[Coco] A little help with DriveWire

[Joel Ewy]

Boisy Pitre wrote:
> Hi
>
> On Jan 29, 2007, at 8:00 AM, Marcus Vinicius Garrett Chiado wrote:
>   
> ...
>> 3) Are there games that run "directly", I mean, without the need of  
>> typing
>> DOS command lines? Like, for instance, Karateka (Apple II) and The  
>> Goonies
>> (Atari)? - not these games, only the way they run.
>>     
>
> At the very least, CoCo games will require you to type DOS to start.   
> Some games will not work with DriveWire since they talk directly to  
> disk controller hardware.  Sundog games are famous for this.  All  
> BASIC games and most M/L games do work with DriveWire though.
>
>   
>> 4) Does the "file" games (more than 1 game per disk side) run  
>> mostly under
>> DOS or OS-9?
>>     
>
> OS-9.  Now there is a very important caveat here.  OS-9 based games  
> will only work with DriveWire IF the boot disk contains a DriveWire  
> device driver and descriptor by default.  This isn't the case with  
> OS-9 disk images out there.  They all assume the main device is a  
> floppy disk drive.  Patching these disks would require making a new  
> bootfile (a bit of work).
>
> For now, I would say try the Disk BASIC games and get comfortable  
> using them with DriveWire.
>
>   

Boisy, can you copy disk images from the host PC to a CoCo floppy, say
by using DECB's BACKUP command using DriveWire?  The DriveWire
documentation on the Cloud 9 site doesn't mention one way or the other
whether the BACKUP command works.  I believe Marcus mentioned in an
earlier post that he is getting a disk system.  If this works, then he
can run his OS-9 and Sundog (etc) games from a real floppy disk.

JCE