[Coco] CoCo3 questions / Cloud 9 Super IDE interface

[Joel Ewy]

Steve.Lancaster at Moorestephens.com wrote:
> Hello all
>   
Hey there,
> I am a UK based Dragon 32 owner. I have found out more and more about the 
> CoCos (partially Dragon compatible) and am looking to get a CoCo 3 (a 512k 
> model from Cloud 9 appears to be a good starting point).
> ...
> As regards the CoCo itself:
>
> 1) Is a floppy drive necessary for a CoCo? - I ask because 5.25 inch disks 
> are hard to source and although I have a 5.25 floppy drive (that I use on 
> a BBC Master computer) I'm not sure if it is CoCo compatible.
>   
Most people categorize 3.5" drives as floppies, even though the housing
for the floppy disk inside is rigid.  I use 1.44M drives with 720K disks
on CoCos.  I suppose one could also use 1.44M floppy disks as well, but
the result will be even more wasted space.  OS-9 can format floppy disks
to 720K using unmodified CoCo disk controllers.  Stock RS-DOS (Disk
Extended Color BASIC) can format a floppy to ~176K at 35 tracks on a
single side.  Patches are available on the Internet to allow BASIC to
use the second side of a floppy as drive 2 or 4, resulting in a single
disk having two separate ~176K file systems.  Some patches and alternate
DOSes allow the user to format more than 35 tracks as well.  So you
really aren't limited to the 5.25" disks or drives.
> ...
> Going back to the Super IDE does anybody know if it is possible to 
> transfer .dsk images to the CF card by drag and drop (on a PC with a card 
> reader) or does the transfer have to be done using a CoCo emulator or a 
> utility like Omniflop.
>
>   
I don't think the former would work.  The CoCo would have to be able to
read an MS-DOS FAT filesystem as a first prerequisite.  There is an
MS-DOS file manager available for NitrOS-9, and I believe there are
utilities for reading/writing DOS floppy disks under RS-DOS, but I doubt
these latter would work with a hard drive / CF card, as the drive
geometry and capacity is likely hard coded for 360K floppies.  Assuming
you could read the FAT filesystem, you would next need to be able to
mount the disk image, or at least copy the contents to a local file
system or disk.  I guess there are some utilities for reading disk
images on the CoCo, but I doubt they would be as seamless as one would want.

If you have a PC running MS-Windows, you could use Cloud-9's DriveWire. 
This isn't quite the same of course, but it does get data from the PC to
the CoCo quickly, and allows you to access the contents of disk images
directly over the wire.  Then you could just copy the files to your CF
card for quicker local storage.

In fact, it looks as if you could get away without using a floppy
entirely using DriveWire, with one caveat.  You need a floppy to load
the DriveWire software onto the CoCo, at least initially.  However,
DriveWire does include ROM images that could allow you to keep the CoCo
DriveWire software in an EPROM so that you don't need to load it from
floppy.  Since Cloud-9 has an EPROM burning service, I'm sure they would
be able to send it to you in that form, so you wouldn't need to have a
CoCo floppy drive or controller at all.

I don't (yet) have DriveWire, but the documentation on Cloud-9's web
site says you can put the EPROM in the CoCo's BASIC ROM socket, or in a
disk controller's ROM socket.  It's not entirely clear to me whether the
DriveWire ROM replaces or augments (Disk) BASIC -- ie, is it a patched
version of BASIC, or does it need to coexist somehow with your existing
BASIC ROMs?  If you have an old game cartridge you don't play (or which
you can convert to a disk file) you might be able to remove the ROM and
use that as a housing for your DriveWire EPROM.  You'd either need to
find a 24-pin EPROM, which isn't so common anymore, or hack together a
socket converter (which you can probably find instructions for on the
Web or in mail list archives) to use a 28-pin EPROM in the cartridge PC
board, which is intended for a 24-pin chip.  Or you might be able to
find a project board from (the UK equivalent of) Radio Shack that could
be cut down to make your own cartridge board.  A little scrap ribbon
cable, a 28-pin socket, and a .1uf capacitor should do the trick.  Heck,
maybe Cloud-9 even has cartridge boards to sell?

JCE
> Obviously I don't want to buy something and then find I don't have the 
> knowledge or skills to use it. 
>
>   
> Any general advice or comments will be greatly appreciated.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Steve
>
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