[Coco] Announcing the Color Computer Starter Kits

[Bill Pierce]

Andrew,
I don't know if making the kits for the old MSDOS emulators would make any difference other than the files all being n one place. The have no DW4 capabilities, limited HD support, (usually) require a dos box of sorts.. Just too many "outside" setups would be required on modern systems and not enough people with MSDOS capable machines to justify all the work. On the other hand, Vcc, Mess, and XRoar are widely used by Windows users and more people are finding ways to run Vcc under Linux and Mac. XRoar and Mess can both be found for Linux and Mac.
The MSDOS emulators (for most people) have to be run in some sort of "dos box" and it would probably be hard to implement that type of installation, though it may be possible and I'll look into it when I get a chance.
I liked the dos emulators as well. I starting using Jeff's Coco 2 emulator from the time he released it (95?). I also purchased Jeff's Coco 3 emulator right after it was released (serial #0007C). I also like David Keil's emulator a lot. To me, it had the best GUI of all the emulators past and present. I just wish he would upgrade it to run on Windows Vista, 7, & 8, as he's still active in the Coco Community. It wouldn't be hard (I wouldn't think so anyway).
But all of those emulators require a lot of setup that's internal to the programs and make it hard to implement a "turnkey" system. Again, I will check into it as I know lots of people still use them.

The Mess kits will be put together as soon as Richard get's a build that the setup is standard in the fashion of the other Coco emus in Mess. He has the becker port working, but it's temperamental about where the roms are, where it's run from etc. So there's still some work to be done.

The "real" Coco kits will be put together as soon as I get some time away from my MShell project which has consumed my waking hours lately. It's become an obsession.

I also need to complete the "Installation and User Guides" for the ones I have uploaded. I have the manuals "partially" done, but was unsure of some things (that are now resolved), so I'll get back to them soon.
 

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

My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Co-Webmaster of The TRS-80 Color Computer Archive
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/
Co-Contributor, Co-Editor for CocoPedia
http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
E-Mail: ooogalapasooo at aol.com


 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew <keeper63 at cox.net>
To: coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Mon, May 19, 2014 8:46 am
Subject: [Coco]  Announcing the Color Computer Starter Kits


Hey Bill, these sound great! One question, though:

You mention that you'll have MESS kits available later (as well as the 
"real deal"); do you have any interest in building a kit using one of 
the DOS-based emulators (perhaps Jeff Vavasour's CoCo 3 emu)? Would 
there be any limitations on such a system?

I've found MESS to be ok on my Linux system, but for some reason I like 
the DOS emulators better (they seem to work fine under DOSBox as well - 
though I haven't really exercised them well). I've never tried VCC under 
Wine (maybe it works ok?).

Regardless, I can tell you've put a lot of effort and thought into 
these, so congrats and thanks!

-- 
Andrew L. Ayers
Glendale, Arizona
http://www.phoenixgarage.org/

On 05/18/2014 12:14 PM, coco-request at maltedmedia.com wrote:
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 18 May 2014 03:10:47 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Bill Pierce<ooogalapasooo at aol.com>
> To:coco at maltedmedia.com
> Subject: [Coco] Announcing the Color Computer Starter Kits
> Message-ID:<8D1407F6CE2E5EB-15CC-2295E at webmail-m275.sysops.aol.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>
> Hi guys,
> A while back (last year) there was talk of putting together some starter kits 
for make it easier for people just getting back into Cocos to get started with 
the real machines, the emulators, DW4, HDBDSO etc. I had volunteered to do this. 
But it was about that time we found the NitrOS9 repository was a wreck and I 
decided to wait until we had good repo builds to do this.
> Thanks to Tormod, we now have a good NitrOS9 repo and now it's time for the 
"Starter Kits"
>
> These "Starter Kits" include almost everything needed for getting started with 
the Color Computer including the manuals


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