[Coco] A little help with DriveWire

[Marcus Vinicius Garrett Chiado]

Boisy Pitre wrote:
1) What kind of image files could I make available with DriveWire to my
CoCo?

Any CoCo disk image with a .DSK extension should work.

OK, thank you, Boisy, I´m gonna start looking for these.


3) Are there games that run "directly", I mean, without the need of typing
DOS command lines? Like, for instance, Karateka (Apple II) and The Goonies
(Atari)? - not these games, only the way they run.

At the very least, CoCo games will require you to type DOS to start. Some
games will not work with DriveWire since they talk directly to disk
controller hardware. Sundog games are famous for this. All BASIC games and
most M/L games do work with DriveWire though.

I see. They won´t work with DriveWire, OK, but at least could they be
"sector copied" to actual floppies? What are M/L games? MultiLoad? Actually
I want to check the following games out: Thexder, Rad Warrior, Rampage,
Koronis Rift, Arkanoid and Leisure Suit Larry. In the other hand, I also
want to check CoCo´s exclusive games as well.


4) Does the "file" games (more than 1 game per disk side) run mostly under
DOS or OS-9?

OS-9. Now there is a very important caveat here. OS-9 based games will only
work with DriveWire IF the boot disk contains a DriveWire device driver and
descriptor by default. This isn't the case with OS-9 disk images out there.
They all assume the main device is a floppy disk drive. Patching these disks
would require making a new bootfile (a bit of work).

For now, I would say try the Disk BASIC games and get comfortable using them
with DriveWire.

OK. What about that EPROM that will be installed into my disk drive
interface?  Does it work as this "boot disk"?

Thank you!!!