[Coco] graphical CoCo emulation environment

[Roger Taylor]

We've talked about this subject before: the idea of a graphical 
representation of a real CoCo system being emulated on a PC, where you can 
drag and drop "floppy disks", "rom paks", "cassettes", insert "cables", and 
everything else you'd normally do with a real system (well, almost).

Because the M.E.S.S. team has made it somewhat easy for some to interface 
with the mess.exe and messgui.exe programs, a graphical environment of the 
type I described should be rather easy to do.  The hardest work would 
probably be in the graphics department, keeping everything pretty and in 
proportion, etc.  Even that is not that hard to do.

My ideal virtual CoCo would look pretty much like the systems did in the 
Radio Shack catalogs, to some degree.  The only portion of the whole screen 
that would belong to M.E.S.S. itself is the surface that holds the CoCo's 
video screen, and maybe the menu riding on top, but I'm sure that can be 
switchable.

The messgui app is okay I guess, but is buggy and if you're just into 
emulating the CoCo, it's not really needed unless you're configuring the 
M.E.S.S. settings when you first install the emulator.  After that, you can 
pretty much call on messgui with parameters and if you know a bit about 
hijacking windows and subclassing them, you can make the M.E.S.S. video 
surface behave to fit this graphical CoCo system.

So this will be my "next" CoCo project, which will be the 3rd project based 
on a PC but aimed 100% at the CoCo, while 2 of those projects are designed 
to actually create CoCo software for real CoCos, so I do not feel bad at 
all playing around in this area.

any thoughts?


{Roger Taylor}