[Coco] Re: Why USB would be nice.

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Fri, 2005-09-02 at 13:49 -0600, L. Curtis Boyle wrote:
>     Just a note on FAT compatibility: aside from the PCDOS utility, there  
> was a file manager for the older FAT-16 MSDOS that worked natively in  
> OS-9... it was called MSF and worked with the enhanced floppy driver  
> called SDISK (and later, for the Coco 3, SDISK3). I ran it for awhile,  
> just before we got into Nitros9, and it ran quite well (Came with a bunch  
> of wildcard capable utilities, like MSCOPY, which I used even after I no  
> longer used MSF). So, yes, it can be done, and, to a certain extent, has.  
> Even the CC3Disk driver in Nitros9 (and later versions for OS9) can read  
> PC disks in a raw mode (512 byte sectors); it is not hard to write  
> utilities to process the DOS/Windows directory structure using that (I had  
> started fiddling with one that could partially handle Win9x long  
> filenames, but never finished it before my TC-9 was shut down).

That's encouraging since FAT32 is FAT16 + extensions.

Is seperate utilities the "norm" for working with alternative
filesystems under OS-9? Perhaps we could design a simple loadable
filesystem infrastructure.

Done right, this would work for SuperIDE + CF... if we could read/write
CF cards with the native FAT32 filesystem... sneakernet is back :-)

-- John.