[Coco] Re: MESS mouse and keyboard question

[Nathan Woods]

James Goff writes: 

> Greetings all, 
> 
> I am taking a fresh look at MESS and its coco emulation.  I have MESS
> 0.74 and the coco3h.zip bios.  I am running nitros09 3.01.01 and so far
> it works great.

I would actually recommend against using MESS with NitrOS9 3.0; there is a 
nasty disk corruption bug that causes disks to be garbled with NitrOS9 on 
MESS.  This bug show up when running older NitrOS9 versions, nor with 
"classic" OS-9. 

Originally I thought that this MESS bug would be easy to track down and fix, 
but Robert Gault and I spent hours gathering information and tracking down 
the bug but to no avail yet.  It seems to not have to do with floppy timing, 
as we've discovered that the bug doesn't manifest itself in cc3disk but 
rather somewhere higher level.  I can say that tracking down this bug may 
require some NitrOS-9 expertise that I do not have. 

> What do you need to do to use your pc's mouse to act as a coco mouse on a 
> hi-res controller.  I am using Mess's GUI and haven't been able to find a 
> way to enable the mouse as either a joystick or a hires mouse under os9.

If you are running the MESS GUI front end, be sure to click "Enable Mouse".  
Additionally, you need to go into Options->Configuration at runtime to 
enable the Hi-Res interface. 

> Second question is when using the natural keyboard instead of emulated 
> what key do you press to switch screens under OS9.

Actually I'm not sure on that one; I do not know much about OS9 so I have a 
dumb question:  What key does the trick when running as an emulated 
keyboard?  If I recall right, it is the Clear key which by default is mapped 
to Home.  If so, this should work under the natural keyboard.  If it 
doesn't, let me know.