[Coco] CoCoNet status

[Roger Taylor]

By the way, if anyone wants to have a floppy disk image included in 
the "drive pak" distro, this is a good chance to put your games or 
apps within a few keystrokes of a pak user.  Back in 1990 it would be 
like asking a company to throw your software disks in each outgoing 
package.  Of course, there was a real market back then so this is a 
little different now.  Just e-mail me the disk image(s) and I ask 
that they are 35-track format if Disk BASIC, and no more than 720K in 
size if OS-9.  I'll get them on the pak if they are worthy.

This brings up another idea..  I don't really have much time to work 
on a fully stocked NitrOS-9 "vhd" image for the pak, so if someone 
has a really good vhd image with all the cool games and stuff on it 
and some good apps, I'll include it on the pak as either the main 
mass drive or 2nd one, etc.  We've got room for tons of huge OS-9 
hard drives on the MicroSD card, so no worries. If 10 people sent me 
a 20-30 meg VHD to be on the distro pak, I'll try to get them on 
there before time runs out.  I will just mount them using the 
bitbanger cable and dsave the contents onto a blank mass drive on the pak.

There might not be time for me to make the VHD bootable before I get 
the pak shipping, but a lot of this stuff can be done and offered 
online to keep upgrades coming.  After all, 90% of CoCoNet is Software.

The partition manager I wrote is in BASIC and is on the SYS0 
partition on the pak.  It lets you erase the table and start over, 
adding partitions in the order you like and with varying automatic 
and suggested sizes, etc. with a listing of the current partitions 
and messages telling you how much space is left, in LSN and MB 
format.  Each partition listed shows you the starting LSN and size in 
LSNs and MBs.  There's nothing on the pak itself that would keep you 
from read or writing to any raw LSN.  The OSes are responsible for 
using their respectful partitions.

The manager has menu items for adding small or huge "USER" 
partitions.  I doubt you'll ever reach the limit which is about ~1200 
partitions.  :)

Lots of fun.
-- 
~ Roger Taylor