[Coco] Pseudo CoCo4???

[Mark McDougall]

Robert Gault wrote:

> Part of the problem (or most) for the MESS Coco group is that the MAME 
> core gets updated without regard for how it will work with MESS. 

That's a little unfair. Whilst the focus is definitely on arcade games,
MESS is not completely ignored. Some MAME source patches are
specifically to fix problems/incompatibilities with MESS...

Besides, a lot of MAME drivers get broken with each major release.
However, there is a larger team working on both MAME development and
MAME testing that fix most problems before the public see a release.

In any case, most 'improvements' to MAME should result in 'improvements'
to Coco emulation as well. Granted that added features will generally
result in gradually slower emulation speed, a *significant* decrease in
performance would suggest to me that the MESS driver is either not
taking full advantage of the emulation core features and/or isn't using
them correctly.

With MAME emulating 40MHz DSP co-processors together with 25MHz 68K and
accelerated graphics hardware all at 100% I very much doubt that the
humble CoCo - implemented correctly - could even go close to bringing
MESS to its knees on modern hardware...

Regards,
Mark