[Coco] Mame CoCo 3 emulation questions...

[Andrew Ayers]

Barry,

Thank you for taking time for your responses; they are all helping to 
clear things up. I'll check out that 0.353 version of Mame you linked 
from your github; maybe or hopefully I can get it to compile in such a 
manner that it doesn't need to be "installed"...

One thing I have a pretty strict policy right now for, is to not 
"install anything not distributed in an form that can be tracked by the 
operating system" - in my case, at a minimum, that would be a ".deb" 
package.

Ideally, though, it would be some kind of "containered" application, or 
something installable as a "canonical" sourced package...anything else, 
if it is something I need to run "make" on, it must be able to be 
"installed" and run from my $HOME, with nothing else needed (other than 
updated "official" package/distro libraries, etc).

I've just run into major headaches in the past otherwise; in one case, I 
b0rked my system pretty good, because I needed the latest version of GCC 
to work on a particular project for an online Udacity course - and an 
update I ran for my system needed to compile the latest NVidia driver, 
and it died, leaving me with a partial driver, and a system I could only 
"fix" from the command line; X and the desktop would not start at all, 
and I couldn't "revert" because of the C compiler brokeness, and on and 
on - it was an ugly few days getting that worked out, and I vowed that 
would never happen again...

Of course, part of the issue at the time (and now, I guess) is that my 
system was so out of date...and I "needed" that particular version of 
gcc (no way around it).

Fortunately, Mame and CoCo emulation is not at that level, but my issue 
currently is that I don't plan to update my OS (which, I should mention, 
will likely be Mint when I get to it) until I get a "new system" built, 
which is on a "back burner" itself, due to so many dang other things 
going on in my life, among other reasons (like my laziness).

...and the real ugly thing is, that new system is woefully out of date 
itself, being as I original bought most of the parts for it back in 
2014/2015 - some are still in their original packaging, even - but I 
can't afford to jump to "the latest and greatest" - and really, that new 
hardware is tons better than my current system hardware, which dates 
from somewhere around 2009...I think?

"Ugh" doesn't even begin to cover it all...

Andrew L. Ayers
Glendale, Arizona
phoenixgarage.org
github.com/andrew-ayers