[Coco] M.E.S.S. CoCo emulators

[Roger Taylor]

Hello folks,

I downloaded M.E.S.S. 0.127 today (plus the i686 optimized version) 
for Windows.  The first thing I noticed is that the CoCo modes 
(emulators) cause the Windows mouse cursor to vanish, as if being 
disabled.  I have to hit ALT-ESC to minimize the CoCo window and then 
kill the GUI sometimes to get back control.  Why is this happening, 
and why has every CoCo revision gotten slower and more erratic on 
each release?  Who's on this team of CoCo developers and how does 
something so obvious go unnoticed?

Other emulation modes seem to work fine, but I haven't tried each and 
every emulation.  Has anyone else noticed the mouse bug, and if so, I 
haven't seen anything written about it since it's release in August.

This isn't a bug report since I don't report bugs to M.E.S.S. 
anymore.  I did this years ago and my reports went unanswered.  I'm 
not on the team since I do not use their development tools and also 
don't want to get involved in such a messy system that keeps changing 
this much from version to version.  I'll simply step back to another 
working version and wait 1 or 2 more years until they get it right 
for a little while more, before breaking yet another revision.

One other potential problem: there's now no formal listing of the 
supported emulations?  Instead, I have to parse the sysinfo.dat file 
and strip out the needed info.  If this fails, I'll fall back to my 
own compiled list of M.E.S.S. systems that's included with my IDE 
installation.  I'm even thinking of merging the two lists of M.E.S.S. 
systems as they are loaded due to a problem I just noticed: M.E.S.S. 
.127 doesn't show the coco2b, coco2, and other coco modes in the 
sysinfo.dat file, but there they are in the MESSGUI.EXE 
application!  So the developers are hiding or keeping these modes out 
of any external file now?  Wow.

So, what I've had to do over time with the M.E.S.S. system is try to 
battle these crippling changes that keep affecting my Rainbow IDE 
that promises to work seamlessly to provide source code to emulation 
in one click.

My newest tricks will involve looking through the entire chosen MESS 
folder for files containing bios system info and all the .exe tools 
involved in the system.  This way, the drunken M.E.S.S. team of 
developers can rename, move things around, or do away with the BIOS 
names listing altogether, and Rainbow should keep on working with it.

IN THE WORSE CASE, a Rainbow user can always step back to a version 
or two back of M.E.S.S. that worked fine before the "current" version 
was broken.  Or, tweak the Rainbow IDE 2.0 options for M.E.S.S. which 
will be ready for any changes made to imgtool.exe (including -switch 
changes), and the M.E.S.S. CLI switches for forcing modes before launching.

On top of that, you should know that I'm working to support the VCC 
CoCo 3 emulator in the same way Rainbow works with M.E.S.S., so 
unless you're developing for other vintage systems using my IDE, and 
prefer to do only CoCo development, you wouldn't have to worry with 
M.E.S.S. or any of the issues I mentioned above.

Rainbow IDE 2.0 is not released yet but today I've got it where you 
can configure the M.E.S.S. launcher to mount floppies with new and 
old versions of M.E.S.S., mount tapes and cartridges, even if the 
M.E.S.S. team changes their CLI switch names and format.

Btw, I'm interested in knowing what version of M.E.S.S. any current 
Rainbow IDE 1.x users are using and what issues you've noticed or 
would like to see improved?
-- 
Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com