[Coco] DriveWire 3

[Frank Pittel]

Joel,

I've run into that interesting limitation of drivewire and get around
it by not using virtual disks 0-3. That way I don't collide with the
floppy drives. This does waste a bit of space on the drivewire server
but hard disks for a pc are so cheap and large that it doesn't matter.

Frank


On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 12:10:14PM -0600, Joel Ewy wrote:
> Boisy,
>
> First of all, thank you for this generous gift to the CoCo community.   
> May it drive the sale of many cables and ROM cartridges.  In any case,  
> it should help many existing users to stay in the CoCo game, and aid  
> potential new and returning CoCo users in getting started, which can't  
> be anything but good for all CoCo users and vendors.  We all benefit  
> when more people use the CoCo.
>
> Last night I made up a cable, burned DW3 into a 2764, and popped it into  
> an old Disto Super Controller.  Works like a champ.  I'm using the  
> Windows server for now, but will try out the Linux server and probably  
> also the MacOS one eventually.
>
> A couple questions:
>
> 1.  It appears to me that the only way to transfer files between server  
> disk images in HDB-DOS is through real floppy disks on the CoCo.  E.g.   
> I want to make a disk image for games and one for image files, etc.  I  
> have individual disk image files on the server.  I can select said files  
> with "drive#[0-3]".  I can automagically expand these disk image files  
> by writing to a virtual drive number >0.  But once I've issued the  
> "drive#" command, the virtual disks in the other image files on the  
> server are inaccessible.  I could do a "drive#0", then "drive off 1" and  
> copy data to a real floppy disk, assuming I have a floppy drive hooked  
> up as drive 1.   Then I could do a "drive#1" command and "drive off 1"  
> again, and then copy the data from the real floppy to a virtual disk on  
> a different image file on the server.
>
> Am I right in thinking that's the only way to do what I'm trying to do  
> in HDB-DOS, or am I missing something?  It would be really cool to be  
> able to do something like:  "backup 254#0 to 5#3" or "copy  
> "hicolor.bin:254#0" to 5#3".
>
> Just for fun I tried loading a ramdisk program that installed itself as  
> drives 2 and 3.  I wanted to try using that as an intermediate location  
> for moving files between disk images.  As I expected it stomped on  
> DriveWire.  I haven't tried all of the ramdisk programs I have, but I  
> suspect the result will be the same.
>
> 2.  Some concern has been expressed that since the CoCo 3 version of DW3  
> runs the CoCo in high-speed mode, some auto-running games might be  
> unplayably fast.  Would a potential solution to this simply be to use  
> the CoCo 2 version and set the server accordingly?  (With the obvious  
> caveat that it would only run at 56k...)
>
> Thanks again for making this available.
>
> JCE
>
>
>
> Boisy Pitre wrote:
>> As the saying goes, the only way to fight fire is with fire.
>>
>> So starting today, DriveWire 3 is now a free downloadable product from  
>> Cloud-9.
>>
>> You can go to our website at http://www.cloud9tech.com/ and click on  
>> the DriveWire announcement on the main page.  It will take you to the  
>> DriveWire 3 page, where you can now download DriveWire HDB-DOS ROMs  
>> for the CoCo 2 and CoCo 3.  Of course, you will need to burn your own  
>> EPROM in order to take advantage of these images.
>>
>> For those of you who don't have an EPROM burner or cable, we've  
>> dropped the price of our HDB-DOS ROM Pak to $20, and are still making  
>> cables available for $10.
>>
>> The server software for Windows and Mac will go up sometime today.   
>> The Linux server on SourceForge has been updated to handle the new  
>> protocol features.
>>
>> Documentation and NitrOS-9 images will be go up this weekend.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Boisy G. Pitre
>> -- 
>> Tee-Boy
>> Mobile: 337.781.3570
>> Email: boisy at tee-boy.com
>> Web: http://www.tee-boy.com
>>
>>
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>
>
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