[Coco] Re: Floppy access from within XP

[John E. Malmberg]

Neil Morrison wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "John E. Malmberg" <wb8tyw at qsl.net>
> 
>>And that brings us back to the first problem in that the operating
>>system has removed that support, so even if the emulated disk supported
>>it, there still is no documented way for an application to read and
>>write non-512 byte sectors.
> 
> Documented, no, but it's still absolutely do-able. The hardware is still
> there so the software can still get at it, it's just that without DOS you
> need to write a lot more code. But I don't want to do it!

Yes, but that more code needs to be a device driver to replace the 
supplied device driver, which generally requires more documentation than 
is publicly available, and even then will only work with a few chip 
sets.  No way to predict if a device driver written for my old computer 
will work on a new one purchased this year.

And on some systems the floppy is only accessible as a USB device, which 
means a different device driver.

Since I have determined that COCO ROM DISK BASIC can read and write 512 
byte formatted media, it follows that it is probably more useful to 
write COCO based programs that can use 512 byte formatted floppies and 
IDE based devices than to try to teach the host operating systems to do 
new tricks.

-John
wb8tyw(at)qsl.net
Personal Opinion Only