Sometimes if you are lucky, you get a DSK image that works with drivewire. Other times, like when one wants a COCO 3 compatible version of Downland, you get something else. The download for DOWNLAND is a bin file. I assume this is a color computer binary file. Great, how do I actually use it??? I have a real COCO 3 and a Drivewire 2 rom pack. I connect via my Linux box to a 98 box which has drivewire server on it to transfer images over, no problem. Trouble is, how do I get something like a DSK image from a BIN file? Is there a Linux based utility to put the bin file on a drivewire compatible dsk image file?
An annoying nit, why are there so many programs for the 512k COCO 3 that I can't get? Z89 comes to mind. There are other lost titles as well. I have dsk images for Gauntlet II, but it isn't drivewire compatible and playing it via xmess is just miserable. One game I'd like to get is marble madness. I don't know if it is drivewire compatible though. It is frustrating that I went to the trouble of upgrading my old COCO 3 to 512k and yet there don't seem to be any 512k COCO programs available. Are there better emulators than xmess for Linux to play old coco games? Seems that dos and windows are favored for coco emulators. I've heard that there is SDLMESS, but I can't figure out how to install it to CentOS. I wonder why some people have upgraded their COCO 3 to have 8 megs of ram? Another thing, is nitros9 really like Linux? It seems I can't run nitros9 without either a local hard drive or disk drive, neither of which I have considering that I use drivewire. Has there ever been an effort to produce an open design dream machine that takes the best attributes of all of the classic computers? An open design computer would not be designed to run a proprietary operating system and it would theoretically be easier for the OSS community to optimize software for it. I have heard about IBM power architecture computers, but I don't know if they use an open hardware design. Will there ever be a practical alternative computer architecture to run Linux on? Alpha died. On Sparc systems, you might as well run Solaris. Is there anything else? I think PowerPC is dead too. The ReactOS project and the Syllable project seem to be stalled. Maybe the PC is not the best hardware platform in the world. Maybe Windows is not worth cloning. I don't know why Syllable is developing slowly. But I digress too much ;-) _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
