[Coco] {coco} wordpak RS info needed

[RJRTTY at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/17/05 12:45:51 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
gene.heskett at verizon.net writes:

> 
>  That was one of the odd things about that card, the other two
>  registers were at $FF76-77.  This of course meant that it tied up 2
>  whole 4 byte wide i/o spaces, something I considered a huge waste so
>  I did a bit of cutting and pasting and moved the $FF78-79 pair to
>  $FF74-75 in my own copy.

    Well,  one reason I think they did that was to simplify and cut
cost of the PCB.     The wordpak II board that came before it
was more complex but took up four bytes in the upper part of FF9X space.
       I had a hunch that FF76 and FF77 where involved because of
the difference in activity on them between when the board was enabled as
opposed to when it wasn't.

>  I don't know about rsdos drivers for it as I never ran rsdos any
>  longer than to type "dos", usually before the monitor was warmed up
>  enough to show a pix.
  
That's OK.   I know some like to avoid DECB but it has it's uses
mainly because it boots up from rom and allows quick and DIRTY
operation but you're right it's not a real OS like OS9 (Nitros9 now).
  
>  There are os9 drivers for it on rtsi I believe.  One set in
>  particular was the one I used as it allowed the WP-RS to be used at
>  the same time as the regular color monitor and you had two screens
>  side by side, both 99% functional.  The missing 1% was that the pause
>  at the screen full when doing a listing didn't on the WP-RS screen.
  
>  Thats the driver set that gives wecho, but I don't recall the exact
>  names of the other two pieces ATM.  I eventually merged them all into
>  cc3io, saveing a page of os9 level 2 system ram in the process. 
>  They were done by Dennis Skala.

Thanks for the info.   I'll check it out.

>  Unforch, my drivers are still on the coco3's drive, never having been
>  able to make a file transfer to this linux box for that stuff.  They
>  would give you a larger screen thatn the stock drivers too, I'd
>  played with the init data being fed to the video chip.

    In my attempts at reverse engineering the board I have become
proficient at altering the screen size, cursor position, etc. but the
one thing I cant figure out is the use of the data latch.     In the
wordpakII board you sent a dummy register number 31 to the
register select address FF98 and then wait for a vertical refresh
as indicated by reading bit 7 of FF98 until its set then writing to
the latch which was at FF9B.     I think the vertical indicator bit
on the Wordpak RS card is bit 5 (32) of FF78.    Is that right?   And
can you remember which address is the latch, FF77 or FF76?

If you cant remember never mind as I will go to rtsi and see
what I can find.     I will probably figure it out now that I know
where things are.    Thanks for your help.

Roy