[Coco] Q: Burke & Burke hard disk controller

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

tonym wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
> Since ya mentioned the word Dragon....
> Are CoCo hardware expansions Dragon-compatible? ie, MPI, RS232Pak, etc...?

Everything I have tried has worked, I don't actually own an MPI or RS232 
pak, but I have the Speech/Sound cart and that works fine, so I don't 
see why the others would not.

The Orchesta-90 doesn't work because it's software driven, and since the
Dragon's rom is different to the CoCo, the entry points are different,
could be made to work if the rom was disassembled, and re-assembled for 
the Dragon tho.

Some game paks also work, some not, for the above reason, and if they 
directly read the keyboard, they work but since the CoCo and Dragon have 
different layouts some work but with odd keyboard layouts :)

> I thought I read somewhere, that there was a replacement ROM to use in CoCo FDC's, to
> allow them to work in the Dragon?

Yep I disassembled the SuperDos rom for the Dragon, and ported it to 
work with some minor restrictions on the RS controler, connected to a 
Dragon, primerally for the folks in the US who have Tano Dragons, since 
propper DragonDos carts are pretty rare in the US, but RS ones are much 
more common.

> Now, if older stuff works, what about newer stuff like C9's TC^3 / SuperIDE?
> NitrOS9? I see mention of Dragon in the source.....

Yeap it can also be compiled for the Dragon, which reminds me I must get 
round to checking the latest release and building a set of Dragon disks 
for that.

Cheers.

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.