A VCC Digression
Jul. 27th, 2025 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThinking to check in on the Color Computer 3 emulator VCC a little while ago, I found a new version of it had become available. It promised a somehow intriguing amount of enhancements for a version number change from “2.1.9.1” to “2.1.9.2.” I went ahead and set up a new “bottle” in the commercial Wine front end CrossOver, which is how I run the Windows-only emulator. When I tried launching the new version, though, I crashed into error messages.
Those messages involved OpenGL, and one of the changes to the program had been switching to OpenGL for graphics. However, a little bit of searching turned up warnings OpenGL has been deprecated in macOS. Somehow, I was a bit more shaken than “having to set up the previous version again” might seem to amount to; maybe I was thinking anew of the forecast end date for “Intel support” on “Apple Silicon.” The potential cost and commitment of “virtualizing Windows for ARM” at last came to mind. Then, though, I wondered about the computers I’d got running Linux. Another little bit of searching turned up a video not just about installing Wine on Linux, and not just about using that to run the VCC emulator itself, but to run the latest version. It seemed a sign.
After starting up my “Linux portable” and typing in the installation commands from the video, I did bump into additional demands to get an older architecture enabled. Trying to start the “Winebottler” utility afterwards just produced further errors in the terminal. I did wonder if the messages had something to do with having installed “Ubuntu MATE,” and resorted to the old iMac I’d put Linux Mint on only to run into different errors. On returning to the portable again, though, when I tried launching VCC’s installer without using Winebottler things worked. As the video had promised, there was even the bonus of the status bar at the bottom of VCC’s screen showing up; it had always been knocked out using Wine before.
I will admit to wondering about some hypothetical future state I would look back from and conclude “all previous protestations aside, this small moment set me on the road to running Linux as my main operating system.” There was also the thought that what I really use VCC for is running the word procesor Max-10. That gets me wondering if I’m nostalgic towards it because I wrote more stories with it early in high school than I managed to write using the more elaborate and perhaps even more capable programs for my family’s Macintosh LC II, and there I have to remind myself the stories weren’t very good. (Later on in high school, anyway, I was writing a lengthy epic by hand on the bus rides into and out of town, but the story still wasn’t very good.)
In the midst of all of that I did take one more look at the VCC site, and I managed to happen on a small comment the “Legacy” version of VCC meant for now-antique versions of Windows like XP still doesn’t use OpenGL. I got it running in CrossOver (if with the status bar knocked out again), noted it did offer the modest improvements promised to “artifact colours” (before that point I’d used XRoar for my experiments there and told myself the whole point of the Color Computer 3 was that it didn’t have to use artifacting for a “colourful display”), and then went to the point of typing a first draft of this post using Max-10.
Along with all of that I did get two more TRS-80 emulators running on my Linux portable, compiling XRoar and launching trs80gp. Along with “Virtual T” that pretty much made the gamut of Radio Shack’s varied (yet barely intercompatible) early systems available to me. Before compiling the Apple II emulator MII, though, I did build a new version of the “AppleWin port” Mariani for my regular computers. All of this was happening as a certain amount of discussion about “the Commodore 64 versus the Apple II” was breaking out elsewhere, with the Atari home computers being brought up too. I suppose I shrugged and reminded myself the original Color Computer, at the very least, would have been dismissed by a great many people had it come up there, its graphics and sound more or less more limited than everything else’s. What period “CoCo boosting” I’ve come across seemed to amount to “the 6809 is far superior to the 6502 when programming in machine language; Extended Color BASIC is far superior to other built-in BASICs commanding the hardware; by the way, we can multitask using OS-9.” However, I can suppose Commodore partisans in particular would either bring up third-party extensions or just say there were so many professionally programmed games for their computer they didn’t have to amuse themselves by writing small demonstrations, and that doesn’t even get into my perpetual uncertainty about just what programs you were supposed to run using OS-9.
Those messages involved OpenGL, and one of the changes to the program had been switching to OpenGL for graphics. However, a little bit of searching turned up warnings OpenGL has been deprecated in macOS. Somehow, I was a bit more shaken than “having to set up the previous version again” might seem to amount to; maybe I was thinking anew of the forecast end date for “Intel support” on “Apple Silicon.” The potential cost and commitment of “virtualizing Windows for ARM” at last came to mind. Then, though, I wondered about the computers I’d got running Linux. Another little bit of searching turned up a video not just about installing Wine on Linux, and not just about using that to run the VCC emulator itself, but to run the latest version. It seemed a sign.
After starting up my “Linux portable” and typing in the installation commands from the video, I did bump into additional demands to get an older architecture enabled. Trying to start the “Winebottler” utility afterwards just produced further errors in the terminal. I did wonder if the messages had something to do with having installed “Ubuntu MATE,” and resorted to the old iMac I’d put Linux Mint on only to run into different errors. On returning to the portable again, though, when I tried launching VCC’s installer without using Winebottler things worked. As the video had promised, there was even the bonus of the status bar at the bottom of VCC’s screen showing up; it had always been knocked out using Wine before.
I will admit to wondering about some hypothetical future state I would look back from and conclude “all previous protestations aside, this small moment set me on the road to running Linux as my main operating system.” There was also the thought that what I really use VCC for is running the word procesor Max-10. That gets me wondering if I’m nostalgic towards it because I wrote more stories with it early in high school than I managed to write using the more elaborate and perhaps even more capable programs for my family’s Macintosh LC II, and there I have to remind myself the stories weren’t very good. (Later on in high school, anyway, I was writing a lengthy epic by hand on the bus rides into and out of town, but the story still wasn’t very good.)
In the midst of all of that I did take one more look at the VCC site, and I managed to happen on a small comment the “Legacy” version of VCC meant for now-antique versions of Windows like XP still doesn’t use OpenGL. I got it running in CrossOver (if with the status bar knocked out again), noted it did offer the modest improvements promised to “artifact colours” (before that point I’d used XRoar for my experiments there and told myself the whole point of the Color Computer 3 was that it didn’t have to use artifacting for a “colourful display”), and then went to the point of typing a first draft of this post using Max-10.
Along with all of that I did get two more TRS-80 emulators running on my Linux portable, compiling XRoar and launching trs80gp. Along with “Virtual T” that pretty much made the gamut of Radio Shack’s varied (yet barely intercompatible) early systems available to me. Before compiling the Apple II emulator MII, though, I did build a new version of the “AppleWin port” Mariani for my regular computers. All of this was happening as a certain amount of discussion about “the Commodore 64 versus the Apple II” was breaking out elsewhere, with the Atari home computers being brought up too. I suppose I shrugged and reminded myself the original Color Computer, at the very least, would have been dismissed by a great many people had it come up there, its graphics and sound more or less more limited than everything else’s. What period “CoCo boosting” I’ve come across seemed to amount to “the 6809 is far superior to the 6502 when programming in machine language; Extended Color BASIC is far superior to other built-in BASICs commanding the hardware; by the way, we can multitask using OS-9.” However, I can suppose Commodore partisans in particular would either bring up third-party extensions or just say there were so many professionally programmed games for their computer they didn’t have to amuse themselves by writing small demonstrations, and that doesn’t even get into my perpetual uncertainty about just what programs you were supposed to run using OS-9.