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

[Luis Antoniosi]

Just a word here: SuperIDE supports 4 ram banks and can be switched by
software.

But I don't see many benefit from having multiple device support for
disk basic. If there is one thing I would like to work is to give disk
emulation on hdbdos, with support for disk switching (talking about a
keyboard interrupt maybe ?). For example there are many disk basic
games that don't run on superIDE, drivePak, etc.


On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 4:43 PM, Robert Gault <robert.gault at att.net> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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