[Coco] Help - CoCo emulator disk image formats...???

[Carey Eugene]

After shipping off my program collection to be disk imaged, I finally got to 
work on my own personal collection.

I have about 300 personal disks, but I'll probably only save half that.

I then spent a full day trying to get my 5.25" drive working again...  Due 
to a flaky drive cable, even the 3.5" wouldn't work for a while.  Finally it 
dawned on me...  I had gotten it working, but because the drive sits out of 
the case by an inch or so (it wont fit fully in the case), the room light 
was interfering with the LED to detect the index hole.  So after covering 
that up, the drive is now working again.  (I just thought I'd throw that in, 
in case anybody else ever has this problem and wants to throw the drive 
across the room.)

I had previously tried OmniFlop 2.01i, but it couldn't read my os9 disks. 
It said it was a new format.

That was a bit odd.  As near as I remember, when I set up my OS9 disks to 
use both sides, I just followed normal directions for setting double sided. 
I don't quite remember what they were since that was many years ago, but it 
wasn't anything unusual.

Anyway, I reported it and I've just downloaded 2.01j and it detects the 
format.  (the 2.01j isn't listed on the web page.  I just noticed it because 
of the online reg page.)

And I save it in .img or .dsk format, and the old dos based msdos<->OS9 
transfer program can read the disk images.  At least it'll show the 
directory contents.

But the disk images don't work under the CoCo emulators.  Neither the old 
Jeff V. emulator nor Mess seems to like the disk format.

I played around with most of the disk formats that omniflop can do:  img, 
dsk, chs, hcs, fea, etc.

None of them work properly under mess.  A couple will show the 'DOS BOOTING' 
notice, but that's all.  Nothing else happens.

Soooo.... what disk image format am I supposed to use for emulators?

I even thought that maybe my old OS9 boot disk that I used was patched or 
configured in such a way that MESS didn't like it.  But trying two others 
didn't help.

I remember way back when I last messed with my OS9 stuff, there was a bit of 
confusion then about how to handle double sided OS9 disks.  Looks like it's 
biting me again.





(I was a bit surprised that omniflop didn't recognize my os9 dsdd disks.  To 
my knoweldge, they are just standard dsdd 360k os9 disks.  But apparently 
not, because omniflop couldn't recognise them.  They are certainly different 
from the NitrOS9 disk format.  [shrug])