[Coco] The dire condition of software documentation..

[John Peasley]

Thanks for the OS-9 information. While I understand the community has
the desire to standardize on the newest community builds for multiple
reasons (including the lack of copyright issues surrounding the
rebuilds as opposed to the legal black hole around getting the
RS-licensed L1/L2 disks) I'm going to need to document the official
L1/L2 disks too as they're a part of the overall history. Obviously
those won't be on the NitrOS9 repository, but I'll figure something
out when I get to that point.

I've spent the last few days slowly digging through some of the
material I already have, and one question did come up (yeah, you'll be
getting a lot of these oddball one-off left field questions as I dig
through the archives..)

So, CoCo MAX 3-- I'm seeing here a disk for version 3.5 that's been
specifically tagged with "hi-res interface". Having gone over the
manual, I know that all versions should support their custom HR
interface, but any idea why the 3.5 version would be specifically
tagged? My best guess would be that it absolutely requires it, but
that makes no sense from a sales standpoint. Maybe it's modded to
support the Tandy interface?

(Also, I'll open a new thread for new non-OS9 questions going forward)

As for the status of MAME CoCo support in general, it did sit for
awhile before recently getting a bit of interest again. I know that
we've had some past issues with 32-bit binaries; about four or five
years ago around when I started work on the major documentation
rewrite we were having issues with GCC spitting out binaries that
would not run correctly on 32-bit XP. I'm pretty sure that's been
fixed by now, but I've been 64-bit for quite some time and wouldn't
have been directly checking that issue.

On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 2:49 PM Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> wrote:
>
> On Friday 09 August 2019 16:40:10 Firehawke wrote:
>
> > It’s good to hear from you again. I hadn’t seen you on Bannister in a
> > few years.
> >
> > I’m familiar with the archive (and had been using the manuals exactly
> > as you suggested), but I’m not entirely certain how good those disk
> > dumps are in general. I’d hit a few oddities with one of the OS-9 boot
> > disks refusing to boot in MAME (which is another one of the reasons I
> > actually wanted to make contact with the community; having access to
> > anyone at all who could doublecheck the oddball cases on real hardware
> > would be worthwhile) and the size of the images in TOSEC’s set is
> > easily twice as large for the OS-9 disks.
> >
> There have been various attempts to make the coco's 256 byte sectors work
> with 512 byte/sector disks, some of which may have 256 bytes of data
> followed by 256 bytes of nulls or some such. Look at one of them with a
> hexdumper.  We don't have that problem now, but os9's history is
> littered with such half fixes. I think theres a flag bit in the disk
> descriptor to control that, see the superdisk.asm file for some notes
> about that if they survived the last cleanup in nitros9's archive.
> Somebody decided the file header wasn't the place for a ChangeLog and
> destroyed quite a bit of history with their housekeeping.
>
> > I’m guessing at this point you’d consider that archive to be
> > essentially the canonical source for the community these days?
>
> Not for os9, use the nitros9 repo I think on sourceforge as the final
> word on os9 stuffs.
>
> > TOSEC’s
> > asking me if I want to take over the CoCo DAT, so I’m looking at this
> > from the angle that the work I’m doing will be going into both MAME
> > and TOSEC’s databases.
> >
> > From: Robert Gault
> > Sent: Friday, August 9, 2019 7:03 AM
> > To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
> > Subject: Re: [Coco] The dire condition of software documentation..
> >
> > 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
>
>
> Cheers, Gene Heskett
> --
> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
>  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
>  - Louis D. Brandeis
> Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
>
> --
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-- 
John "Firehawke" Peasley
firehawke-mame at sanctuarycrew.com
// This account is used for MAME-related projects only. //