The setup to get Vcc going with the Becker Port and DW4 is not so complicated as it is confusing.
With all these new capabilities in Vcc, comes some complexity. Now with Vcc 1.4.3b and DriveWire4, you can load multiple VHD images, print to DW4's virtual printer, access the internet through TelNet, play Coco MIDI sequences through DW4's virtual MIDI interface and much more!! Vcc couldn't be much better. Eventually, the patched version of Vcc was released to the public as Vcc 1.4.3beta. With a little modification to DriveWire, the Becker Port became Vcc's connection to the world.
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They discovered a way to implement the Becker Port so that Vcc could talk to the hosting PC through a patch to the TCP port. Meanwhile, the holders of the sources had been playing with them. So until he is contacted, there can be no official release of the sources or an Open Source project. Several people have tried to contact him with no response. Much to our dismay, he hasn't been heard from since. He said he wanted to change the copyright statements and also remove the RSDOS ROMS to avoid possible copyright infringements. He sent them a copy of the source code to "play around" with until he finished preparing the sources for public release. He want the Coco community to be able to carry on with his Vcc project. In his replies, he stated that he would like to move the Vcc sources to an Open Source project as his age and health would no longer allow him to work on the project. Somewhere along the line, a couple of members of the Coco community located and contacted Joseph to inquire about the state of the Vcc source code.
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All the port really consists of is 2 unused address lines that with proper coding, could access serial input from outside the emulation. Originally, the Becker Port was interfaced in a Coco FPGA project by Gary Becker so the Coco emulation in the FPGA could access the DriveWire interface. like support to interface the outside world. It was still (IMHO) the best Coco 3 emulator around.
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As luck would have it, there were at least copies of the Vcc installation package in several of the Coco archive sites, so it was still available. There were no more updates, no more posts, and even his website eventually disappeared. Joseph seemed to disappear from the Coco community. With 4 virtual floppy disk dirves, a virtual hard drive usable in both RSDOS and OS-9, Vcc became the ultimate Coco 3 emulator. With some help from Robert Gault, Joseph added the RGBDOS system for controlling VHDs (virtual hard drives) just as you would real hard drives. Vcc 1.4.2 was easy to install, easy to run, and felt like using a real Coco 3. Coco 3 emulator started to get more features, but with each feature, introducing more bugs. It was about that same time, the M.E.S.S. At that point the emulator had matured greatly and would run most Coco software, even OS-9.
Slowly, he updated the releases from 1.0.0 to 1.4.2. When Joseph Forgione released the 1st version of the Vcc Coco 3 emulator, I was a little sceptical about it. Introducing Vcc 1.4.3beta with Becker Port Support for DriveWire4