[Coco] VCC emulator on laptop?

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

Roger Taylor wrote:
> At 08:40 AM 8/4/2007, you wrote:
> 
> The M.E.S.S. emulator is nice but appears to be in the hands of people 
> who are currently consuming alcoholic beverages while they are coding.  

As someone who has worked on the mess dragon/coco driver I'm not sure if 
I should take that as a compliment or an insult :)

> A *group* of coders or a team wouldn't normally release a crippled or 
> buggy version when past versions worked fine.  

Not ran any Microsoft software then recently have you ? :) :)

Seriously as one who codes both professionally and personally, I realise 
how difficult it is sometimes, to update code without breaking 
something, it's also not possible to test the code in every situation 
that an end user would, or on evey setup.

Another thing is that doifferent components of mess/mame are coded by 
different people, and so one person's change could break another 
person's code, this has definatly screwed up the CoCo/Dragon driver a 
couple of times in the past.

>						They fix something, then 
> 2 more things break, and it's usually in the CoCo emulation.  

Could that be perhaps because it's the CoCo emulation that you use the 
most, that you notice the breaks there ?

>								However, I 
> don't disagree that they have done a great job and I think eventually 
> the emulator will shine much brighter.

Cheers, I think one of the main problems with mess, is that it is in a 
lot of ways a subservient project to mame, and so changes that the mame 
people make can break the mess stuff in strange and interesting ways. 
The other problem that I think plagues mess, is that the people 
emulating some of the chips in mess, do so in a minimalist way 
(implementing what they need), and without fully understanding the way 
the thing works. This is kinda illustrated by my fight to get them to 
acknolege that the PIA side A input pins all had internal pullups that 
should be emulated, I think that the current mess' problems with the 
clock still might be down to that :)

>					  I mean, it can do it all right 
> now, but if it hogs your 2ghz PC so bad that you can't even move your 
> mouse cursor, something is seriously wrong.

Humm running on a 2.2GHz Athlon64, and while acording to task manager 
it's using >80% CPU, the rest of the machine seems reponsive enough,
was the same on my laptop (1.7GHz core duo), both I might add have at 
least 1GB of ram. So there may be some other problem, but yes it is a 
bit of a proccesor hog :(

Oh, and just to  keep on subject, have tested VCC on both my XP Pro and 
my Vista Home Premium (Laptop), and it works or seems to work on both, 
though not done anything more complicated than booted Nitros :)

note that all of the above is IMHO, and I in no way speak for the Mess team.

Cheers.

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.