[Coco] Help with MacMAME

[Barry Nelson]

On 2025-03-26 01:18, coco-request at maltedmedia.com wrote:

> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2025 23:04:37 -0700
> From: Andrew Ayers <keeper63 at cox.net>
> To: coco at maltedmedia.com
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Help with MacMAME
> Message-ID: <7b03456d-3cda-46e4-8458-25a131d79cd7 at cox.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
> 
> Barry, thank you for this information; that probably explains why I
> couldn't get rid of the floppy controller rom without Mame throwing an
> error. At least that part of my question is answered from my post...I 
> think.
> 
> Regarding the rgbdos rom image, as I mentioned I was able to put it
> inside a "coco3.zip" file (I couldn't get anything else recognized;
> ideally, I'd like to create a "coco3rgb.zip" file with the CoCo 3 rom
> image and the rgbdos rom image in it)...
> 
> When I started it, it complained about the image not being right, but 
> it
> did load up rgbdos (then failed to find a hard drive attached); I don't
> know if just adding a hard drive image to Mame will work or not. I may
> not even ultimately need it; I only want it because that's what I have
> set up currently on my VCC/OVCC configuration (because I have this
> long-dormant project to take and re-arrange my old floppy images into
> something more coherent than what I had as a kid - because I did crazy
> stuff with my floppies, because they were so expensive, and my parents
> could only get me a few at a time - so I have floppies with like, both
> music and images on them, and now I'm creating a bunch of floppies in
> "groups" - one group for images, one for games, one for utilities, one
> for music, one for etc...)
> 
> Though maybe since I haven't touched it in forever, there might be a
> better way, but I'm not sure; all of these old images of mine are
> formatted/work under Super DECB...the majority of the images use that,
> and are not formatted/configured, with only a scant few, for OS-9 (and
> most of those are actually the kind of OS-9 floppies you start using 
> the
> "DOS" command).
> 
> Unless HDB-DOS might be a better way? In short, I'm kinda using
> individual floppies as "sub-directories" (each floppy image is named
> with an 8.3 name, with the 3 character being "the number" in the 
> series,
> and the 8 alphanumerics characters as a name of sorts (ie,
> "GAMEHOFK.001" meaning "Game, Hall of the King, disk 1" - something 
> like
> that); based on what I've tested (or at least, if I remember what I was
> doing before correctly), these floppy images will then be able to be
> loaded on an SD card for the SDC (and they could probably also work 
> with
> a gotec and/or drivewire).
> 
> So I would have 255 floppies, with the zero-th floppy being the
> "autostart" boot floppy for the SDC (which loads the RGB-DOS part - I
> think that's how I was doing things - it's been a while)...
> 
> Andrew L. Ayers
> Glendale, Arizona
> phoenixgarage.org
> github.com/andrew-ayers

If you upgrade to MAME version at least 0.252, it has option for a 
floppy controller with the RGBDOS ROM installed as a RGBDOS cartridge 
which uses rgbdos.zip. For it to find a hard drive you must have a hard 
disk vhd file mounted. You can download one here: 
https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Virtual%20Hard%20Drives/NitrOS-9%20L2%20V3.3.0/

This says it's for VCC but I use with MAME also, it was actually created 
with MAME and is an image of my old physical HD. This drive image is 
dual partitioned and contains both OS-9 and Disk Extended Color BASIC 
partitions.