[Coco] Have no idea what to call it, but, it WAS New tool: WIRED

[Robert Gault]

Boisy G. Pitre wrote:
>
> On Dec 4, 2012, at 12:22 PM, Brian Blake <random.rodder at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 12/4/2012 1:02 PM, Boisy G. Pitre wrote:
>>> Perhaps the Super HDB-DOS project would be something Luis and others would be interested in working on.
>>
>> There are some very smart people working in this group now...
>>
>>> Some background: this project was discussed back in September in an email discussion between myself, Mark, Aaron, Darren, Robert Gault and William Astle.  Nothing besides discussion ever took place, and no work was done.
>>>
>>> The idea was (and still is) to define a set of commands that would easily allow one to address DriveWire, Floppy, IDE, and SCSI devices in the same ROM, and to do so without making the syntax difficult or strange.  We discussed a number of different proposals to do this.
>>
>> This would be a dream come true - the flexibility I mentioned earlier with the performance of a SuperIDE or TC^3.
>>
>> Had the discussions reach a point where you were talking about device detection - whether Super HDB-DOS would detect the mass storage on the machine? Or would the user have to use a setup program, similar to what we do during the initial setup of a SuperIDE?
>
> The idea would be to include the code to talk to all devices in the same ROM. There would be no need for run-time detection -- only error handling in case a device was accessed that wasn't on the system.
>
> Essentially, it would have eliminated the need for any setup program at all.
>
> But it would have definitely required moving up to a 16K ROM.
>
>

Luis Antoniosi has demonstrated one approach which can handle Drivewire plus one 
type of HDBDOS; one ROM loaded to RAM, the second the current ROM. Extend it to 
a 16K ROM with the main package in the first half and hardware specific routines 
in the second half, and there just might be room to support all flavors of drives.

Aside from the difficulties and work needed to attempt this, the requirement of 
a 16K ROM may make the concept Coco3 only. That would not be desirable.

As things stand right now, the point is moot for NitrOS-9 as you can have driver 
packages for any type hard drive and Drivewire co-existing in OS9Boot. I have 
this currently going for my SCSI drives and Drivewire.
So this Super HDBDOS really is needed only for Disk Basic. Far as that goes, it 
is only needed to transfer files back and forth as Luis' Wired does right now.

Robert