[Coco] newb: Can I use DriveWire with my CoCo 2?

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 11:59 AM, Chad H <chadbh74 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I concur with this entirely.  I also feel what Aaron said about
> "documentation not being fun".  While I'm not currently employed as a
> "programmer" per say, I do make use of my skills in this area at my work
> place not only for personal benefit but also for the benefit of co-workers.
> Many of my projects there are SOLEY for their benefit in fact.  I to  do not
> care for "waisting time" on documentation.  Some of those knuckleheads
> wouldn't even read it anyways, they just come straight to me to figure out
> how to do something with the applications I come up with.  It's just how
> people are wired...they go to whatever resource is the most convenient and
> helpful.   Here in the CoCo online community, people can't just call up  or
> talk directly to the authors, they need a good place to go to get
> 'standardized/official' support.  Now if they take it upon themselves to
> experiment and go outside the box to 3rd party ROM's or other mods, they
> should seek support elsewhere on that.  It's not the responsibility of the
> author to support mahem they didn't create.
>
> On a side note... I think I found that DriveWire 4 package is NOT supported
> by Windows '98.  If it is, will someone please tell me what I'm missing.  I
> will describe what I've done so far.  Keep in mind DriveWire 3 already runs
> fine on this machine.
> *  Unzipped and executed DriveWire 4, got message: "Java 1.5 is required"
> and it closed, so I researched
>         For the lastest win'98 compatibal Java package which does seem to be
> 1.5.
> * Installed Java 1.5 (586) revision 18 and attempted to execute DW4, got
> message: "Could not find the Main class.  Program will exit".
>         I Googled this and found someone had some luck running it from the
> command line after Java was added to the PATH so
>         I tried that and got: Exception in thread "Main"
> Java.Lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError
>
> I suspect DriveWire 4 was compiled to use a higher version of Java, which
> Windows '98 doesn't seem to be able to run a higher version of Java.  I
> tried installing Java 1.6 and it failed.

DW4 is supposed to require only Java 1.5, but I may have broken that
somewhere along the way.  At one point I did have it running on a
Win9x virtual machine but that was a good while ago.  I'll see if I
can find out more.