[Coco] VCC direct VHD vs DW

[Bill Pierce]

William, you can make VCC's window any size you like. You must go to "Configuration/Display" and check "Allow Resize". Then resize and maximize work. If you're using a wide screen monitor, then "Full Screen" will be stretched, and it's best to manually resize to retain the aspect ratio. Hopefully, this will be fixed soon. We have a test version (WIP) that retains aspect on resize and full screen and hope to release it soon.
I didn't realize so many people didn't know how to make VCC larger. It helps to read the manual :-)

Walter, as far as just drives, VCC's native drive is 100 times faster than DW4 drives. Due to DW4's TCP to serial bottleneck, and DW4's buffering, DW4 is actually slower in the emulators than it is on a real Coco (even when VCC is overclocked).
In VCC, goto "Cartridge/FD-502 Config" and set "Overclock Disk Drives" and the floppies are fast as well.

In my software dev setup for writing NitrOS9 software, I have the VCC drive as my system drive for NitrOS9 (128meg), then I have 8 (yes 8) drives available in DW4 plus a 256k ramdisk (almost instantaneous). I also run VCC at 89mhz for fast C compiling speeds and immediate screen refreshes in my text editor. Do not uncheck the "Throttle" in the config menu though, as that make EVERYTHING overclock and the keyboard becomes unusable. With just the CPU overclocked (Config/CPU/Overclock), the keyboard and clock remain stable. No, this is definately not for gaming... games will run too fast, but for software development and compiling sources, it makes my VCC Coco work as fast as my PC (almost).
An example would be compiling my MShell sources... At regular 1.79mhz, it take more than 5+ hours to compile the 250+ sources. At 89mhz (maxed), it all compiles in a little over 2 mins!!

 

 

Bill Pierce
"Charlie stole the handle, and the train it won't stop going, no way to slow down!" - Ian Anderson - Jethro Tull

My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
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-----Original Message-----
From: William Carlin <whcarlinjr at gmail.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Fri, Jun 16, 2017 6:42 am
Subject: Re: [Coco] VCC direct VHD vs DW

Technically you can have 3 hard drives mounted at one time in VCC.  Youhave the standard Hard Disk 0 RGB style hard drive.  If you use one of youMPI slots for the Glenside IDE you can also have a master and slave IDEhard drive(s) mounted as well.I think of DriveWire as the CoCo's version of network drives or networkattached storage.  You can literally attach anything to DriveWire.  Fromother downloaded VHD's to floppy disks to disks located on a web server,ftp server, SMB/CIFS share, inside of a .ZIP file (mounts VHD but nochanges are written back).  Once you become familiar with the 'dw' command,you can create scripts to automate most of the drudge work of ejectingdrives, modifying the 'dmode' parameters of a /Xx device to adjust the sizeof your "network volume", creating the disk in memory on the DW server,formatting the drive, writing the drive out to physical disk on the DWserver, and finally inserting the written disk to complete the process.I think the feature I use most in DW is the virtual serial ports to telnetinto NitrOS9.  The VCC window is so small on my laptop I need to use theWindows telnet in a command prompt in order to see what I'm typing.Additionally VCC emulates the keyboard just a CoCo and NitrOS9 can misskeystrokes under heavy load.  When you use telnet, the keyboard is bufferedand characters are read by the serial port as the NitrOS9 can accept them.​-- Coco mailing listCoco at maltedmedia.comhttps://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco