[Coco] David Keil's emulators

[Roger Taylor]

I have a question concerning Keil's emulators, which includes the 
CoCo, CoCo 3, Model 4P, and Model 1, and probably his others.  I've 
noticed they all share the same interface and menus.

A problem I've encountered is that when I run any of them from a 
bootable CD or bootable USB stick, apparently I don't have the 
config.sys or autoexec.bat files set up properly because in the menus 
the characters 1-9, SPACE, and maybe a few more are trashed with 
garbage.  I assume I don't have the DOS or FreeDOS memory set up right.

I've run the emulators from both MS-DOS and FreeDOS with the same 
problem, so I assume it's the memory management or a driver loaded in 
the wrong place?

On another note, yes... I've created both a bootable CoCo emulator CD 
and bootable USB dongle (4gig).  When I boot my laptop up with the 
dongle or CD in and the BIOS set with those devices listed first, the 
system boots up into DOS or FreeDOS depending on which one I put on 
the media, and I can make autoexec.bat go right into the CoCo screen, 
but the menus are garbled as I said, with trashed 1-9 and SPACE.

Has anyone seen this font problem before, and is there a fix?

Btw, today I accomplished the CoCo-on-a-USB dongle trick and I was 
thrilled to see it working fine except for the menus.  I pulled off 
the bootable CD trick a few weeks ago.  I'd like to go forward with 
these items if I can fix the font.  Character '0' shows up fine, though.

My USB CoCo emulator is a 4gig Lexar with FreeDOS installed on 
it.  The idea is to boot with no prompts or pauses, right into the 
nuclear green screen, and perferrably running NitrOS-9 from a virtual 
hard drive filled with lots of goodies plus all the asm and rma 
development tools, but for now it is in Disk BASIC with all of the 
.dsk images from the CoCo archive DVD and all the other virtual 
images, making it the smallest CoCo emulator I know yet.  The Lexar 
dongle is about an inch past the USB prong itself and almost weightless.  Nice!

Another problem: on a laptop with a wide display, the CoCo screen is 
stretched to fill the screen, causing it to be too wide.  I haven't 
tried this on a wide LCD monitor connected to a desktop PC, but I the 
same problem is present.  Any fix for this?  There should be a 
setting in Keil's emulators somewhere (hopefully) for a no-stretch 
fit to the panel?

I really don't want to use Vavasour's emulator because it's just, 
well.. plain ugly, but I've got that on the media as well and can go 
into it manually but it reports the ROMs are incorrect or not 
present.  Due to his very nonstandard strange virtual media formats, 
I find it difficult to even work around his emulators without getting 
media mixed up with the ones for the better emulators.