[Coco] Emulator problems

[Mark McDougall]

David J Bush wrote:

> My drive is a CD-ROM drive. Am I supposed to have a CD-R drive
> to read this disc correctly?

Some old CDROM drives won't read CD-R's properly.

> When I try to open the folder "CoCo3 512k emulator v2.0" the
> system hangs and probably crashes, but I have learned to quickly
> reboot at the first sign of trouble, so I'm not sure if it would
> have crashed or not.

This is probably a problem with your CDROM drive and CD-Rs. Have you used 
CD-Rs in your drive before? I had an old drive that would hang on some files 
and not others - also happens on *very* old CDRs as well. To this day, I 
still don't think they've got the whole CD thing worked out, it's still very 
flakey.

> If I try to access the disc within DOS, the folder names are much
> shorter and not very informative. And I sure can't read any html
> or pdf files (at least, not the way they were intended to be
> viewed.)

DOS is limited to 8.3 filenames.

> Then it tells me to execute the file "COCO" well what folder is it in?
> Am I supposed to search around under DOS for this file, with the
> truncated and confusing directory names?

Well, from my perspective, this CD was provided 'free' as-is, as a service 
to CoCo enthusiasts. It is not intended as a consumer "plug-n-play" product. 
You get what you pay for - don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Having said 
that, I'm sure you'll find enough helpful people on this maillist to at 
least get you up and running.

But your first problem is going to be reading that CD.

> I notice there is a file "rs405eng.exe" on the disc. rs might mean
> Radio Shack, but I'm not about to execute a file without documentation
> telling me to. And why is winamp206.exe on the disc also? What do I
> need winamp for? Is this a virus?

RS405eng is Adobe Acrobat Reader, for reading PDFs.
I'm not sure why winamp is there, but why assume it's a virus? If you don't 
need it, then don't run it!

> So far, I'm glad no one asked me for money first.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't see anyone else here complaining 
about the CD, so on the balance of probabilities, I'd suspect your problems 
have more to do with your inexperience with computers than a fault with the 
product.

As I said, sort out yor problems reading the CD and I'd be glad to offer any 
assistance I can.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
| <http://members.optushome.com.au/msmcdoug> |   with less resistance!"