[Coco] A "compile - able" CoCo emulator

John M. Eicher jmeicher at starband.net
Wed Jul 7 14:25:25 EDT 2004


I could have guessed about the copyright and MS. In my brain, I always
forget that the MS that wrote Disk Extended Basic is the same MS of
today. I just can't ever seem to wrap my brain around the fact that the
producer of WinME and Coco Basic are the same entity!

On the ROM, yes, I am aware... ;>) It could be on the end users
shoulders to bear responsibility of the ROM image by having the emulator
read the ROM image each time it was compiling an EXE.

I was planning on checking to see if the CoCo2 emulator has command line
parameters. I highly doubt it will "autoload" a program, but I could
make an image file right after the program is executed under the
emulator and have that loaded via command line. That is if my favorite
emulator allows command line parms.

Granted, I am not the norm, but living by the KISS principle, I still
would like to have EXE capability. I will wake up soon... ;>D

I have never been able to warm up to MESS. It is a great idea, but I
just don't like it. I like specific, DOS executable emulators for each
different machine. I have tried to like MESS, but I just end up back
with my nice, warm, comfortable DOS CoCo 2. 

Which I hope soon to replace with a nice CoCo 3 emulator if my parallel
drive turns up around here so I can put Win98SE on my laptop. Living
large with DOS right now. Only putting on Win98SE primarily for CoCo 3
and other emulation. :>(

John

-----Original Message-----
From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com]
On Behalf Of John R. Hogerhuis
Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 2004 2:11 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] A "compile - able" CoCo emulator


On Wed, 2004-07-07 at 10:31, John M. Eicher wrote:
> Has anyone tried again recently to get the ROM released as PD?

You can forget about that. Microsoft is not going to give up their
precious Microsoft BASIC copyright. It isn't worth the trouble/liability
whatever to them. Imagine you start up your emulator, and the random
bits in memory represent an emergent CoCo intelligence in the form of
random tokenized BASIC code that leaks out the virtual serial port,
takes over the Internet unifying it into one great larger emergent
intelligence that attempts to destroy humanity.

What rational corporation would they take that kind of risk for no
possible return on investment?

That said, right or wrong, ROMs are widely available. It really isn't
that hard to copy it into the right directory, you just have to spend 15
minutes (at most) figuring it out.

Conceivably you could write a batch file that will invoke the emulator
in the mode you want, and tell it right where the ROM is at. Then make a
link to the batch file. Easy peasy...

There are also nice front ends to mess. The command line is good enough
for me though...

-- John.




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