[Coco] VCC configuration discussion

[Bill Pierce]

Barry, the Wine build sounds cool. I need to check into that. Do you have any links? Do you know if it can be done through Visual Studio 2015?
VS 2015 opened up a lot of "outside" build environments that MS never supported in the past. Someone was telling me you can even run lwtools and toolshed from VS2015, but I've yet to find any info on it.

As for the RS232, your idea sounds like building a "suedo dw4" into Vcc itself. That's not a bad idea at all. At the moment, we just want to get all "original" Coco hardware going. The bitbanger is used by a lot of existing software and opening that up to outside communication would make old software work again. Then plugins could be made for the BB.. Printers & Modems come to mind. The plugins would do what dw4 does (as far as virtual modems & printers), but more efficiently. The printer module could actuall send stuff to the host PC's printer instead of just writing to a text or graphics file.

There's a lot of stuff that could be done, but no programmers doing it. That's the real problem. The two programmers working on Vcc have been too busy to do much so everything has come to a halt for now. With more people sharing the load, it could move forward again.

 

 


Bill Pierce
"Charlie stole the handle, and the train it won't stop going, no way to slow down!" - Ian Anderson - Jethro Tull

 

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-----Original Message-----
From: Barry Nelson <barry.nelson at amobiledevice.com>
To: coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Fri, Jul 8, 2016 1:46 am
Subject: Re: [Coco] VCC configuration discussion

That may be, but I suspect that posting here will get exposure to a larger audience and more discussion. I think the ability to connect to an IP address and port would be more useful in this day and age than a real serial connection and emulating an RS232 pak would require less overhead than a bit banger port since the 6551 handles data a byte at a time but for the bit banger you would have to assemble a serial bit stream. Another thing. Has anyone looked into linking the existing code to wine lib to make it portable? In theory you can link wine lib into a native binary, not like my Mac package, but actually build the wine routines into VCC and make VCC run native on Linux and Mac. This approach is used for some commercial game software and seems to work fairly well. It would make VCC fully portable and reduce the effort required to do so considerably. Windows isn't going away any time soon, and neither is Direct X or Wine, so there would be future support.> Bill Pierce ooogalapasooo at aol.com > Thu Jul 7 21:50:23 EDT 2016> Barry, there's an "issues" tab on the Vcc site. You can post ideas there. In fact, I sarted a "whish List" thread that could be extended.> And yes, an RS232.dll has been discussed.. as well as more colors, higher resolutions, hi-rez joystick interface, dual HDs (actually already added in the unpublished build", real serial access via the bitbanger, midipak, sound card, speech pak, parallel interface to feed a modern printer, etc, etc, etc, etc > >  I don't think any of it has been posted in the issues much though.-- Coco mailing listCoco at maltedmedia.comhttps://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco