[Coco] COCO to PC transfer and Using VCC

[J.P. Samson]

On Sep 11, 2008, at 11:39 AM, Allan Chaney wrote:
> Thanks for the info on Drivewire.  I'm going to give it a try.

DriveWire certainly is a very elegant, inexpensive solution.  Again,  
it'll only work for transferring non-copy protected disks that use the  
standard Disk Color BASIC format.  Also, when running programs from a  
Windows PC file server on the CoCo, the programs must use the standard  
disk I/O routines; some assembly programmers chose to write their own  
disk access routines, and these tend to break DriveWire.

There are a few other potential gotchas I'll warn you about from my  
own experience with the product:

1.  DriveWire comes with a floppy disk used to patch Disk BASIC to  
create the DriveWire DOS.  This requires you have an unaltered Disk  
BASIC ROM in your disk controller as the source.  A number of my disk  
controllers have altered ROM's to support double-sided disk drives.   
The DriveWire patch rejected these ROM's.

When the patching is finished, you'll have a DriveWire DOS diskette.   
When you power up the CoCo, you simply load and execute the DriveWire  
DOS program from the disk.  Simple as that.  If you ask Mark Marlette  
at Cloud 9 (the DriveWire vendor), they can also burn you an EPROM  
with the DriveWire DOS on it to insert in your disk controller--that  
makes it faster to boot into DriveWire.

2.  I've had great success with using USB-to-Serial adapters on a  
Windows PC, but not so on a Mac.  (In fact, I've only ever gotten  
DriveWire to half work on a Mac.)  It has been recommended to me that  
you avoid USB adapters with the Prolific chipset (which you'll find in  
just about every cheap USB adapter out there).  Instead, try to find  
one with an FTDI chipset.  For example, cable 'N' from this catalog  
page:
http://www.mouser.com/catalog/635/32.pdf

3.  One annoying thing with DriveWire DOS is that it runs your CoCo in  
double-speed mode (for faster serial I/O).  You have to remember to do  
a POKE 65496,0 after loading a CoCo I/II game to slow down the CPU.   
If the binary is auto-executing, well, then I guess you are stuck  
running the game in double-speed mode!

> The game that was published by Sundog Systems did contain copy  
> protection on
> the Player Disk side.  The City disk side of the floppy has not copy
> protection.  And of course I have a copy of the commercial version.   
> But I
> also have all of my unprotected copies with 5 years worth of  
> versions as I
> worked on the game.  Luckily I kept my final disks in a zip lock bag  
> along
> with the commercial version and the manual.  That really helped  
> preserve the
> disks.

It'll be good to have authentic, unprotected disks of the game.  That  
makes it so much easier to preserve the game (i.e. transfer onto new  
media) into the future.

The scans of the game manual will also be essential, given the  
complexity of the game. As I mentioned, I was sequentially hitting  
keys trying to figure out what they did!

I personally try to scan at 300 dpi for color, 600 dpi for black &  
white text.  I also prefer to retain lossless images.  I can then use  
these images as sources to create, say, compressed PDF's.  In the  
future, as document formats improve, one can then reuse the sources.   
It seems a good way to future proof one's archiving work.

-- JP