[Coco] Mess with Becker Port & DW4

[Bill Pierce]

I have been "messing" (pun intended) with the Mess w/Becker Port (Win32 UI version) that Guillaume uploaded to The Color Computer Archives, and I've found a few peculiarities. After checking the "non-becker port" emulations, I find these are limited to the becker port emulations only.
As a note, I've only tested this on an old WinXP laptop which is EXTREMELY slow and is quirky in operation to begin with. I will be trying these tests on my Win Server 2003 (pentium 3) and Win 7 (dual core) machines as soon as I can. My main quadcore (Win Vista Premium 64bit) that I normally use is down for the count at the moment which is my usual machine for emulators and Coco stuff.
Here is what I find... Anyone else?

1. When in HDBDOS, if I switch to the internal Mess disk drives (DRIVEOFF) and perform any disk operations, the emulation crashes. I cannot seem to access the emulated floppies at all. The hdbdos floppy partitions seem to perform properly.


2 When using the "DOS255" or "AUTOEXEC.BAS" method to boot NitrOS9 from a OS9/RSDOS partitioned VHD, the boot fails. I've tried this with several configurations with offsets poked into hdbdos, rom modified with offsets and offsets in the DW4 UI. All fail. These same VHDs will boot fine in VCC so I know it's not the software.
A Nitros9 DW disk image from the repo will boot fine from DW slot0 with no offsets (non partitioned). Once booted, I can access the "/Xx" drives from NitrOS9 with no problem. In fact, this is how I created the partitioned VHD I was trying to boot from. I have created literrally hundreds of boots in the past 3 years for others as well as myself and for the most part, without failure, so I'm pretty sure the problem is not in the boot itself.
This could be a quirk in this WinXP laptop and Java but I won't know until I try other systems.


3. When in Nitros9, EmuDsk does not seem to work correctly and I have no access to Mess' internal HDs. I think this is related to #1 above. I haven't tried EmuDsk on non-becker port/DW4 emulations so I'm not sure if it works there. I know it did before the patch.


4. The "Natural" keyboard mode blocks the use of the "arrow" keys. The "Coco" mode, restores this. I've tried several settings in the configs, but cannot get the arrow keys to work in "Natural" mode. I'm pretty sure this is a Mess problem and has nothing to do with the patch as I had noticed this in regular Mess a while back and is true for ALL Coco emulations. This is actually a long standing issue. Working in OS9 most of the time using the C compiler, I use a lot of Coco's "special" keys ( { } [ ] | \ etc.) and I hate having to remember all the key combos to get them in "Coco" mode. My real Coco has an Eagle AT keyboard interface so I haven't used a Coco keyboard since the 80s and I'm used to the modern layout even on my real Coco.


All of these issues exept the arrow key bug seem to be directly related to the patched emulations only. The "regular" emulations seem to run fine. When I was testing Richard's last patched version he sent me for testing (pre-release), I don't remember having any of these problems except the arrow key issue. I could just swap in my Vcc VHDs and everything booted. I also had access to the internal floppy drives. I will probably dig up that version and see if it behaves the same on this machine. 
As I mentioned, this could all be the fault of this laptop and I won't know until I try some of my other systems.
Has anyone else seen these problems?



Bill Pierce
"Today is a good day... I woke up" - Ritchie Havens
 

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