[Coco] Pseudo CoCo4???

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

DISCLAIMER : This is all IMHO and I in no way speak for the MESS team.

>> I can't remember the dead-head who told me that, but I disagreed, and
>> I still invision such an emulator front-end where you drag and drop
>> graphical elements using your PC mouse.  Drag a .dsk file into the
>> floppy drives, a tape into a tape deck, and click the keys if you want.

Whilst that would be cool in a wow that's good sort of way, personally I 
actually prefer the way things are done but that's just me.

>> The latest version of M.E.S.S. appears to run fast enough but when
>> you boot into the CoCo window it delays for too long to make me
>> happy.  There used to be no delay, but now it reports a progress bar,
>> "Loading 66%", etc. Then, "initializing"... taking up more time than
>> ever which each new release. 

Maybe on your machine, it's pretty much instant on mine, especially if 
you don't run it through the GUI. What are the specs of your machine ?

>				 I don't know what's going on with the
>> development team but they have had it right so many times in the past
>> and I'm sure they are fixing things that aren't broke.  

Speaking as one who has done a reasonable amount of work on the 
CoCo/Dragon driver, I can assure you that certainly from my point of 
view that most defiantly is not the case. I personally have implemented 
2 new variants of the extended CoCo family (Dragon Alpha, and Dragon64 
with Dragon plus), fixed a couple of bugs related to the differences 
between the two machines. I don't consider that "fixing things that 
aren't broke".

Having said that I have done almost no work on the CoCo3 driver.

>>							There seems
>> to be a focus on doctoring with the CoCo emulation on each
>> release.  

Again not true, I believe the focus of MESS, is to document, and emulate 
the hardware as accurately as possible. For example my current work 
focuses on tiding up the memory handling code so that it more correctly 
mirrors what the real CoCo 1/2 & Dragon hardware does.

>>		If you check out the WhatsNew.txt file you'll see the CoCo
>> mentioned more than the other modes.  Grab a past stable release and
>> don't ever delete it just in case they really screw things up with no 
>> hope.

This is actually quite a sensible attitude to *ANY* software that is 
still in development, even with commercial software, new releases 
sometimes break things :(

Also, please remember a couple of things about MESS, it is developed by 
a reasonably large group of people, in their own time for free, mainly 
because we love old systems like the CoCo and want to keep it alive, we 
like most people are not perfect and we do sometimes make mistakes and / 
or do things the wrong way, please cut us some slack. We also cannot 
please everyone all the time, sorry :)

I'm sorry if this sounded a little forceful, it's not really meant to be :)

Cheers.

Phill.

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

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