[Coco] The dire condition of software documentation..

[Robert Gault]

John,

There is a large collection of Tandy CoCo programs and manuals at
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/
and it should be easy to get copyright dates from the manuals.

For a while there was very good support for the CoCo on MESS/MAME but
there may not be anyone currently working on that emulation. Glad
to see that you want to work with CoCo emulation. MAME has the best
CoCo graphic emulation available.

Robert

John Peasley wrote:
> Hello there! I've just joined the list. I'll talk a little about
> myself at the end of the email, but for now I'd like to get straight
> to the heart of the matter.
>
> I'm a member of the MAME development team and peripherally involved in
> other software preservation projects as well. Most recently I've been
> assisting 4am and others in the Apple community with getting disks
> documented and preserved in the MAME softlists. Over 2000 of them were
> added this year.
>
> Well, my next project, if possible, is to work on the good old CoCo.
> I'm definitely familiar with the hardware (see section at end about my
> history), but I'm going to be blunt-- a lot of what's already out
> there is in pretty dire condition. The TOSEC DATs are.. problematic in
> multiple ways, with loose disks and ill-defined sets (and some
> outright errors like saying Disk EDTASM came out in 1994), and MAME
> itself doesn't have a lot of floppies yet (which is what I'm aiming to
> fix, really)
>
> I'm going to definitely need some community help to start to unravel
> some of this and to try to track down what's good and what isn't,
> because I really do NOT want to be just blindly throwing .DSKs into
> the proverbial blender.
>
> So, a little about myself:
>
> My first computer was a 4K Color Computer owned by my father, who got
> me started at a very young age. First computer I owned myself was a
> CoCo 3. Also had a Tandy 1000-- so I have a very RS-filled background.
> Sometime around '94 the CoCo 3 died during a botched 512K upgrade
> (don't remember specifics) and getting replacement DRAM/parts was
> difficult by that point so I ended up going fully MS-DOS.
>