[Coco] Newbie questions

[Sean Margules]

Both RGBDOS and HDBDOS are replacements for the Tandy Disk ROM which permit 
access to hard drives. These hard drives (real or simulated) are formatted to be 
equivalent to first an OS-9 partition and then 256 separate 35-track normal 
(Disk Basic) disks.


Thank you all for the info. If I'm understanding correctly RGBDOS doesn't allow access to the disk drives because it is substituting a hard drive for them. If you want the disk drives you have to DRIVEOFF to shut down the hard drive. But if that's the case, how does one go about tranferring data to the VHD (since you can't read a disk from a drive and access the hard drive at the same time)? For instance if I wanted to take DK.dsk and transfer it to one of the 256 partitions of Nitros9.VHD What would I need to do?



On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 5:34 PM, Robert Gault <robert.gault at att.net> wrote:
 
Sean Margules wrote:
>    For the life of me I'm not sure what RGB dos is good for, because it doesn't seem to recognize anything in the disk drives. When I type "dir" The screen comes back with "drive = 0             free=68". It does apparently read the hard drive
>   though ("dir 255" shows OS-9 hard drive boot and it works).

Sean,

Both RGBDOS and HDBDOS are replacements for the Tandy Disk ROM which permit 
access to hard drives. These hard drives (real or simulated) are formatted to be 
equivalent to first an OS-9 partition and then 256 separate 35-track normal 
(Disk Basic) disks.
Both of these DOS default to having all of the 256 "drives" active at boot. That 
means you can't access any of the 0-3 floppy drives until you issue a command to 
switch to floppies for those drives.
DRIVE OFF    - drives 0-3 floppies 4-255 hard
DRIVE OFF n  - n=0-3 drives 0-n floppies
ex DRIVE OFF 1  - drives 0-1 floppies 2-255 hard drive
DRIVE ON     - drives 0-255 hard

There are many other advantages to RGBDOS but the main one is having both a 
large OS-9 "drive" and 256 Disk Basic "drives" all running at the same time.

A simple Google search for these dos will give you all the information you need 
to use them. The pdf included with VCC is out of date and the reference to 
RGBDOS should now be
http://aaronwolfe.com/robert.gault/Coco/Downloads/Downloads.htm
Or you can go to the documentation at
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/ROMS/RGBDOS/Readme.txt
The similar HDBDOS is at
http://www.frontiernet.net/~mmarlette/Cloud-9/Support/HDB-DOS%20User%20Manual.pdf

Robert



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