[Coco] A little help with DriveWire

[Marcus Vinicius Garrett Chiado]

2007/1/29, Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net>:
>
>
> I believe that DriveWire will work with both RS-DOS and OS-9 floppy
> images on the host PC.  But of course, you will have to boot OS-9 in
> order to be able to access the contents of the OS-9 disks.  And you'll
> have to use a utility (available on os9archive.rtsi.com) called 'rsdos'
> to be able to access the contents of RS-DOS disks from within OS-9.


I see, thank you. Are these images on .DSK format? Are there other formats?



I think this depends on whether or not you will have the CoCo side of
> DriveWire in an EPROM.  If not, you will probably have to load a CoCo DW
> program from disk or tape first.


I think my disk drive interface will come with that Eprom. At least, Mark
(from Cloud-9) has told me so. By using the Eprom, I guess it will
automatically load the OS-9. Am I right?



Since the CoCo's disk system is optional, the CoCo does not attempt to
> load any OS or program from disk automatically when powered on.  The
> closest you would come is the OS-9 games distributed by Tandy, which
> come with a stripped-down OS-9 system disk.  In this case, you would
> have to type only 'DOS' in Disk Extended Color BASIC (DECB, AKA RS-DOS)
> to start booting OS-9.  I believe that with these games, OS-9 will
> auto-execute them when it gets booted up.  Games like this would include
> Rescue on Fractalus, Microscopic Mission, King's Quest III, Sub Battle
> Simulator.  Probably others.
>
> There may be a few games for RS-DOS that will also run when you type
> 'DOS', just because their loader code has been put in the same place on
> the disk where the OS-9 bootloader usually resides.  They would have had
> to be specially written that way.


OK, thanks.



There are protected games (Gates of Delirium comes to mind) and programs
> to crack them.  I don't know much about them though, so I'll leave this
> one for others to answer better.
>

:-D