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

[Roger Taylor]

At 06:22 AM 3/13/2010, you wrote:
>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.

And they never considered using the indirect call to DSKCON.  Jeez.  :)



>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


Well, let's get these games compatible with CoCoNet and DriveWire 
already.  Just patch the things to call DSKCON and ignore the junk 
disk routines.


-- 
~ Roger Taylor