[Coco] Emulators on a laptop?

[Roger Taylor]

If you're trying to run one of Jeff's 16-bit-coded emulators, I think 
they might require DOS mode to fully function.  I've seen his source 
code and I doubt that he will bring these up to date to the modern 32 
or 64-bit Windows standard anytime soon.

You're better off moving to the M.E.S.S. emulator since the video 
window and CoCo accuracy is much better.  You're not going to get 
visual depictions of the cassette recorder, MPI, or floppy drives (at 
this time), but you can join the list of people who push and bug the 
dev team to improve on some of these bells and whistles.

You can run M.E.S.S. from a Windows console prompt (closest thing to 
an MS-DOS prompt), or do everything from their "front-end" GUI using 
your mouse for most functions.  You can get it configured to where it 
requires no keyboard interaction until you get into the CoCo 
emulation window itself, where the OK prompt sits and waits as usual.

I've run M.E.S.S. on a Pentium 4 laptop for over a year, and have 
moved over to a dual-core Pentium laptop running Vista and everything 
seems to work fine.  M.E.S.S. is getting power hungry so you'll have 
to keep up with the requirements by getting a decent 
computer.  Personally, I think M.E.S.S. is suffering from a major 
design flaw if I am right that it concurrently maintains certain 
running features of all the supported emulation modes.  I hope this 
is not the case.

Anyway, to see it running so many computers from a window is an 
awesome sight.  You can literally "have it all" that you couldn't 
have as a kid!  Not only that but my Rainbow IDE supports writing 
software for a great number of the M.E.S.S. emulated computers, where 
your source code is compiled and mounted in/on those computers in one 
click.  Up pops the CoCo, or another computer, and you can run your 
program.  If it's a cartridge build, it runs automatically like a ROM 
Pak.  If it's a floppy disk, type DIR and there's your stuff.  I'm 
working right now on OS-9 builds using RMA/Rlink/Asm FROM THE IDE, 
and your final program(s) will end up on a virtual OS-9 floppy disk 
and mounted in OS-9 or NitrOS-9 in the pop-up CoCo window.  There's 
no way to describe the seamless builds from source code to emulation 
unless you try it and see for yourself.












At 09:17 PM 2/3/2007, you wrote:
>Has anyone got one of the emulators to run on a laptop? I'm working 
>with an old HP 5500CT P133 laptop with around 128MB of RAM. Couldn't 
>get DOS to work with the PCMCIA card CD-ROM drive, finally stopped 
>fighting with that after an hour of getting nowhere!
>
>I got David Keil's emulator to run, but the video was all messed up. 
>Tried different screen refresh rates, and sync on and off, but 
>didn't clear it up. All the setup screens worked flawlessly, just 
>the CC3 screen was bad. I didn't try to change CC3 screen modes... 
>darn, that's probably all I need to do!! I didn't get it to 
>recognize the disk drive either. The docs are not very helpful. I 
>did get the floppy controller in slot one, and the HD controller in 
>slot 2 of the MPI.
>
>Vavasour's emulator wouldn't display at all. It just gave me a blank 
>screen. None of the setup screens or anything would come up on the 
>laptop. I might plug in a standard monitor and see if the emulators 
>will display correctly. At least that will let me know it's a 
>hardware problem with the laptop display and the emulator is running.
>
>Any advice appreciated! Nothing is on the laptop except DOS 6.22. I 
>performed a clean install including formatting the little 1.2GB 
>drive this morning.
>
>--
>Frank Swygert
>Publisher, "American Motors Cars"
>Magazine (AMC)
>For all AMC enthusiasts
>http://farna.home.att.net/AIM.html
>(free download available!)
>
>--
>Coco mailing list
>Coco at maltedmedia.com
>http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


-- 
Roger Taylor