[Coco] Emulator

[Wayne Campbell]

For what it's worth, the MESS emulator is the ONLY CoCo emulator, that I have found so far, that even runs on my laptop. Vcc doesn't, and there are a couple others I found that wouldn't run. They were all written in 16-bit code, and XP Professional running in a 32-bit environment just won't allow those programs to launch.

Are all of the problems I see related to coding errors in MESS? I don't know, but I don't think so. I'm also running NitrOS-9, not OS-9. From what I see, it seems that NitrOS-9's commands still don't have all of the functionality that OS-9's commands did. Then there are the errors. I get many errors that I can't be certain aren't differences between OS-9 and NitrOS-9. I'm not trying to say NitrOS-9 is "bad", but I do remember that it was not equal to OS-9 back when I had my CoCo3, and the author was promising that eventually it would be as bullet-proof as OS-9, and with the functionality in the commands that OS-9 commands had. It doesn't look like it was ever done.

Then there's Basic09 01.01.00. I'm not saying it's buggy, but there are the following facts:

* OS-9 Level II included Basic09 version 1.1
* The version used to get the code for the new version 01.01.00 is a disasm of Basic09 version 1.0, not 1.1 (whatever changed between 1.0 and 1.1 was lost)
* Many of the errors I get in my code are OS-9 errors, not Basic09 errors, even when the statement erroring is an assignment statement.

Are these things a MESS problem?
Are they a NitrOS-9 problem?
Are they a Basic09 problem?

I don't know. The only way I can think of to know is to

* Get a copy of the original OS-9 disk (in .os9 image format, of course) and run it instead of NitrOS-9 (allowing me to run Basic09 1.1 if it's a Level II disk image)
* Get another original CoCo3 and run OS-9 Level II on it (not doable, since I have no spare cash to spend on a system)

I am content to keep working with what I have. It works well enough to get by. If improvements come to MESS or NitrOS-9 or Basic09 01.01.00, I will definitely implement them in my copies.

Wayne