[Coco] M.E.S.S. CoCo emulators

[Roger Taylor]

At 03:40 PM 10/19/2008, you wrote:
>Roger Taylor <operator at coco3.com> wrote:
>
> > One other potential problem: there's now no formal listing of the
> > supported emulations?
>
>It's built into the executable. See the -listfull switch. Parsing the
>sysinfo.dat file is the wrong way to go.
>
>Or better use: -listxml. The resulting machine readable output contains
>a lot of useful information.


Rainbow has a LearnMESS() procedure called at the start of the 
program that catalogs what systems are in the current/latest install 
of M.E.S.S.

I also have a file called messbios.txt with the condensed info (along 
with index for my small photo for that system) updated as of probably 
.124 or so, but I want Rainbow to update itself to what systems are 
currently part of the copy of M.E.S.S. the IDE user is pointing to at 
the time.  This means the user can choose different versions of 
M.E.S.S. at any time and not have a conflict.  On my system, I've got 
D:\MESS  D:\MESS104b   D:\MESS127   D:\MESS127_i686   etc...

Right now, I'm getting all the full names from sysinfo.dat (from 
.127) live but it involves more logic than I want to use and it takes 
about 8 seconds to process the entire file.  That's a bummer.  It has 
to skip TONS of text that is put there to show up in the M.E.S.S. GUI 
under System Info, etc.

I can probably have the IDE call M.E.S.S. using -listfull or whatever 
options I need then capture the stdout and scan it, but no matter 
where I'm getting this info, there's a BIOS nickname *and* full 
system name that I'm interested in, where the full name is shown in 
the drop-down listbox in the IDE panels, and the BIOS name is used 
when I launch M.E.S.S..

I think what I'll do is call LearnMESS() when the IDE user points to 
the M.E.S.S. .exe module and hits Apply or OK to accept it.  But... 
if a past version doesn't understand -the -listfull option, I'll have 
to recognize that nothing was obtained from the stdout listing and 
then try other means of learning the supported BIOSes... then if all 
else fails, use my own messbios.txt file.


-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com