[Coco] SuperIDE, compact flash, and Linux

[Rich Carreiro]

jorge_machin at hotmail.com (Jorge Renato Machin Ibarra) writes:

> > 2) Is the size of a HDB-DOS virtual floppy (as it is
> >   laid out on the CF card) always the same size, no
> >   matter how much or how little is on the floppy?
> >   If so (assume for now that size is 158K), can
> >   you backup/extract drive 10 (i.e. 11th floppy) with
> >      dd bs=158K if=/dev/whatever of=floppy10.dsk skip=10
> >   and can you restore/"mount" floppy #10 with
> >      dd bs=158K if=floppy10.dsk of=/dev/whatever seek=10
> > 
> 
> It works If you use the same disk format/geometry

How do you make sure you do that?  Also, what about the
other question?  Are the virtual floppies "full size"
no matter how little is on them?

> > 3) If you can do (2), can you do something like that to
> >    transfer a .dsk you downloaded (or created via an
> >    emulator or when using Rainbow IDE) onto the CF card?
> >    Or do those DSK files have "extra" stuff in that that's
> >    used by the emulators and cannot be used "as-is" by
> >    a real CoCo?  I've also notices that some DSK files I've
> >    seen online aren't the full 158K.
> 
> Yes

Given that you said you have to match the format/geometry, how do you
do this with random DSKs you download off the internet?

(And a sidebar to the fantastic Cloud-9 people -- if it is technically
possible, It would be cool if there could be a combined IDE/DriveWire
HDB-DOS that could talk to both virtual floppies on the IDE controller
and virtual floppies over the serial port so you could easily do
backups/transfers as native CoCo data directly between the CF and the
PC.)

--
Rich Carreiro                            rlcarr at rlcarr.com