[Coco] Hello and a few questions

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 18 December 2009, Louis Ciotti wrote:
>Hello all, new the the list, and I have just obtained a coco2 to play
>around with.  The COCO 2 was my first computer, and still have my old
>floppy disk from back then.  I currently do not have a floppy drive
>for it, and have not seen any up for sale (yet), but I am still
>looking.  In the mean time, I have a few questions:
>
>Has anyone built up a controller that will work with IBM type drives?
>5 1/4 IBM drive are easily obtainable, and this would be a perfect
>solution for me.
>
Generally speaking they will all work under nitros9/os9.  The drives are, 
again generally speaking, all IBM compatible.  For full control of a 
multidrive setup, you will need to replace the drives connectors on the cable 
with versions that have a full complement of contacts, replacing those on the 
stock cable that have missing contacts, or were using the twisted cable 
method of accessing the 2nd drive as all drives were then programmed to be 
drive 1's back then, but were jumper correctable, or even with modern 
3.5"drives, could be sold bridged to be drive zero.  The most recent 3.5" I 
bought, I have not been able to grok to change that so its currently in use 
as drive 1.

>I am considering building up a Controller card using some schematics I
>found of a controller card dated 7-19-1983, 

26-number please?

>and making updates as
>needed to the parts that are available.  Looking at the schematics
>however there seems to be an error.  U7 is listed as an 74ls02, but
>has two different gate symbols.  Am I misreading the schematic?  If I
>do this, is it possible to burn a Disk Extended Color Basic Rom?

Yes, but a more capable version to burn would be HDB-DOS, which you can get 
from Mark at cloud-9.  He can also supply several hard drive controllers at 
reasonable cost. See 
<.http://www.frontiernet.net/~mmarlette/Cloud-9/index.html>
I have one of his TC^3, scsi controllers with HDB-DOS in it, it works fine.
A better thought might be the IDE controller plus the CF adapter, giving you 
the size of the CF card plugged in for storage, 512 megs shown.

That, combined with the drivewire package that allows the coco to access a 
pc's hard drive for its storage requirements would be a good solution.

I don't think there are any WD1773's for the FDC controller left in the 
supply lines, so the smart people here have been busy making it possible to 
use something else that looks like a floppy drive to the coco.

Good luck!

>Lou
>
>--
>Coco mailing list
>Coco at maltedmedia.com
>http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>


-- 
Cheers, Gene
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