[Coco] Midwest Gaming Classic (was) MicroSD Drive Pak

[Steve Bjork]

Both Dallas Quest and Sands of Egypt use an independent floppy driver 
that does NOT used any code in the ROM.

At the time Sands of Egypt was written, Tandy did not allow the use of 
ROM calls to talk to the floppy drive. The word was Disk Basic would 
have an update and the location of key disk I/O subroutines could move.  
As you know, the code did move around a bit from version 1.0 and 1.1.

The only way to make sure Sands of Egypt would work all future version 
of Disk Basic was to write your own drivers.  Not a problem for me since 
I've been writing drivers for the Western Digital floppy disk controls 
for years.  (My first drivers for that chip were written back in late 
1977 for SoftTape's floppy drive for the Apple II that never saw the 
light of day because it of Apple's own floppy drive.)  I also wrote the 
code for DataSoft's floppy disk production system using TRS-80 (and 
later CoCo's) to make our CoCo and Atari disks.  (Note: We could make a 
Atari game disks in about 15 seconds where an Atari computer would take 
about 6 minutes to create the same disk.)

Dallas Quest was written use the same drivers since I had left DataSoft 
by then and I was the only one there any hardware background. Should a 
new driver patch be written for one game, it should work on the other.

Steve Bjork

On 3/12/2010 10:59 PM, Roger Taylor wrote:
> Dallas Quest... locks up during the load.  There's something they did 
> that inteferes with the CoCoNet ROM but I don't know what it is right 
> now.
> I really like Dallas Quest and have got to figure this one out.