[Coco] Question about DriveWire 4 and MESS

[John W. Linville]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 12:06:46AM -0800, Rick Taylor wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am trying to get Drivewire 4 working, both in an emulator (MESS or
> VCC, either will do), and I'm running into problems.
> I have downloaded the latest version of MESS from here
> http://www.mess.org/download.php
> 
> and I have the latest version of drivewire 4 (the beta) from here
> http://sites.google.com/site/drivewire4/beta
> 
> I have MESS booting up from the coco3 and DECB1.1 roms, and when I
> boot (ie, type "DOS" from within DECB) from the sdlmess_dwboot.os9
> image, it comes up to the 'development build/not for distribution'
> initial screen for NitrOS-9, and then hangs, no prompt.
> 
> One of the reasons why is because I have not applied the
> sdlmess-coco-dwsck-ffe0.patch file to MESS. I am running under
> windows, and have my choice of XP, Vista, or Win7(64 bit) -- this
> machine boots to a couple of different images.

I'm pretty sure I wrote that patch... :-)

I don't think any drivewire version works with any unpatched version
of MESS.  AFAIK, you will need to patch the source and rebuild.

Robert mentioned something about not using sdlmess on windows.  I'm no
expert on windows, in fact I basically don't use windows at all.
And I'm not particularly knowledgeable of MESS either.  But FWIW,
that patch only touches the coco driver in sdlmess.  So it shouldn't
be too specific to sdlmess versus windows mess or whatever.

It is however, a bit specific to the 0136 version of sdlmess.
For whatever reason, the mess folks seem to continuously refactor
the driver layer code in ways that break that patch between versions.
Usually they are trivial to fixup _iff_ you understand what has changed
in the pseudo-language mess uses for its driver code.  Unfortunately,
the pseudo-language seems to change quite a bit too...

So the net is, if you want to use that patch as-is then you should
use either sdlmess 0136 or whatever windows mess source version is
closest to that.  Otherwise, you may need to make some manual changes.
I haven't used mess for any recent project work, so I haven't needed
to update the patch myself.  If you get stuck, you are free to ask
me for help -- but you might only get what you pay for! :-)

> So here's my question: Under Windows, how the heck do you apply the
> patch file? There is no patch.exe in the MESS distribution that I can
> find. Do I go get a copy of MAME or something? Or do I just put it
> somewhere special?

patch is a reasonably common utility in the unix-derived world.  Linux,
FreeBSD, etc all should have it readily available.  Under windows,
you probably need to get it from cygwin or some other package of
unix-compatible utilities.

Hth...happy hacking!

John
-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
linville at tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.