[Coco] [Color Computer] Dumb drive question?

John E. Malmberg wb8tyw at qsl.net
Tue Oct 14 21:34:00 EDT 2003


KnudsenMJ at aol.com wrote:

> Any half-height drives are pretty sure to be double sided.

Unfortunately not. :-)

I have not found one yet with a double sided drive, but they were 40 tracks.

> Tandy's stock OS9-L1 driver (CCDisk) was hard coded to SS also, no matter 
> what you put in the device descriptors.

When they came out with a newer controller, they put out a patch that 
allowed it and it's successors to use double sided drives.  They never 
put out a patch for the older controllers.

This was strange because the same patch to use the second side of the 
drive from Disk Basic works on all the Tandy controllers, and Flex-09 
also works double sided with all the Tandy controllers.

> There were 3rd-party replacements that not only respected the double-sided
 > descriptors, but were smaller and less buggy.
> 
> OS9-L2 for the Coco3 respected DS descriptors from the beginning.

I never tried it with the older controller.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.network
Personal Opinion Only




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