[Coco] Still having newbie issues

[Robert Gault]

Stephen Pereira wrote:
>
> Hello again, all,
>
> I am still having a problem with two programs that I can get to work on the VCC emulator, running on my MacBook Pro in Windows XP on Parallels, but I cannot get them to work on my physical system.  One program is Zork I, and the other is Disk EDTASM.  Both of these .DSK files have been downloaded from the Color Computer Archive.
>
> My physical system is a CoCo 3, recently purchased from Cloud-9.  I made up an EPROM cartridge, and I have HDB-DOS in EPROM, also purchased from Cloud-9.  I am using Drivewire 3 at the moment, served up on a Dell Mini laptop running Windows XP.  Everything works great in this setup, but I am stymied by the fact that I cannot get these two programs to work, even though both do work just fine with the VCC emulator.
>
> I even went and purchased a Tandy FD-500 floppy disk controller ($50 plus $10 shipping on eBay) so that I could power up with Disk Extended Color Basic to start, then CLOADM HDB-DOS into my machine so I would have all the original CoCo ROMs in place, and HDB-DOS in RAM.  Still no dice.
>
> I realize this is a trivial thing in the big picture, but why can I get Zork II and Zork III to run fine (now that I have my EPROM cartridge properly configured and running correctly) but not Zork I?  What is it about my setup that I cannot run Disk EDTASM?
>
> I would greatly appreciate any ideas that you folks might be able to offer.  Thanks, in advance, for all your attention and assistance!
>
> smp
>
>
>
>

Stephen,

Tandy's Disk EDTASM contains its own disk I/O routines and is designed to work 
with floppy drives 0-3. VCC emulates floppy drives so the program works with it. 
Drivewire 3 or 4 can't be said to emulate floppies as all disk I/O must go 
through the serial port and requires using the Drivewire ROM code.
Darren indicated that Zork has its own disk routines but again VCC will run the 
program as it emulates normal disk I/O hardware.

If you want to use Tandy's Disk EDTASM with Drivewire, you will have to purchase 
my patch for that program. The patch, along with many other enhancements, 
permits EDTASM to run with RGBDOS or HDBDOS using virtual drives from 0-255. The 
patching forces the EDTASM included DOS to switch to ROM routines when accessing 
disks. Therefore the new EDTASM version will run on Drivewire via a real Coco or 
VCC 1.43b, with MESS or VCC from .vhd emulated hard drives, and with real HDBDOS 
formatted hard drives on a Coco system.

Nick Marentes is using a special patched version of Disk EDTASM which works with 
the CoCoSDC by Darren Atkinson.

Robert