[Coco] DW3/HDB-DOS

[Robert Gault]

tonym wrote:
> OK - I probably wasn't too clear...
>
> I have the SuperIDE w/256MB CF card I got from Mark.
> I have a DW3 server on my PC. I have the SuperIDE straight into the ROMPAK port on the CoCo3.
>
> I want to be able to use DRIVE0-2 as DW3 drives, and the rest be the HDB-DOS virtual floppies,
> so i can mount a bunch of .DSK images on DRIVE0 and do backup 0 to xx to copy them into the virtual floppies,
> and not have to rely on having DW3 wired up or an FDD setup. I just want to pre-load all the DRIVE4-DRIVE250 with stuff.
>
> Tony
>

Well, that's not how HDB-DOS for Drivewire works. You can have drives 0-3 access 
real hardware floppies and drives 4-255 access virtual floppy "drives" on any 
single DW3 slot. There is no way that DW3 can access simultaneously different 
slots on the DW server.
You can't do that when you access the CF card or even real hard drives mounted 
on the Coco.

More confusing is "not have to rely on having DW3 wired up...." Do you want this 
to happen using only the CF card? Otherwise DW3 must be "wired up."

You can do essentially what you want using DW4 which has 256 slots where DW3 has 
4. Turn on HDBDOS translation. Mount the same VFD (.vhd) image in all slots. 
Adjust each of the DW4 slot drive parameters with whatever the Disk Basic offset 
value is and indicate the each "drive offset number" equals the slot number.
With this kind of setup, you can swap floppy images in slot number 0 and back 
them up to whatever "drive number" you want. Once you have the VFD image fully 
stocked, there is no need to have it mounted in all slots, you can have it 
mounted in a single slot and access all of the "drives" with HDBDOS translation 
turned off.
An easier approach would be to use MESS or VCC to stock a single .vhd image. 
Your floppies are mounted as drive0 and can be backed up to any of 4-255 drives 
on the .vhd image. Once stocked, mount the .vhd image in DW3 or DW4 and use it 
from your real Coco.