[Coco] The dire condition of software documentation..

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 09 August 2019 16:40:10 Firehawke wrote:

> It’s good to hear from you again. I hadn’t seen you on Bannister in a
> few years.
>
> I’m familiar with the archive (and had been using the manuals exactly
> as you suggested), but I’m not entirely certain how good those disk
> dumps are in general. I’d hit a few oddities with one of the OS-9 boot
> disks refusing to boot in MAME (which is another one of the reasons I
> actually wanted to make contact with the community; having access to
> anyone at all who could doublecheck the oddball cases on real hardware
> would be worthwhile) and the size of the images in TOSEC’s set is
> easily twice as large for the OS-9 disks.
>
There have been various attempts to make the coco's 256 byte sectors work 
with 512 byte/sector disks, some of which may have 256 bytes of data 
followed by 256 bytes of nulls or some such. Look at one of them with a 
hexdumper.  We don't have that problem now, but os9's history is 
littered with such half fixes. I think theres a flag bit in the disk 
descriptor to control that, see the superdisk.asm file for some notes 
about that if they survived the last cleanup in nitros9's archive.  
Somebody decided the file header wasn't the place for a ChangeLog and 
destroyed quite a bit of history with their housekeeping.
 
> I’m guessing at this point you’d consider that archive to be
> essentially the canonical source for the community these days?

Not for os9, use the nitros9 repo I think on sourceforge as the final 
word on os9 stuffs.

> TOSEC’s 
> asking me if I want to take over the CoCo DAT, so I’m looking at this
> from the angle that the work I’m doing will be going into both MAME
> and TOSEC’s databases.
>
> From: Robert Gault
> Sent: Friday, August 9, 2019 7:03 AM
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [Coco] The dire condition of software documentation..
>
> John,
>
> There is a large collection of Tandy CoCo programs and manuals at
> http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/
> and it should be easy to get copyright dates from the manuals.
>
> For a while there was very good support for the CoCo on MESS/MAME but
> there may not be anyone currently working on that emulation. Glad
> to see that you want to work with CoCo emulation. MAME has the best
> CoCo graphic emulation available.
>
> Robert


Cheers, Gene Heskett
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