manufacturers
(and the 5 and 1/4 drives are getting very hard to find).  The MESS
emulator is great though.  Was thinking of trying to convert some more
of my old CoCo Basic games to Basic on the PC, but they run better on
the emulator than they when translated to Basic on the PC.  

Best wishes.

Laura





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