[Coco] OVCC - attn Walter Zambotti?

[Andrew]

After OVCC was mentioned again, I took another look at the repo, and 
noticed that there were instructions to compile it for Linux. Only one 
thing stopped me:

It appears to need a special patched version of the GUI library it uses 
with SDL2; Walter has provided those patches, and what appears to be 
sufficient information on putting it in place - but it is still an 
alteration to something "base" to the system (well, from a developer 
standpoint I guess).

Prior to my current workstation, I had built (over a period of time and 
numerous modifications) a reasonable facsimile of the Crunchbang distro 
- this was just after they stopped, and before things like Bunsen Labs 
(and CB++) became "stable". My version was built up from an install of 
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Minimal - adding in the relevant pieces, etc. I kept it 
around a long time, then sometime last year, or the year before, it all 
fell apart - mainly due to some mods I had put in place to support a 
newer version of C++ for a Udacity course. A later update to some stuff, 
and compilation died, and that was my forceful exit ticket.

I moved on to Ubuntu Budgie on 18.04 LTS (and so desperately want the 
20.04 LTS to be finalized), but I vowed to never do any of the wacky 
hacking I had done before; if it couldn't be installed from a .deb file 
(or a app pak or similar), then I wasn't installing it. OVCC seems to be 
one of these cases (configure, make, make install).

The first two steps are ok for me - but I don't want anything I have to 
"make install" - if I can run it from the folder it's built in, that's 
great. I've got a bit of software just like that on my system. But the 
only actual installs I will trust not to make a mess of my system (and 
be easily able to be completely removed with the state restored to 
things it changed during install) have to come from some kind of 
debian-style repository.

So - my first question would be: Can this be done with OVCC? Do I have 
to do a "make install" for anything? Can the patched GUI library remain 
"out of the loop" as far as the system and compilation goes for OVCC? So 
that - should I install a "new version" from a repo (or the distro, if 
it has it) it will work for that stuff, as if the custom version never 
existed...

My second question would be - in lieu of the above, how well does OVCC 
work via other "methods"? What I'm thinking of would be (potentially) as 
installed under a containerized version of Linux, or on a virtualbox 
image; does performance suffer much?

I could easily set up a basic Linux image under virtualbox and compile 
everything under that, but I don't want to go through all of the effort 
(or more for a container) just to find it runs slow, or has some other 
issues that make it painful to use.

I already have MAME with the CoCo 3 roms installed, but I have always 
wanted to try out VCC and OVCC would give me that chance I guess. I 
didn't have a windows box before to try it.

Honestly, what I need to do is dig out my actual hardware (and maybe 
also revamp my DOS "emulator" PC that I built a long while back) - but 
that stuff is so packed away in my shop, I don't know when I'll ever get 
to it again. I keep saying soon, but that never seems to arrive for 
me...anyhoo...

-- 
Andrew L. Ayers
Glendale, Arizona
https://www.phoenixgarage.org/
https://github.com/andrew-ayers