[Coco] 3 1/2 drive on coco and drive 0-3 on one ribbon cable

[Barry Nelson]

> Rietveld Rietveld rietveldh at hotmail.com  <mailto:coco%40maltedmedia.com?Subject=Re%3A%20%5BCoco%5D%203%201/2%20drive%20on%20coco%20and%20drive%200-3%20on%20one%20ribbon%20cable&In-Reply-To=%3CDM5PR14MB130676B5CBC6C813A04CB1D7B69D0%40DM5PR14MB1306.namprd14.prod.outlook.com%3E>
> Thu Aug 31 15:00:48 EDT 2017
> 
> Two questions pls:
> 
> I replaced my 5 1/4 drive 1 with a 720k 3 1/2.   When I do a DIR 1 it reads the drive, but when I DSKINI 1 it will only format the disk to 158k.   Will DECB format the full 720k?
> 
> Question two
> 
> I want to hook up this dual drive FD502 inline with another FD502 and dual drive to have three physical 5 1/4 drives and one 3 1/2 drive.
> 
> If I replace both ribbon cables with one from cloud nine that has a card conector on one end for the controller and for connectors on the other end for the four physical drives will the one FD502 controller and the coco recognize this setup as drive 0-3
> 
> Thanks
Disk Extended Color BASIC only knows how to read/write to a single sided 35 track disk. In order to access more capacity you must do one of the following:
1) Apply patches to Disk BASIC. Patches are available that allow using both sides of the disk, and more tracks. These modifications have limitations, I suggest reading http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Hacking_Disk <http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Hacking_Disk>
2) Use ADOS (CoCo 1 or 2) or ADOS3. You can load it from disk or from ROM. It still has limitations and I suggest reading the web page linked above.
3) Only use the first 35 tracks of each side of up to 4 sides, using method 1 or 2. This will maintain compatibility with existing software and disks.
4) Use OS-9. This, however is a completely different operating system and will not help at all if you want to run Extended BASIC software.

You should also be aware that the same wire used to select the fourth drive is also used as a side select line, thus if you choose to access the second side of your disks, you can only have 3 drives, 0 to 2 and can not use drive 3.