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MAME

From CoCopedia - The Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer Wiki
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MAME (originally an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms.

As such, it can be used to emulate most - if not all - CoCo variants, including clones like the Prologica CP-400

Installation

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Windows

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The installer can be downloaded from the official MAME site

macOS

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Linux

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Setup

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In order to run MAME, you will need the ROMs from the computer being emulated. They can be found in the TRS-80 Color Computer Archive, under the MESS ROMs section

Once downloaded, copy the ZIP file containing the .rom files to the \roms folder in your MAME installation.

Command line parameters

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MAME can be started and the emulated computer configured from the command line.

mame64 [machine] [media] [software] [options]

Machine is the name of the computer to be emulated. Some CoCo related options are: coco, coco2, coco2b, coco3, dragon, dragon64, cp400, cp400c2, lzcolor64, mx1600 and cd6809

The remaining parameters are used to determine the configuration of the emulated computer. Some examples are:

mame64.exe coco -ramsize 16K -window -confirm_quit

will emulate a CoCo 1, with 16 KB of RAM, start the emulation in a window (instead of full screen), and prompt for confirmation before quitting.

mame64.exe coco2 -ramsize 32K -ext games_master -nowindow -confirm_quit -skip_gameinfo

will emulate a CoCo 2, with 32 KB of RAM and a Game Master Cart, start the emulation full screen, prompt for confirmation before quitting and skip the initial screen showing the computer's configuration.

mame64.exe coco3 -ramsize 512K -ext multi -ext:multi:slot3 ssc -flop1 "Documents\DSKS\SAMPLE.DSK" -window -nomaximize

will emulate a CoCo 3, with 512 KB of RAM, a MPI with the Speech/Sound Cartridge in slot 3, and the disk image "SAMPLE.DSK" from the specified path, mounted in drive 0. It will start the emulation in a non-maximized window.

It should be noticed that if a disk ROM is available, and nothing is loaded in the cartridge slot (or in slot 4 of the MPI), a floppy drive controller will be automatically loaded.