[Coco] Just another peek...

[Dave Philipsen]

Yes, that's a good point. Continue to use stock ROMs and intercept the 
FD interface to communicate with the SD card. There are perhaps two 
problems I see with that: first, it is probably a lot of work for Gary 
to add the support not only for Drivewire but now for an SD card too.  
Second, Drivewire has it's own interface on the PC by which you can swap 
disks in and out.  The 'behind-the-scenes' FD to SD card translator 
wouldn't necessarily have that without some extra software somewhere.  
It is a good thought, however, and I'll have to bounce around some ideas 
over on the other forum and see what we come up with.

Dave



On 2015-10-09 19:47, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> Again FWIW, the Coco3fpga does the heavy lifting at least for 
> DriveWire.
> It presents a standard FD 501 interface to the CoCo and does the DW 
> stuff
> behind the scenes.  So you use a standard DECB rom, not one specially 
> made
> for DW.
> 
> I think doing the same with other types of storage makes a lot of sense
> (assuming it is possible with the room on the fpga).
> 
> On Fri, Oct 9, 2015, 8:39 PM Mark McDougall <msmcdoug at iinet.net.au> 
> wrote:
> 
>> On 10/10/2015 7:32 AM, Dave Philipsen wrote:
>> 
>> > My guess is that we'll have the DE1 booting from the SD card in fairly
>> > short order but it could be some months as I have not found any other
>> > volunteers as of yet to help on the coding and my time is a little
>> > stretched right now.
>> 
>> My $0.02 worth...
>> 
>> You're really going about this ass-backwards and creating more mess 
>> and
>> confusion along the way. We don't NEED more media support in software,
>> it's only going to muddy the already muddy waters.
>> 
>> You should be looking at making the FPGA do the heavy lifting via
>> hardware emulation. My Coco 1/2 implements the 'standard' Cloud9 IDE
>> interface via the opencores OCIDE controller core. That interfaces
>> directly to a CF card, for example. I've got read support working on 
>> the
>> SD card - not via any convoluted driver quasi hardware setup - but via 
>> a
>> back-end interface that make the SD card look/act like disk media on 
>> the
>> back end of an IDE controller. Not 1 byte of additional software/ROM
>> required.
>> 
>> The coco is already confusing with FD-50X, Super/GlensideIDE, 
>> Drivewire
>> and CocoSDC hardware. Add DECB, (Nitr)OS9, HDBOS and Drivewire 
>> software,
>> and it's becoming unmanageable. Now you want to add SD card support in
>> software as well, across DECB and NitrOS9? That's just nuts!
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> --
>> |              Mark McDougall              | "Electrical Engineers do 
>> it
>> |  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> |   with less resistance!"
>> 
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>>