[Coco] DriveWire virtual serial ports - multiball success (2)

[Aaron Wolfe]

That is Windows 7 with lots of instances of SecureCRT that are
connected to a single Linux box, which is in turn connected via a
serial port to the CoCo's bit banger serial port.

I guess nothing in the screenshot is really running on the Windows
box, its just the display.  I am running four copies of minicom on the
linux box (one in each window) which in turn connect to the four local
PTYs that the single drivewire server is bridging to the OS-9 drivers
over the single bit banger port (which is simultaneously providing the
CoCo's disk drives).  Data for the four connections is then processed
by a single interrupt handler and split out into four standard OS-9
SCF devices (/T1 through /T4).

For whatever reason, I find this all incredibly cool :)  Ever since I
was a kid I wanted to connect my CoCo to other things.  I actually
still have my first CoCo (the large silver version expanded by my
father to 64k).

The DriveWire interface is super easy to program for, and performs
very well even when I write bad software that uses it it silly ways.
I cannot thank the folks who created it and made it available for free
to our community enough.

Also the "toolshed" set of development tools are incredible.  I had it
in my head that I would need to be developing directly on the CoCo or
at best an emulator, this actually delayed my starting the project for
a few months.  When I realized that you could do the work on a linux
box, even assemble your 6809 code and manipulate disk images..
everything changed.  What an amazing set of tools.

-Aaron


On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 10:58 AM, richec <rcrislip at neo.rr.com> wrote:
> Hi Aaron,
>
> Congrats on getting it to work. What desktop was that?  Were you running Vista
> in a VM? Cause the desktop sure looked like Linux to me.
>
> Cheers
>
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