[Coco] vacant ramblings....

[Johann Klasek]

Hey!

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 04:28:04PM +0200, Simon Jonassen wrote:
> anyone ever tried interfacing a commodore c64 drive (1541 II etc) with the
> coco via the serial port ?

No, serial Port seems not that easy, because the ACIA chip is not adaptable
to support the IEC serial protocol ... (AFAIK).

I've done this for a Dragon 32+ (+ stands for my 64KByte upgrade) back in 1987 with
a small piece of extra hardware.
I used a separate PIA 6821 and some cabling which is connected to
Dragon's expansion port.
The driver was loaded from tape and contains the IEC-routines and the Basic
interface with a LOAD, SAVE and DIRECTORY statements shortcut.

The IEC driver uses the original protocol (slow!), no burst or parallel mode or
similar acceleration. My plans to support SpeedDOS+ too (my drive was
prepared for that) wasn't realized yet. :(

Just to offer some info on it (what I have already at my hands):

http://klasek.at/hc/dragon/iec-floppy/

I planned to publish this sooner or later, but this question may give me the
boost to finish this up earlier.

What's missing: 
 - clean documentation in english
 - a digitalized tape image of the driver  - maybe someone can help me
   (is there a common format or is a WAV-file sampled on a PC enough)?

Never tried it on a Coco (alas, simply don't haven't access to such a device).

Johann E. K.

-- 
The dragon on my side: http://klasek.at/hc/dragon/