[Coco] Using a Coco without a floppy drive - what are the options ?

[Joel Ewy]

Steve.Lancaster at Moorestephens.com wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I am waiting delivery of my first ever Coco. I intend on using it, in the 
> first instance, mainly for games but will then proceed to find out more 
> what the machine can do.
>
> Although I have drives (3.5 and 5.25) for a BBC Master - I am aware that 
> it is possible to use the Coco without a floppy.
>
> What are the general options available - I am aware of the following
>
> 1) Drive Wire
> 2) CF Interface
> 3) Super IDE 
> 4) Hard drives
>
>   
Don't forget the cassette port.  CD players and .mp3 players make nice
cassette surrogates.  Someone on this list (was it Roger Taylor?) has
had good success with a Sony Mini-Disc player.  You can also use a PC
soundcard on the cassette to make a (slow) poor-man's DriveWire.  You
may even be able to record straight to a portable digital audio recorder
if it has an appropriate input jack, or if you hack it.  (Some of them
are getting cheap enough one might even consider doing this.)  That way
you can save your cassette or cartridge games.
Cassette port I/O is slow, but the digital options probably do add
overall reliability, plus easy back-up to PC.  I've used a USB .mp3
player.  It's nice to have USB-based portable storage for the CoCo. 
There are a lot of .cas files floating around out there, which can be
turned to .wav or even compressed formats, if you don't let the audio
quality get too low.
One caveat -- unless you hack your player you may have trouble with some
programs that need to pause the cassette player before loading more
data.  I had this problem with "The Glove."  It tries to pause the
cassette after loading each level, but it had no way to pause my .mp3
player.  I couldn't get it to load properly till I put it on floppy.
Still, if you already have at least a PC with a sound card and some
audio cables, there's probably no cheaper way to get programs onto the
CoCo.  Though almost anything else is faster.
> What experience of these options do you fellow Coco users have and in 
> general, what is the best option taking into considration ease of use and 
> cost.
>
>   
Well, if you are talking about file transfer between PC and CoCo, I
think DriveWire is about the only solution (aside from cassette, as
mentioned above.)  There's been some discussion with Marcus about this
in this list over the last few days.  Briefly, while hard drives and CF
cards (which act just like IDE drives) are physically compatible between
PC and CoCo, there doesn't appear to be any good way to use them to copy
data between the two systems.  All the file transfer programs seem to be
floppy-specific.  Cloud9 can supply you with HDB-DOS (a modified version
of Disk BASIC) which can access floppy disk images hosted on the PC over
the DriveWire interface.  There are also HDB-DOS versions that use a
hard drive interface (Disto, Glenside IDE, Cloud-9 SuperIDE, and others)
to provide multiple floppy images (<=255 virtual floppy drives, I think)
under Disk BASIC, and/or proper large file systems under (Nitr)OS-9. 
What's not clear to me is whether the DriveWire version of HDB-DOS and
the real hard drive version of HDB-DOS are interoperable.  Can one copy
files from a PC over DriveWire to a real hard drive / CF card using
HDB-DOS?  If not, then you could probably use the cassette interface as
a temporary buffer for moving files onto permanent CoCo storage.
I used a 40M MFM hard drive with an Adaptec SCSI controller and a Disto
4-in-one SCSI host adaptor with a CoCo 3 repackaged in a mini tower case
for years until the hard drive finally crapped out.  I used it only for
OS-9.  I bought a Glenside IDE interface at a CoCo Fest in '99 or so,
but haven't gotten it hooked up yet.  Pretty soon I'm going to get a
copy of HDB-DOS from Cloud-9 and get it running again using either an
old IDE hard drive, or a CF card w/ adaptor.
> Also, does a system like MMC exist for a Coco ? (I already have a GoMMC 
> for the BBC and MMC64 for the Commodore 64). I suspect that the CF 
> Interface is similar, however.
>
>   
As far as I know, nobody's done this yet.  The MMC/SD uses a serial
interface.  There is a project that provides some information about the
physical interfacing ( http://uanr.com/sdfloppy/ ) but CoCo software
would have to be cooked up to make this work.  Actually, CF works quite
differently (at least as used on the CoCo).  CF cards, as I mentioned
above, can be interfaced to the IDE bus, and respond to ATAPI commands,
just like a hard drive.  With a simple adaptor (which does little more
than hook CF signals to appropriate pins on the IDE bus) this will work
on any computer that has an IDE interface.  The only way to use a CF
card on a CoCo that I'm aware of is to hook it up to an IDE interface. 
Cloud-9's SuperIDE has, in addition to a regular 40-pin IDE interface, a
CF socket on the side of the PC board, which eliminates the need for a
separate adaptor, and would make a very tidy little mass-storage
solution for the CoCo.

One thing about CF in IDE mode -- used this way, it doesn't support hot
plugging.  So on the CoCo, CF is not really a removable medium, in the
sense of a floppy, CD, or USB memory stick.  That's why I think that an
SD/MMC interface for the CoCo would be a nice complement to CF --
especially if the CoCo software could read and write CoCo floppy disk
image files on a DOS FAT file system on the MMC card.  Then it would
make a nice replacement for the floppy drive, and it could also be used
to transfer disk images to and from the PC.

JCE
> Best wishes
> Steve
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