[Coco] Question about DriveWire 4 and MESS

[Rick Taylor]

Ok, I can also boot to Ubuntu on that machine :-) I'll give that a try.

Yes, I am also trying DriveWire 3. Basically I have a CoCo that I want
to copy floppies from, and then use an emulator to access those disks
instead of actual Tandy hardware. I was going for DW4 because it looks
like I could, under OS-9, dsave the contents of floppies directly to a
windows share and get them out of the OS-9 format entirely and
accessible to other programs. Getting the files on to a Linux drive
would work out fine as well.

Thanks for the help!

On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 6:25 AM, John W. Linville <linville at tuxdriver.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 12:06:46AM -0800, Rick Taylor wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am trying to get Drivewire 4 working, both in an emulator (MESS or
>> VCC, either will do), and I'm running into problems.
>> I have downloaded the latest version of MESS from here
>> http://www.mess.org/download.php
>>
>> and I have the latest version of drivewire 4 (the beta) from here
>> http://sites.google.com/site/drivewire4/beta
>>
>> I have MESS booting up from the coco3 and DECB1.1 roms, and when I
>> boot (ie, type "DOS" from within DECB) from the sdlmess_dwboot.os9
>> image, it comes up to the 'development build/not for distribution'
>> initial screen for NitrOS-9, and then hangs, no prompt.
>>
>> One of the reasons why is because I have not applied the
>> sdlmess-coco-dwsck-ffe0.patch file to MESS. I am running under
>> windows, and have my choice of XP, Vista, or Win7(64 bit) -- this
>> machine boots to a couple of different images.
>
> I'm pretty sure I wrote that patch... :-)
>
> I don't think any drivewire version works with any unpatched version
> of MESS.  AFAIK, you will need to patch the source and rebuild.
>
> Robert mentioned something about not using sdlmess on windows.  I'm no
> expert on windows, in fact I basically don't use windows at all.
> And I'm not particularly knowledgeable of MESS either.  But FWIW,
> that patch only touches the coco driver in sdlmess.  So it shouldn't
> be too specific to sdlmess versus windows mess or whatever.
>
> It is however, a bit specific to the 0136 version of sdlmess.
> For whatever reason, the mess folks seem to continuously refactor
> the driver layer code in ways that break that patch between versions.
> Usually they are trivial to fixup _iff_ you understand what has changed
> in the pseudo-language mess uses for its driver code.  Unfortunately,
> the pseudo-language seems to change quite a bit too...
>
> So the net is, if you want to use that patch as-is then you should
> use either sdlmess 0136 or whatever windows mess source version is
> closest to that.  Otherwise, you may need to make some manual changes.
> I haven't used mess for any recent project work, so I haven't needed
> to update the patch myself.  If you get stuck, you are free to ask
> me for help -- but you might only get what you pay for! :-)
>
>> So here's my question: Under Windows, how the heck do you apply the
>> patch file? There is no patch.exe in the MESS distribution that I can
>> find. Do I go get a copy of MAME or something? Or do I just put it
>> somewhere special?
>
> patch is a reasonably common utility in the unix-derived world.  Linux,
> FreeBSD, etc all should have it readily available.  Under windows,
> you probably need to get it from cygwin or some other package of
> unix-compatible utilities.
>
> Hth...happy hacking!
>
> John
> --
> John W. Linville                Someday the world will need a hero, and you
> linville at tuxdriver.com                  might be all we have.  Be ready.
>
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>