[Coco] Ideal Windows box for working with the CoCo.

[Roger Taylor]

At 12:21 PM 9/23/2004, you wrote:
>I'm planning on building up a Windows 98 system with both 3.5" and 5.25" 
>drives, USB CF card reader, and plenty of HDD space to use with  Portal 9, 
>various emulators, and the DriveWire.
>
>Can anyone think of anything else I may need?
>I decided on Win98 since it still uses real DOS and not the psuedo DOS on 
>2K and XP and it supports the older 720K drive format.  This info I had 
>gleened from the list, and I may have misunderstood what some people 
>posted, so please correct me if I am wrong.
>
>Also, from what I have read from the list, Win98 is the most compatable 
>Windows OS with the emulators.  I have tried to get the DK emulator from 
>GCC (check is in the mail) to work with 2K, but I can never access the 
>configuration routine and all I get when I run the program is the standard 
>CoCo screen, so I'try it on a Win 98 box.
>
>Any thoughts?  Thanks!


You might not know it, but Portal-9 works seamlessly with the M.E.S.S. 
emulator to let you build and see your CoCo projects run, all in one 
click.  That is, if your project is set up to build correctly (not hard to 
do), and you have installed the M.E.S.S. emulator and told Portal-9 where 
the mess.exe and imgtool.exe files are (easy to do), when you click the 
Build button, in a few seconds or less you'll see a CoCo pop up on the 
screen with your software mounted.  If it's a ROM Pak you built, it will 
run instantly.  If it's a floppy disk(s) you built, they/it will be mounted 
in the emulator drives automatically and ready to use.  There is no better 
form of CoCo 6809/6309 assembly development.

The Keil emulators are tricky when it comes to using DECB/floppy 
controller.  I can't recall the specifics right now but I went a while 
before getting it to work, myself.  I use XP.  But it has something to do 
with getting the MPI set up right.

--
Roger Taylor