[Coco] Introducing the next generation of Color Computer, the CoCo-X

[Mark McDougall]

On 23/03/2013 11:48 AM, Allen Huffman wrote:

> A bigger issue were programs that used their own disk access code.

I wrote a WD179X core for my TRS-80 implementation for this very reason. It 
ran Super Utility - the grand daddy of all disk utilities - just fine with 
raw track & sector operations.

The idea was to make a generic back-end and be able to hook it up to any 
medium, including real floppy drives, but also another process (eg micro) 
that could read floppy images off, eg. a FAT-formatted SD card.

I only ever hooked it up to flash and SRAM; the former so I could actually 
boot DOS, and the latter so I could create floppy disk images.

I never really took it any further, as I hadn't decided in what direction to 
take it, although I was going to try a real floppy drive next. Just never 
got around to it. The Minimig (Amiga) core uses a 2nd soft-core processor 
for SD/FAT filesystem access, with an on-screen overlay menu to 
mount/unmount floppy drives. That's probably my preference, although an 
external micro would also suffice.

I wouldn't imagine it would take much to support the other like floppy 
controllers, such as the 1771/2. IIRC the main differences were the 
inter-sector data and the available sector sizes.

So there are options; 'real' floppy emulation, some hybrid like Drivewire, 
or hard-disk support like HDBDOS. Would be nice to have them all! :)

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"