[Coco] MESS Emulator

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

John Donaldson wrote:
> Also wondered why MESS did not have the ablitity to read COCO disks
> from the PC floppy. We do have stand alone softwater  that does read
> the  COCO disk, just wonder why it was not intergrated into the 
> emulators. IMRC the C4 emulator will read a C4 floppy using the PC
> disk drive.

The problem is that Mess is multi platform, there are versions for 
Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and various Unix systems, so there would be 
no consitent reliable way of doing this. Some of those platforms would 
not easilly have access to floppy drives either.

Those emulators that will read disks directly do they run under Win 
2K/XP as when I investigated reading CoCo/Dragon disks on XP, I found 
that I could not get the driver for the floppy drive to read anything 
other than 512 byte sectors. (It would read Sinclair QL disk format 
which is physically identical to MSDOS 9x512byte sectors per track, but 
has a completely different logical format, but not Dragon floppies).

Linux however has no problems reading CoCo/Dragon floppies, so I use my 
linux box to transfer from disk image to real floppy or floppy to image 
and then just punt them across to my windows box for use in mess.

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.