[Coco] cocodisk, a program recovered from 1993.

John E. Malmberg malmberg at Encompasserve.org
Sun Nov 30 23:06:00 EST 2003


I wrote a program back in 1993 to transfer files from Disk Basic to my 
Tandy 2000.

I discovered a while back that it could do directory listings under 
Windows NT 4.0, but could not write files.  Subsequent tests showed 
problems under Windows 95.

This weekend I was able to rebuild it using Symantec C++, and it seems 
to work on Windows 95 and Windows 98.  It would not work on Windows 2000.

The recompile exposed a few bugs that the earlier Quick C compiler did 
not detect.

On my test system, it sometimes is getting seek errors on the 3.5 inch 
floppy drive.

I have only tested this version on a 3.5 inch floppy.  I do not know if 
it will work with a 5.25 drive.

The 1.1 version is available for a while at:

http://encompasserve.org/~malmberg/coco/cocodisk_dos.exe.

Free for use.  I am not releasing the C source at this time.  It is too 
much of a mess, and I plan to restructure it as I move forward.

So Enjoy.  And let me know what platforms that it works on.

This program only knows about 35 track floppies.  Not exactly true, it 
should handle 40 track floppies, or what ever size that the gran table 
allows.

It can read files from the COCO formatted disk and translate the CR-LF 
properly for a PC.  For writing files to the disks, you can choose a 
binary write or ASCII write.

It has not had a lot of testing recently, so do not use it to write on 
floppys that you can not afford to get corrupted.

My next planned enhancement to it is to be able to make floppy images, 
and to read the other side for double sided floppies made from the COCO 
double sided hack, and to be able to extract files from a disk image file.

At that point I plan to stop work on the DOS based version that can read 
the 256 byte sector floppies.

I expect that future file transfers for me will be using the 
CompactFlash card or other removable media, and I will be looking at 
modifying a version of the program to handle that.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net
Personal Opinion Only





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