[Coco] Mame CoCo 3 emulation questions...

[Barry Nelson]

On 2025-03-27 01:18, coco-request at maltedmedia.com wrote:

> Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 16:30:08 -0700
> From: Andrew Ayers <keeper63 at cox.net>
> To: coco at maltedmedia.com
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Mame CoCo 3 emulation questions...
> Message-ID: <cbdda5c9-4731-4a65-962b-17c6005b6138 at cox.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
> 
> 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 system was so out of date...and I "needed" that particular version of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 ...and the real ugly thing is, that new system is woefully out of date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

Since you already have version (0.220 I think it was?) of MAME running, 
the newer version should not have any other dependencies. You should be 
able to configure and make with no issues. If you want to you could set 
the --prefix option when you run configure and that should result in 
everything being installed under that folder when you run make install, 
if you do that you will just need to add the folder "prefix"/bin to your 
PATH. MAME is not a kernel level video driver like that nVidia software 
and I am fairly sure your existing GCC should compile the current MAME 
fine. MAME supports building with GCC version 10.3 or later and clang 
version 11 or later.