[Coco] MAME problems .186

[Steve Strowbridge]

This has been an interesting discussion and I've been silently observing,
and I find it fascinating what some people do, or at least attempt to do
with emulators.

My needs for a real CoCo, and by extension an emulator have always been
very simple, the ability to bring up a single floppy or cartridge and run a
single program, for mostly entertainment purposes.
When I had real CoCo hardware I never had more than one floppy drive.  I
understand the benefit of having two for making copies of disks, or
programs that are large, etc., but have a really hard time understanding
the need for or use of 4 floppies at once, out of curiosity, not judgment,
what are you doing with four floppy drives?

I completely agree the the general statement, that an emulator _should_ do
anything/everything real hardware can do, but I'd imagine, it's hard to
calculate and compensate for "Everything" that could possibly be done,
almost getting in to Microsoft territory, "we'll work 90% reliably on 80%
of the world's computers".

I've heard stories of Simon Jonassen "breaking" Xroar, by pushing the
limits of the SAM/VDG and finding things that couldn't be produced, and how
those extreme examples we fixed by Ciaran.
I'm now hearing what David Ladd is doing with "custom" floppy
configurations that were possible in real hardware, but are not fully
compatible in a variety of emulators, so it's neat to see the boundaries
being pushed, and nice to know that a lot of these extreme cases are
getting addressed.

I think the good news/bad news about MAME is that there are many people
working on it.  This means things will sometimes change/break, but also
means that reporting them can hopefully get resolutions in a reasonable
time frame.

One of the things I've come to be aware of, is the hypocrisy of trying to
"judge" anyone's preference on what they want to do with a vintage system.
My interests, even going back to my original CoCo have always been for
mainly entertainment purposes, can I play a game, can I listen to music,
can I write in BASIC, and soon, Assembly.

I have yet to dip my toes into the waters that are OS9, but hopefully that
will change, too.  For any of "us" to cast judgement on what "others" are
doing with their real or virtual CoCo's seems self defeating, anybody
"outside" the retro community would think we're all nuts bothering with
real or imaginary old computers, and "dead" operating systems and
programming languages, etc.

The cool thing about the retro hobby is, it doesn't matter what you do or
want to do, if it makes you happy and you aren't hurting anyone else, then
there's nothing wrong with it, and when people are doing some fairly
"extreme" things and pushing boundaries are stretching previous limits of
what real hardware and emulators can do, and things are
addressed/adjusted/added to make the real and emulated CoCo's a good as
they can possibly be, it's a good thing and everyone wins.




Steve Strowbridge, aka
The Original Gamer Stevie Strow
http://ogsteviestrow.com
ogsteviestrow at gmail.com


On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 11:24 AM, Robert Gault <robert.gault at att.net> wrote:

> Doug Fraser wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure if it's related, but after compiling mame 0.186 (on a
>> Slackware64 14.2 system), every time I try to boot any NitrOS9 disk I get
>> seg fault errors, with flop1 and flop2 as QD drives. Should I change the
>> 'dsk' format to 'jvc' to see if that works?
>> Doug Fraser
>>
>>
> Doug,
>
> I think you will find that it does not work. While 0.187 may fix the
> issue, in the meantime try an older version ex. 0.158 .
>
>
> Robert
>
>
>
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