[Coco] I love VCC + wish list

[Paul Fitch]

I use, as stated in another thread, VCC (currently 1.40).  If I had to say
how good it is, I would say it does about 90% to 95% of the job with perfect
results.  There are some short comings which I would like to see addressed,
but even if they weren't, I would still use it.  Its that good.

Things I like:

A. V1.4 of VCC has a cassette emulator with a counter on it! My god, I
remember the days when I only used ECB and saved everything to cassette.
The counter was a great idea. 

B. The ease of setup and use.  Its intuitive and flexable. 

C. The options are diverse.  You can select sound card type, monitor type,
CPU type, over clock speed (up to 89 MHz) and memory up to 8-meg.

Things I would like to see added:

1) I would love to see it include hooks to integrate with Rainbow IDE.  I
dislike MESS a whole lot.  1st and formoemost because the people working on
MESS, IMO, don't really care about the CoCo. They emulate everything, so you
relly can't expect them to lavish a lot of love on just one of HUNDREDS of
emulations they cover.
 
2) I would love a way to grab a file off of the PC file system (for example
a text file or an AR archive) and drop it onto/into a coco .dsk image.
There are a lot of stand alone tools that sort of work, most of the time,
but I've noticed issues.  And mostly it's a pain to stop everything, find
the utility, refigure out how to use it, ect...  IMO, the emulator should be
one-stop shopping.

3) It needs serial port (rs-232 pak) and Bit-banger / printer support.  

On the printer side, I would be happy if it output'd to a PDF file that I
could then send to my laser printer.    Even if the output looked like an
old style DMP dot matrix printer or my old "Gorilla Bananna".  <--That was a
robust printer shipped in a big box with HOLES cut in it, and it said
Gorilla Bananna on the side with this huge picture of a Bananna on it<g>. 

For the bitbanger you could do the same thing. 

On the serial port (rs-232 pak) side, I'd like it to connect to the PCs com
port.  In the simplest case, you would then hook a modem to that com port,
and the emulated CoCo would be out surfin the BBs's again. 

4) I wish there was a way to emulate artifacting on a PCs LCD screen.  Now
we are talking physics and human visual perception, not software.  I'll name
my 1st born after the man that can figure that out<g>.  (Roger, you want to
be a Godfather?)

Nuf said.  If I had 10% of Rogers or Boisys skills I add those to VCC in a
heartbeat.  But even without all that, the developer of VCC has done an
outstanding job.