[Coco] CoCo3 questions / Cloud 9 Super IDE interface

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Joel Ewy may have mentioned these words:
>Steve.Lancaster at Moorestephens.com wrote:
>
> > 1) Is a floppy drive necessary for a CoCo?

Necessary? No, but preferable, unless you have something like SuperIDE and 
DriveWire to xfer & store stuff... Audio Cassette gets "slow" quick! ;-)

>Most people categorize 3.5" drives as floppies,

That's because they are. Newbies might call 'em "hard drives" but they're 
named floppies due to the *media* not the envelope that contains it.

I had some platters out of my first 5.25" RLL 66Meg drive that I *loved* to 
teach a "hard disk / floppy disk" lesson to people with...
;-)

>  I use 1.44M drives with 720K disks on CoCos.

If you want to use more than one, find an old CoCo floppy cable with the 
drive select pins removed, or an older drive that still has the drive 
select jumpers/switches on 'em - else you'll be limited to one drive 
without some hackery.

>   I suppose one could also use 1.44M floppy disks as well

You'd be supposing wrong. Using 1.44Meg media will change the datarate that 
the floppy drive expects (from 250Kbit to 500Kbit) and stock CoCo 
controllers cannot supply that speed.

Taping over the hole on 1.44Meg media is also a no-no. The coercivity of 
the media is different, and your data will (dollars to donuts) not last 
very long.

>but the result will be even more wasted space.

That would only be true if the controller supported HD, which it doesn't. ;-)

> > ...
> > Going back to the Super IDE does anybody know if it is possible to
> > transfer .dsk images to the CF card by drag and drop (on a PC with a card
> > reader) or does the transfer have to be done using a CoCo emulator or a
> > utility like Omniflop.

No, almost no, and no. ;-)

AFAIK, there's no tools that can read/write raw CF drives in Winders, so 
drag-n-drop is out. Omniflop is only for floppy drives, so it's out...

... but ... Alert: Theoretical (and maybe Heretical ;-) stuff ahead!

However, with (maybe) some minor diddling of the .dsk files to extract 
*just the raw data*, one could use the dd command in Linux to write the 
multple "partitions of floppies" to a CF card that can be used in the 
SuperIDE. I do know that if you set up a CF card w/SuperIDE, you can copy 
it quite easily with DD and 2 CF readers... you'd need to know the offsets 
& whatnot for each "virtual floppy" but I believe it would be possible to 
backup/restore individual floppies.

[snip]

>BASIC ROMs?  If you have an old game cartridge you don't play (or which
>you can convert to a disk file) you might be able to remove the ROM and
>use that as a housing for your DriveWire EPROM.  You'd either need to
>find a 24-pin EPROM, which isn't so common anymore, or hack together a
>socket converter (which you can probably find instructions for on the
>Web or in mail list archives) to use a 28-pin EPROM in the cartridge PC
>board, which is intended for a 24-pin chip.

A lot of game carts didn't have DIL chips - just the bare IC bonded right 
to the PC board & a blob of potting material plopped right on top of 'er. 
IIRC my Downland cart is like that.

And: if you did find a 24-pin socket cart, you'd be limited to an 8K DOS 
without addition hackery to add one more address line from the cardedge to 
a 16K EPROM.

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Bugs of a feather flock together."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers |           Russell Nelson
zmerch at 30below.com          |