[Coco] Re: Disk Basic and 512 byte block floppies.

[John E. Malmberg]

Ray Watts wrote:
>>
> John,  I just installed VirtualPC Windows 2000 emulator on my Mac, then 
> configured the Command Line window and installed the USB Superdisk 
> driver.  Haven't had time to  test run it with CoCo disk images, etc. 
> When you say you have to reboot down to DOS for reading a floppy image I 
> become confused.

> Are you saying the Command Line window in 2000 Pro is 
> not putting you back into DOS?

Correct.  The command line window in Windows 9x and later is not putting 
you into MS-DOS.  It is putting you in a MS-DOS emulator that intercepts 
and re-issues MS-DOS BIOS calls and other hardware access.

It seems that sometime after Windows 98, the API to set the floppy drive 
parameters to 256 byte sectors instead of 512 has been removed.

However if your emulator supports the API, and you have MS-DOS or 
Windows 9x that you can boot on a separate copy, then it may work.

Windows 9x and some other have a "Single DOS mode".  What they do is 
reboot the computer into DOS, which terminates all your active programs. 
  Then when your DOS program ends, they reboot back and restore what 
they can.

> This is an important distinction for me since I run Mac OS 9.1 with no
 > command line capability and VirtualPC is my only link to what most of
 > you are discussing.

There are other Mac users on this forum, one seems to be actively 
working on MESS, so I am sure that you could get a lot of advice on how 
to get things done with out requiring emulation.

>  I also plan to use it, if feasable, for burning CD's
 > that will run on Mark's/Boisy's Super SCSI CoCo CD.

While I do not have the specifications for that, I would assume that is 
just a hard drive image the size of a CD-ROM for a specific operating 
system like OS-9.

Again, once you have the data in a container file, most commercial and 
free CD-ROM burners can burn an image on to a CD-ROM.  You may have to 
name the container file .ISO for some of them.

Again, the Mac users can probably help with with getting the container 
file set up.

I would expect that CD-Burning software may not work well when run on an 
emulator.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.network
Personal Opinion Only