[Coco] running RSDOS games from hard drive?

[Frederick D Provoncha]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 07:36:45 -0500 Mark Marlette <mmarlett at isd.net>
writes:
> At 9/20/2004 06:27 AM -0500, you wrote:
> 
> Fred,
> 
> Didn't you have hardware problems on your system with .dsk?? I don't 
> 
> remember the details on if it was determined to be on the CoCo or on 
> the PC 
> side. Could be that it reads fine but writes are bad?
> 
> VERIFYON
> DRIVEOFF
> BACKUP 0 to xx
> 
> 
> Try that.....See if you get errors. If no errors then place another 
> floppy 
> in the drive and
> 
> VERIFYON
> DRIVEOFF
> BACKUP xx to 0
> 
> Then loadm and run the game from the disk. Does it work???? This 
> makes the 
> full circle of testing on the CoCo.
> 
> Mark

Hey Mark,

I don't think a definite conclusion was reached concerning my problems
with .dsk images. The problem only existed with double-sided images. The
last suggestion I got was that it might be an alignment issue with the
floppy drive, which I haven't verified yet. I finally developed a
workaround using Drivewire to read the images, which worked!

As for this problem, running Tutankaman from the hard drive, my gut tells
me it's a different problem, but I don't know. I followed your
instructions in your last email exactly. At the end I tried LOADMing and
running the game from the disk and the Coco crashed just like it did when
I tried running it from the hard drive! I tried a few more times and
finally on about the 6th try the game did run successfully from the disk.
So the game did finally run, but not nearly as reliably as before. But so
far, I've never gotten it to run successfully from the hard drive.

What's also strange to me is that so many of my other games run just fine
off the hard drive. I have several other games on the same disk as
Tutankaman, which were also copied back and forth from the floppy to the
hard drive in these tests you asked me to do above, and they all work
whether loaded from the floppy or the hard drive. It's just Tutankaman
that's not working. Strange.