[Coco] Mess is a mess.... again....

[Mark McDougall]

On 24/02/2016 1:27 PM, Bill Pierce via Coco wrote:

> In doing some experiments, I needed to use Mess, and wanting the
> latest build, I just downloaded v1.70. The last version I "messed"
> with was v1.56 & v1.65. Somewhere between 156 and 165, someone
> changed the floppy system to "5.25' Quad Density Floppy Drives". Now,
> absolutely no floppy disk image in the Coco archives will load!!!
> Mess gives a "File format not recognized" error on every disk. I
> tried a couple of tricks (like removing the 2 header bytes that VCC
> creates when creating a disk) and it just completely crashed Mess.

I don't have an issue with v0.166.

> This is the very reason I switched to VCC years ago and have
> continued to use VCC through the years. Every time I try a new
> version of Mess, something else is broken (and usually it worked
> before). There is no consistancy from one version to another.

It's a double-edged sword. People working on VCC are working on a single 
emulator for a single platform - the Coco. Those working on MAME/MESS 
are working a framework that enables emulation of literally thousands of 
systems and the almost infinite variety of hardware that entails. It's 
inevitable that changes to the core will break some emulations, or human 
error when editing by someone trying to update/fix two dozens platforms 
at once, and it probably won't get fixed until someone shouts loud 
enough. But on the flip side you get the benefit of the advances made in 
the rest of the framework. You can't have your cake and eat it too...

I don't consider _any_ emulator as an all-encompassing solution.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall              | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> |   with less resistance!"