[Coco] CoCo emulation on a Compaq Internet Appliance?

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Roger Taylor may have mentioned these words:

>I would absolutely crap a gold brick...

Well, that would pay for hosting for quite a while, wouldn't it???
;-)

>  if I can get this thing to read a USB floppy drive (from Keil's or JV's 
> emulator) since I have at least half of my CoCo stuff on 3.5's written 
> from a real CoCo.

There are USB drivers for DOS (that come with Norton Ghost) to run 
USB-based hard drives - I've never tried to see if they work with floppies 
as well, but it's worth a shot.

>With the BIOS reporting it can boot from Floppy A: or Hard Drive C:, and 
>knowing that there is NO floppy drive on the unit, it kinda sounds obvious 
>that it supports USB floppy drives BEFORE Windows takes over.

Not as obvious as you think, unforch. I've seen quite a few "Mostly" PC's 
where once they got the BIOS working for the chipset, they just left any 
"impossible" options there knowing those options would never get used anyway.

However, it's also possible that the motherboard may have lands for a 
floppy chipset/interface that aren't used on this particular run of 
machine... or it's also possible (but not probable) that the machine *has* 
all the hardware to run a floppy as they used a single run of motherboard 
for all their designs (some of the later JavaStations had IDE on the 
motherboard - add header & bigger PS & you had a full Sparc box) - but no 
provisions to bring the interface external.

I might be wrong, but for the vintage of the machine, there's nothing I can 
remember USB-based (remember, it was only 12Mbit at the time) that was 
considered bootable; all that was really available at the time was 
keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc. Even 10Mbit Ethernet took a while to get 
ported to USB.

What I can do is dig out the USB drivers I have with the (scant) 
documentation & email it when I get a chance...

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch at 30below.com

What do you do when Life gives you lemons,
and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????