Some Deluxe Dabbling
Sep. 12th, 2024 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerA series of development updates for the Color Computer emulator XRoar (its name springing from how its developer identifies it first of all as a “Dragon” emulator, the Dragon being a British machine using the same chipset as the “CoCo”) turned into a release with a normal version number. As I got around to downloading it, I noticed the program now offers the “Deluxe Color Computer” as an option. I’d know that unreleased yet all-but-finished computer to exist in MAME’s vast list of systems, but hadn’t thought too much about it until now.
This time, though, I was at least curious about where to find the ROM file to activate the new system and began searching. That turned up an overview of the Deluxe Color Computer’s BASIC enhancements, including commands for the sound chip that would have helped make it “Deluxe,” and that piqued my interest to the point where I managed to find the MAME ROM files. Guessing at what had to be done, I “concatenated” the four separate files into one, moved it into a directory XRoar looks at, and managed to get the emulation running.
After testing a few sound chip commands I did start wondering about what other software might run. What I found by going to certain standby programs, though, was that programs would load off disk, but when they tried to read the disk themselves the emulated machine would lock up. Whether this would have been addressed when the firmware was finalized beyond the prototype the ROM file was acquired from, or just by third-party programmers, seems the question. As ever, I can contemplate that while the Color Computer 3, which showed up two years after the Deluxe Color Computer was once supposed to have, offered only marginal sound and firmware improvements it did have much better graphics.
This time, though, I was at least curious about where to find the ROM file to activate the new system and began searching. That turned up an overview of the Deluxe Color Computer’s BASIC enhancements, including commands for the sound chip that would have helped make it “Deluxe,” and that piqued my interest to the point where I managed to find the MAME ROM files. Guessing at what had to be done, I “concatenated” the four separate files into one, moved it into a directory XRoar looks at, and managed to get the emulation running.
After testing a few sound chip commands I did start wondering about what other software might run. What I found by going to certain standby programs, though, was that programs would load off disk, but when they tried to read the disk themselves the emulated machine would lock up. Whether this would have been addressed when the firmware was finalized beyond the prototype the ROM file was acquired from, or just by third-party programmers, seems the question. As ever, I can contemplate that while the Color Computer 3, which showed up two years after the Deluxe Color Computer was once supposed to have, offered only marginal sound and firmware improvements it did have much better graphics.