[Coco] Drive Wire

[Boisy Pitre]

Marcus,

You're right.  There are a few other games besides PitStop II that  
exhibit this behavior.  (Glen Dahlgren's games I think?)

My point is that DriveWire isn't to blame here... the authors of the  
games in question are.  Either out of a lack of foresight, ignorance  
or ego, they chose to write their own disk I/O routines that talked  
directly to floppy hardware.  Hey, it worked at the time because all  
there was then was the floppy controller.  Today, with other storage  
options available, people discover that these games don't work.  The  
fact of the matter is that these authors designed their software to  
be tethered to hardware that is now obsolete and hard to find.

This may read like a "don't blame me" message, but in this case, it's  
truly justified.

Boisy

On May 31, 2007, at 9:50 AM, Marcus Vinicius Garrett Chiado wrote:

> I copied at least two PitStop II image files to actual floppies, via
> DriveWire, and then tried to load both. Unfortunately, it didn´t work
> either.
>
> :-(
>
>
>
> 2007/5/31, Boisy Pitre <boisy at boisypitre.com>:
>> Steve,
>>
>> Thanks for the kind words.  Actually, it's a shame that PitStop II
>> doesn't work with DriveWire, not the other way around.  For whatever
>> reason, some game designers chose to ignore Tandy's strong
>> recommendations to stay within the guidelines and use DSKCON for disk
>> I/O.  Had they done that, then they would have worked with DriveWire
>> without any reservations.
>>
>> It would be valuable if someone could get these games to use the
>> DSKCON routine instead of their own custom WD1793 disk controller  
>> code.
>>
>> Boisy
>
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Boisy G. Pitre
Email: boisy at boisypitre.com
Web: http://www.boisypitre.com/
Phone: 337-781-3570