[Coco] CoCo emulator for Pocket PC

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 23:09 -0500, Roger Taylor wrote:
> A user of the CoCo3.com forums posted this link, which I find very interesting.
> 
> http://members.lycos.co.uk/poco6809/
> 
> -- 
> Roger Taylor
> 
> 

Looks cool! No pocketpc's here though, but a possible portable Coco 4
could use an ARM CPU has the heart of it.

Why do freeware developers insist on "no commercial use" clauses? MESS
has the same limitation. If someone makes a buck distributing your
freeware or integrating it into, say, portal-9 it doesn't really
diminish the original product. I suppose if he's holding out for some
vendor to come along and license his emulator code... hmm, dream on...
This is why I prefer Free Software to freeware, you get clear licenses
to use the software any way you like.

If for example, we were to make a Coco 4, and wanted to use an emulator
as part of it, we'd probably have to start with the Vavasour emulator
(Jeff calls it "freeware" -- does that mean that it is in the public
domain?) because of license restrictions with MESS. My understanding is
that MESS is not licensed for any commercial use.

And also one has to wonder why there are so many emulators of the coco
around... do people just start developing emulators rather than google
for what's already available first and do the porting effort instead?
Plus we've never heard of it so whoever it is is operating in a vacuum
for no obvious reason.

The only reason I could see to rewrite a coco emulator is to create
something innovative in the engine, like a dynamic code generator ala
QEMU. But there are diminishing returns there. Coco emulations don't
really tax modern CPUs, but I suppose that might not go equally for an
embedded processor such as in the pocketpc.

I guess another reason would be to get an emulator available under a
clean Free software license, or in the public domain.

-- John.