[Coco] Newbie Questions

[Stephen Pereira]

Hello Robert,

Thank you very much for your detailed reply.  This is greatly appreciated.

Here is my follow-up question:

Since I have all the parts and pieces to create a ROM Cartridge that has HDB-DOS in an EPROM, would that be a substitute for purchasing a floppy disk controller?  It would fulfill the criteria of having HDB-DOS in both RAM and ROM, rather than just having it in RAM as I do now.

Again, thanks very much for all your attention and support!

smp


> Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 22:52:10 -0400
> From: Robert Gault <robert.gault at att.net>
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Newbie Questions
> Message-ID: <53B616DA.2030808 at att.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
> Stephen,
> 
> I think most of your problems are the result of not having a disk controller. 
> That means your HDBDOS is in RAM only instead of both RAM and ROM. There are 
> many Disk Basic machine language programs that will run in full RAM but switch 
> to ROM/RAM mode for disk I/O. Emulators don't have this problem because the disk 
> ROM is emulated.
> 
> You certainly can run HDBDOS with a hardware floppy controller. Depending on the 
> controller you acquire, you could have several disk ROMs in a single EPROM and 
> select them with switches. A drivewire HDBDOS is one of the several versions of 
> HDBDOS that exist.
> There should be several documents on the Cloud-9 site explaining how to use 
> HDBDOS including some "white papers".
> 
> By the way, Drivewire3 is fine but there are more features with Drivewire4. You 
> should switch to it.
> 
> Robert