[Coco] Flex-09 on the Coco 3 - It works from a real floppy drive

[John E. Malmberg]

I have not been monitoring this list for a while and have just been 
skimming through the older posts to try to catch up.

Still have 114362 messages marked unread.

I posted back on 12/06/2003 that I successfully booted Flex+ from 
Spectral Associates on a Coco 3.  The 51 character wide Hires screen 
even worked.

I am seeing many posts that Flex-09 does not work on a Coco 3 or an 
emulator since my original post.

The issue is that the anything that is emulating a floppy that contains 
a Flex-09 disk volume has to be able to deal with the fact that the 
first track is single density.  I think it would be 9 256 byte sectors.

So a disk image would have 9 256 byte sectors, and then the remaining 34 
tracks for original disk with the 18 256 byte sectors, more for others 
in order for the bootstrap to work.

Or one of the formats in the COCO SDC manual that allows specifying the 
density of specific tracks.

So far I have not found a tool to copy a Flex formatted disk except flex 
it self.  It is now on my large list of TODOS.

Currently it looks like the flex-09 bootstrap will also only use the 
disk controller in slot 4 of the MPI interface.

So it looks like a bit of work is needed for flex-09 COCO SDC when there 
is a real floppy controller also present.

An emulator should just needs the a disk image it knows how to grok to 
make Flex work.

Regards,
-John