[Coco] Multipak and Drivewire

[Barry Nelson]

I have a similar setup. One thing I did to make access to the Drivewire disks more convenient was copy HDBDOS into EPROM bank 2 in the CoCoSDC. Access to drives from SDC-DOS only allows you to map 4 drives at one time, where as HDBDOS allows access to up to 256 drives at once. To map a single DW disk (an size) to drive 0-3 on the CoCo you can do this:

DRIVE <physical drive number>,#<Drivewire disk #number>,<Drivewire disk sub number>

Only one Drivewire floppy image in an HDBDOS HD is mapped to one floppy drive number in SDC-DOS.

Quote: http://cocosdc.blogspot.com/p/in-order-to-use-disk-image-located-on.html

Using DriveWire Images
To access disk images on the DriveWire server, you use the DRIVE command as explained above but instead of a string argument identifying an image file on the SD card, you provide a DriveWire virtual drive number (prefixed with #) in the range of 0 to 63:

   DRIVE 2,#0

If you have a virtual 'hard disk' image containing an array of up to 256 floppy images, you can specify the index of the desired floppy image as a third argument to the DRIVE command:
  
   DRIVE 2,#0,125 

End quote

The other option is to use SDC-DOS to setup the mapping to physical floppies or SDC images, and then run HDBDOS with that mapping setup to access Drivewire disks.

I am working on software that will run from Disk Extended BASIC under HDBDOS that will allow you to remap the SDC drives, but so far I only have this capability under OS-9 using programs called sdrive and sdir that I compiled from example code and patched to work properly with a Multi-Pak.

On May 14, 2015, at 5:11 PM, coco-request at maltedmedia.com wrote:

> Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 16:13:50 -0400
> From: Michael Brant <brant.michael.l at gmail.com>
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Subject: [Coco] Multipak and Drivewire
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAGJGKwh205c3vaH1zHc-RcywPUDq6utZbM0ZrJfm+FpWOJzDew at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> 
> I have an MPI, I also have a CoCoSDC, along with two FD502s (one stock and
> one with HDB-DOS.)
> Both the SDC-DOS and HDB-DOS allow me to use Drivewire (which I connect to
> DW3 on my Mac Pro.)
> The question is this how (if possible) does the system assign disk numbers
> and drive numbers?
> 
> So far I have used the drive function but when doing so, I it seems to
> cutoff access to the DW and only access physical disks.
> 
> I am fairly new to DW and MPI usage, my old CoCo days did not have an MPI.