[Coco] RGBDOS in Mess

[Robert Gault]

John Orwen wrote:
> I do still have access to floppies as well as hard drive1. I have not set up a
> second hard drive.
>
> The error is the same one, I receive when I don't have the virgin disk11.rom in
> the subdirectory. it is
> [ One or more ROM missing - Please select a different game ]
>
> I don't know what commands/text to put into coco_cart.xml to make MESS fall in
> love with it. When I open coco_cart.xml in a browser window all I see are game
> carts and orch90 listed. If you can supply that info, I would be happy to enter
> it in and give it another try renaming the rgb4mess.rom to disk11 and replacing
> the virgin one.
>
> John
> N0GFB

After more thought on this, I don't think altering coco_cart.xml will help. MESS 
is hard coded to look for disk11.rom when running coco3 and the crc is actually 
within mess.exe. If you know how to patch files, you can search for the 
disk11.rom entry and change the crc values within mess.exe.

The version of rgbdos.rom I sent you has
crc(32)= $1E9F1918
sha-1 = $7CBC5548DB6B51C2A410B60D7B349129F3EA7AD5

Searching in mess.exe will find
disk11.rom $00,00 R0B9C5415 S10BDC5AA2D7D7F205F67B47B19003A4BD89DEFD1
where R means CRC and S means SHA-1.

If you patch mess.exe, then you could rename rgbdos to disk11 and there would be 
no complaints. However, mounting rgbdos in a cart slot is just as good and less 
work.

The latest versions of MESS no longer support the UI so you must start MESS with 
a command line. It helps to create a .bat file so you do less typing. The .bat 
file can include any parameters you want.
example
mess coco3h -snapview RGB

The .ini file is where you can include commonly mounted drives. You may also 
want to make sure the .ini file can be edited by MESS.

example at start of ini
#
# CORE CONFIGURATION OPTIONS
#
readconfig                1
writeconfig               1

example at end of ini
#
# SLOT DEVICES
#
ext                       fdcv11

#
# IMAGE DEVICES
#
cassette
printer                   C:\printer.wri
cartridge                 D:\MESS\software\RGBDOS2.ROM
harddisk1                 D:\MESS\software\HardDrive.vhd
harddisk2                 D:\MESS\software\Games Drive.vhd
floppydisk1
floppydisk2
floppydisk3
floppydisk4