[Coco] A little help with DriveWire

[Marcus Vinicius Garrett Chiado]

Boisy, can you copy disk images from the host PC to a CoCo floppy, say by
using DECB's BACKUP command using DriveWire? The DriveWire documentation on
the Cloud 9 site doesn't mention one way or the other whether the BACKUP
command works. I believe Marcus mentioned in an earlier post that he is
getting a disk system. If this works, then he
can run his OS-9 and Sundog (etc) games from a real floppy disk.

> Yes, BACKUP does work. Insert the floppy disk in CoCo drive 0, and
> insert the virtual disk in virtual drive 0 on the server. Type the
> following commands:
>
> DRIVE ON
> BACKUP 0 TO 1
>
> The above commands make DriveWire's drive 0 active, and backs up the
> disk in drive 0 to the disk in drive 1. Keep in mind that a single
> disk image under DriveWire has 256 'virtual' disks. So we are
> backing up the disk onto the same virtual file on the PC.
>
> Now insert a blank floppy into drive 0 and type:
>
> DRIVE OFF 0
> DSKINI 0
> BACKUP 1 TO 0
>
> That will backup the disk in virtual drive 1 onto the floppy disk in
> drive 0.
>
> Hope this isn't too confusing.


Totally cool! That´s exactly what I want. Besides DriveWire, I also bought a
complete disk drive system (including an EPROM that will be installed into
the disk drive interface, according to Mark). My original idea is:

1) Load a desired image (game) into CoCo´s virtual drive on the PC. Let´s
say, the game Thexder.
2) Insert a blank disk into CoCo´s actual disk drive unit.
3) Sector copy Thexder to the actual disk, thus copying it from the PC.
4) Run Thexder from the actual disk.

Keep in mind, my friends, I´ve got not a single CoCo actual floppy to play
with. Zero.

:-(

I´m used to Atari 8 Bit machines and their SIO2PC (and APE) system. SIO2PC
is as easy to use as it gets. In order to copy a game (let´s say an .ATR
image), one only needs to load a sector copier like MyCopyR! or Copy 2000
directly from APE (virtual drive), load the game image into virtual drive 1,
insert a blank disk into a real Atari disk drive (configured as drive 2) and
press START. And that is all. The copy process is fast and straightforward,
pretty much like Apple II´s Locksmith copier.