[Coco] [Color Computer] Re: imgtool.exe in M.E.S.S. 0.74b is bad

[John E. Malmberg]

lmemsm wrote:
> --- In ColorComputer at yahoogroups.com, Roger Taylor <rtaylor at b...> wrote:
>  
> I haven't made the switch to XP, but from trying the operating system
> out on other people's machines, the DOS support seems really crippled.
>  In Windows 98, there was an ANSI driver.

It is an almost ANSI driver.  There are several critical errors in it. 
Apparently the author did not look at the ANSI specs and just guessed at 
things.

>>I also keep seeing where some PC manufacturers are 
>>planning to discontinue the floppy drives altogether.

Floppy disks are available on USB.

I just saw a single USB device that provides all the legacy I/O in one 
product.

> I have a SCSI with better specs than new Serial ATAs and I am having
 > all kinds of trouble finding devices that still work with SCSI since
 > it's an older standard.

I have had no problem finding SCSI drives, and my employer is still 
selling them, but concentrating on the high end.  Fibre interfaces are 
expected to take over for the extreme high end.

Price is the issue.  I am finding that standard IDE drives are the least 
expensive disk space.  But keep good backups.  My older SCSI, DSSI, and 
MFM drives are going strong.

My IDE drives seem to be having problems making it through their warrantee.

This is why I got IDE to CompactFlash adapter from Cloud-9.  When I get 
my SuperIDE board, I will have a way of interchanging or storing programs.

I expect that it may be a problem soon to find reliable IDE drives that 
are small enough to put on a COCO.  But CompactFlash drives will be 
affordable.

I have a USB CompactFlash Reader/Writer that I can put on my OpenVMS 
system or on my Windows 2000 system to facilitate the transfer.

>>I think it's a great idea to preserve all of your CoCo floppy disks
>>(and tapes, for that matter), and store them on one or two CDs so
>>they'll live forever... we hope. 

> Been wanting to do this for a long time.  I could probably have done
> it with Xenocopy but the restore and port tools seem to work much
> better and are faster.  I really need to back up all my 5 and 1/4s and
> 3 and 1/2s (both CoCo and IBM) to hard drive or CD, since as you
> mentioned they're slowly being phased out by computer manufacturers
> (and the 5 and 1/4 drives are getting very hard to find).  

My 5.25 inch HD drives are on systems that have bad hard drives.

The retrieve program works on the Windows 95 system, but not on the 
Windows 2000 system.

I have dusted off the sources to my COCODISK program that transfers 
files from a COCO floppy to a PC on a DOS 2.x or 3.x system.

Since the COCO disk access features work on a Windows NT and on a 
Windows 95 system, but the file system access fails, I figured that it 
would be a compile and go to convert it.

Wrong.

My program uses _bios_disk() to access the floppy disk, and that is no 
longer in the Visual C++ header files.  I have found replacement 
routines for reading and writing 256 byte sectors for Windows 9x, and a 
different set seems to exist for Windows 2000 and later, but one of the 
needed APIs appears not to be documented, but showed up on a google search.

I have the Windows 9x routines almost coded, but a lot is guesswork as 
there does not seem to be much documentation in this area.  Apparently I 
have to issue a lock call before accessing the floppy drive and unlock 
it afterword.  There are 3 lock levels, but I can not find any 
documentation as to what they mean.

 > Was thinking of trying to convert some more
 > of my old CoCo Basic games to Basic on the PC, but they run better on
 > the emulator than they when translated to Basic on the PC.

I was looking at implmenting the BASIC interpreter in portable C. 
However i have discovered that a significant number of my non-trivial 
programs use ML assists.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net
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