[Coco] Maximum CoCo Drives (was: Re: Posted this pic for retro innovations)

[David Ladd]

Yes the 7 drives would for sure be handy :D

The one thing you have to be careful of is that some of the newer 5.25" and
3.5" drives have SMD/SMT pull up resistors installed and having that many
drives would be a problem.

The older 5.25" drives had it where you could remove the resistor pack to
solve this.  Normally back then the floppy controller has a set of pull up
resistors(terminators) and the last drive on the chain has a set of pull up
resistors(terminator).

Though with Jim's two 8 slot MPI's combined to form the super MPI, I could
see having maybe 10 floppy drive controllers just so I could see if I could
have 70 working floppy drives on the CoCo :D  Muahahahahah

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On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 1:49 PM Dave Philipsen <dave at davebiz.com> wrote:

> You shouldn’t talk about floppy drives in that way. You’re going to get
> David Ladd all excited.
>
>
>
> > On Jan 22, 2020, at 12:53 PM, RETRO Innovations <go4retro at go4retro.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > On 1/22/2020 12:41 PM, rietveld rietveld wrote:
> >> Let's turn this back into a coco topic
> >>
> >> is 4 the maximum number of physical drives a coco can have, or has
> someone ever  patched a DOS  to allow for the use of more drives?
> > Others can chime in, but the FDC has 3 drive select lines.  As such, I
> would assume one could put a 3-8 decoder on those lines, and, with
> requisite changes to the DOS, use up to 7 drives (leaving 1 selection for
> "no drive selected").  I think I saw an advertisement in Rainbow for
> something that did just this.  Of course, even at 3 drives per interface,
> in an MPI, isn't that 12 drives?
> >
> > Jim
> >
> >
> > --
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>
>
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