[Coco] Quick Poll

[gene heskett]

On Thursday, December 02, 2010 09:36:07 am John Kent did opine:

> Mark,
> 
> I don't know what HDBDOS is ... but I assume from your original email
> it's something you have to pay for.
> 
> DE1 board = 1 = yes
> HDBDOS = ? = probably not

Why not?  Its not that expensive but is best burned into an eprom, which 
IIRC in my case since I favor scuzzy, is in my sc-2 (now without the 4n1 
since I bought a TC^3 controller) floppy controller.  See the details for 
HDB-DOS at <http://www.cloud9tech.com>

There are several FAQ's available there, along with downloadable manuals 
for it.

Please note that access to your hard drive via HDB-DOS is dependent on your 
hard drive setup as the address of the rsdos virtual disk starting address, 
normally beyond the end of the os9 partition on the hard drive, is set at 
the time the eprom is burnt, so if you change it, then I'd assume you would 
have to write a short rsbasic proggy to run and change those 2 or 3 bytes 
if the hard drives formatting is ever changed.  I have doubts I will have 
to on my watch those old Seagate Hawk 1Gb drives are apparently forever 
drives, mine is pushing 17 years of spindle runtime as it originally was 
spun up in an amiga way back when they were new.

It is also, AFAIK, the only way to use the virtual disks with rsbasic, up 
to 255 of them.

> Fuzzy logic anyone ?
> 
> signal answer : std_logic;
> signal DE1_board : std_logic := 1;
> signal HDBDOS : std_logic := X;
> 
> answer <= DE1_board and HDBDOS;
> 
> 
> John.
> 
> On 2/12/2010 11:11 PM, Mark McDougall wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Well I guess I would've expected about 3 or 4, so that's not too bad.
> > Thanks for taking the time to respond.
> > 
> > The reason I mention it is that very shortly I'm going to release a
> > binary for the DE1 that is a Coco 1/2 emulator (not quite as exciting
> > as Coco3FPGA, I know, but a start). And the reason I asked about
> > HDBDOS is that, atm, it is the only practical way to run software on
> > it. It should simply be a matter of dumping a CF image from a working
> > Coco/HDBDOS setup, and copying it to an SD card.
> > 
> > Early days and a few details to work out, but it does actually run
> > now. More details to follow.
> > 
> > Would appreciate some help in testing the emulation etc if you guys
> > get some spare time.
> > 
> > Regards,


-- 
Cheers, Gene
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