[Coco] Newbie questions

[Sean Margules]

Hi everybody. I'm new here, and completely new to the coco3, so please excuse my ignorance. My Dad had a black and white TRS-80 (way different machine I know) in the library when I was a kid. No games or even a disk drive, but I used to mess around with basic on there after school. I looked it up online on a whim and found the Vcc emulator. I've been playing with it in my free time for a couple weeks now, and it kinda sucked me in. I'm using the 1.43 beta with drivewire support. 

Everything I know about this I've learned from google, websites, and a LOT of trial and error. 

Ok.... here's some of the issues I'm having

I CAN load a Sierra disk image like kingsquest1_40d.dsk when I mount it in the FD-502 Drive 0 slot, boot the system in 'disk basic', and type "dos" to boot into Nitros9 when I have a Nitros9 VHD in the hard drive slot.

I CAN use an external HDBDOS ROM image to access drivewire and then type "DOS" to boot a drivewire compatible Nitros9 boot disk in the 0 disk slot of the drivewire server.

I CAN'T figure out how to run any games or programs from the FD-502 drive or the drivewire drives when I'm already inside Nitros9. I can "dir /d0" to see whats there. I even figured out how to "chx /d0/cmds" but the system freezes when I try to use what one would think would be the boot command (Sierra, AutoEx, etc.)

I CAN'T get RGB dos to recognize any FD-502 drives, although I can get it to boot into nitros9 with "DOS 255"

I CAN'T run any .BIN files at all, from any DOS or OS. I try "loadm programname" and it will wait and say ok, but when I type "execute" the system will freeze on the screen with that little s on it.

I DON'T know how to access a hard drive directory or load data on to it.

 And uh... I don't know a lotta other stuff. I've found resources online, but they're a little scarce on the basics, so I figured I'd try you guys. Thanks in advance for any tips. : )