[Coco] Pseudo CoCo4???

[farna at att.net]

First -- apologies to the list for not trimming that last post!! I forgot... 

Roger, I'm thinking more of a stripped down MESS that takes over the machine -- when you boot you get some type of CoCo screen or window. A Linux version would probably be easiest to manipulate, maybe even a DOS version. Windows would just overly complicate things, though you can set Windows up to immediately run a program and be semi-transparent. At least you should be able to. 

I see what you envision, and I'm not sure it would be used much. Takes all the fun and "feel" out of it. That would be more like playing a game or running a simulation than using a computer. If the machine looks and feels different, I don't think anyone would even notice or mind it's really running on "foreign" hardware as an emulation -- as long as it's mostly transparent. The emulator would find the USB printer in the back ground when you called for a print. Would be nice if the parallel port could be reprogrammed to simulate a cartridge port. All it would have to do is read, though I bet it could be programmed to emulate a full CoCo port. Something like that would be nice for experimenting and transferring cartridges. The only problem would be going back to the ROM question, but for something like this a "work alike" might be doable. It would be easy enough to have patches for some games, and the ability to upload your own original ROM code for 100% compatibility. Would ta
 ke mor
e programming than I'm capable of for any of it though! 

--
Frank Swygert
Publisher, "American Motors Cars" 
Magazine (AMC)
For all AMC enthusiasts
http://farna.home.att.net/AIM.html
(free download available!)

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
>
>Just a thought here... I haven't played with MESS yet, one of those 
>"when I get some extra time" things. But as I recall it can work 
>with added features such as hard drive support, and run in a full 
>screen mode (sort of a "letterbox" mode). What is the lowest 
>speed/level processor MESS runs well under? Will it work reasonably 
>well with a Pentium I, or does it require at least a PII or PIII to 
>run at CoCo3 speeds? What I'm thinking is why not package a "live" 
>CD with everything to run like a CoCo3 but make a few enhancements 
>(like HD support, faster clock speed, access to some of the PC 
>peripherals)? It's cheaper than doing it in hardware since there is 
>so much cheap PC hardware out there now.
>
>--
>Frank Swygert
>Publisher, "American Motors Cars"
>Magazine (AMC)


Years back I offered to write a "housing" for the M.E.S.S. emulator 
that showed a CoCo on your PC screen, complete with monitor, printer, 
floppy drives, hard drives, MPI, etc. and about the only response I 
got was "nobody is going to use it".

I can't remember the dead-head who told me that, but I disagreed, and 
I still invision such an emulator front-end where you drag and drop 
graphical elements using your PC mouse.  Drag a .dsk file into the 
floppy drives, a tape into a tape deck, and click the keys if you want.

The latest version of M.E.S.S. appears to run fast enough but when 
you boot into the CoCo window it delays for too long to make me 
happy.  There used to be no delay, but now it reports a progress bar, 
"Loading 66%", etc. Then, "initializing"... taking up more time than 
ever which each new release.  I don't know what's going on with the 
development team but they have had it right so many times in the past 
and I'm sure they are fixing things that aren't broke.  There seems 
to be a focus on doctoring with the CoCo emulation on each 
release.  If you check out the WhatsNew.txt file you'll see the CoCo 
mentioned more than the other modes.  Grab a past stable release and 
don't ever delete it just in case they really screw things up with no hope.