[Coco] Drivewire 3 issues

[Christian Lesage]

Bonjour Boisy,

Boisy Pitre wrote:
> On Apr 2, 2009, at 12:04 PM, Christian Lesage wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I just got Drivewire 3 burnt onto an EPROM and put it in a ROM Pak. 
>> It is a great product and a marvelous gift to the CoCo community. 
>> Thanks Cloud-9!
>>
>> I have two issues with Drivewire 3:
>>
>> 1. Is it just me, or DW3 disables the CoCo 3 "Super" Extended Color 
>> Basic? The startup message reads:
>>
>> DISK EXTENDED COLOR BASIC 1.1
>> COPYRIGHT (C) 1982 BY TANDY
>> UNDER LICENSE FROM MICROSOFT
>>
>> HDB-DOS 1.1D DW3 COCO 3
>>
>> The SECB commands are all disabled. I especially miss WIDTH and 
>> PALETTE (since I use a monochrome monitor). More importantly, some 
>> games have a Basic loader containing SECB tokens, and I cannot run 
>> them for this reason.
>
> Christian,
>
> Something is wrong.  You should see the entire SECB sign-on on a CoCo 
> 3, and all the new SECB commands should work.
>
> What disk controller are you running the ROM in?

I don't use a disk controller. I removed the ROM from a "Shanghai" ROM 
Pak and replaced it with a 27C256. Since A14 (pin 27)  is held high in 
the ROM Pak, I offset the code by $4000 (i.e. it starts at $4000 instead 
of $0000). So out of 32kb, only 16kb are usable. I now realize that 
there's probably  a mechanism that allows the CoCo to check the ROM Pak 
size (8kb or 16kb). That's probably where my problems come from. The 
CoCo sees a 16kb ROM Pak while it should be an 8kb one, as if using a 
disk controller. So I guess I have to modify the ROM Pak, but how? It's 
been so long since I last played with CoCo hardware.

>> 2. I tried booting NitrOS-9 using the "nos96809l2_dw3.dsk" disk 
>> image. It does boot, but it doesn't allow me to input anything from 
>> the keyboard. However, I noticed the CoCo sends TIME requests to the 
>> DW3 host every minute, so I guess it is not frozen. Well, it's been 
>> 20 years or so since I last played with OS-9, so maybe there's a 
>> magic keystroke I don't remember.
>
> These are not problems that I or others have experienced.   There must 
> be something about your setup that is different.  Please provide a 
> list of what equipment you have.

A stock 128k CoCo 3, my custom ROM Pak, and a PC (Asus P2B running 
Windows XP Pro SP3). The PC's regional options are configured for 
"French (Canada)". Will it cause a problem when NitrOS-9 wants to get 
the date and time?

Merci beaucoup,

Christian