[Coco] MAME problems .186

[Robert Gault]

Steve Strowbridge wrote:
> This has been an interesting discussion and I've been silently observing,
> and I find it fascinating what some people do, or at least attempt to do
> with emulators.
>
> My needs for a real CoCo, and by extension an emulator have always been
> very simple, the ability to bring up a single floppy or cartridge and run a
> single program, for mostly entertainment purposes.
> When I had real CoCo hardware I never had more than one floppy drive.  I
> understand the benefit of having two for making copies of disks, or
> programs that are large, etc., but have a really hard time understanding
> the need for or use of 4 floppies at once, out of curiosity, not judgment,
> what are you doing with four floppy drives?
>
><snip>

Steve,

My current setup has two floppy drives (one 5.25" one 3.5") and two SCSI drives on my Coco3. 
However, at one time I had three floppies (two 5.25" and one 3.5") and two SCSI drives.

Now keep in mind that floppies can be addressed as either single or double sided. That means you 
need to increase your drive table in the ROM if you want to include all possibilities in Basic. So, 
the number of hardware drives won't increase but the number of addressed drives will.
.                        mask
drive 0 front side of 0  $01
drive 1 front side of 1  $02
drive 2 back  side of 0  $41
drive 3 back  side of 1  $42
drive 4 front side of 2  $04
drive 5 back  side of 2  $44

Whether you need this many drives might depend on how often you want to swap disks. You might also 
ask why anyone would need a .vhd drive with 256 (or more) Basic drives.
We are currently using hard drives or their equivalents on real Cocos that can hold many thousands 
of programs. I find it hard to believe that is needed but it clearly makes a great hobby for many of 
us. :)

Robert