[Coco] Re: CoCo disks and XP

[Torsten Dittel]

> This is potentially a gold-mine find for those who use Windows XP.
> That platform has been plagued with problems when it comes to using
> DSKINI/RETRIEVE, and this could be the answer.

I fear it doesn't work without modification of those tools
(DSKINI/RETRIEVE).

AFAIK the problem is the uncomplete BIOS emulation in the command line
window in XP. And direct access to the I/O ports doesn't work generally
in XP (I wonder if DSKINI/RETRIEVE only use BIOS calls). This is why the
"OmniDisk" command line tool for DOS/9x has to be replaced by the
"OmniDiskXP" version.

However, my idea: Someone writes a command line tool which translates
one or some of OmniFlop/OmniDiskXP's disk image formats into the common
emulator formats (shouldn't be to much work, maybe just a different
header if any changes at all (otherwise just RENAMING the (both logical
or raw) files should be enough). This would mean we could have a batch
file which uses OmniDiskXP to retrieve an image and than converts it to
a CoCo emulator file. I'm just thinking about setting up a machine with
XP to make some tests and write an application but I'm sure someone here
will be faster than me with this task. And I have other projects on my
to-do list like finally testing Roys's CoCo2SVGA converter on PAL
machines... 

I think the author of the Omni* stuff will collaborate if any
enhancements of his software are necessary for that process, because it
looks like he's intereted in support of 8-bit machines beside the Arcorn
BBC.

Regards,
Torsten