[Coco] MESS Emulator

[John Donaldson]

True, but most of the emulators are written to work under MSDOS not 
windows.
Under MSDOS, you can access the floppy. DSKINI and RETREIVE both work with
the floppy to make/format a COCO OS9 disk and RETRIEVE will copy a OS9 
disk to
a DSK. It should have been a snap to intergrate the same code into the 
JV/JC emulator.
IMHO, this would have made it more like a REAL COCO. Allowing one to 
easly move
disks and files back and forth between the Diskette and a  DSK file. 
DSKINI and
RETRIEVE don't work under XP, so you still have to use either MSDOS or WIN98
under the DOS mode anyway. even Kriel's emulator which DOES give you floppy
access doesn't work correctly under XP. Under the next release of the MS 
OS's even
these will problely stop working.
  If I understood MSDOS assembly well, I would try and get the source to 
the JC/JV
emulators and correct the floppy code to correctly read a 360K or 720K 
floppy as
a real COCO drive.

John Donaldson


Phill Harvey-Smith wrote:

> 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.
>