[Coco] DriveWire

[Boisy Pitre]

On Mar 6, 2009, at 12:43 PM, Ryan Pritchard wrote:

> Boisy,
>
> These responses from you and Robert are very informational.  Now I  
> have a
> couple of questions.
>
> You have DriveWire 3 HDB-DOS ROM Pak available (and if I recall  
> correctly
> had a DriveWire 2 ROM Pak previously).
> When you say ROM Pak are you saying a board with a ROM on it?
> Or are you meaning a ROM that fits into say... an existing 26-3029  
> FDC ROM
> socket?

The ROM Pak is just that.. a ROM Pak.  It has a socket and an EPROM  
burned with HDB-DOS for DriveWire 3.  You could remove the EPROM from  
the pak and put it in a disk controller.

> I am contemplating the idea of getting the TC^3 SCSI Controller or the
> SuperIDE Interface.  It looks like I could definitely use the TC^3  
> SCSI
> Controller on a Y Cable with my 26-3029 FDC.  It also seems that I  
> may be
> able to use the SuperIDE Interface on a Y Cable, provided I either  
> disable
> the SuperIDE flash ROM or have the 26-3029 ROM disabled and an  
> equivalent
> ROM (DriveWire HDB-DOS) loaded in the SuperIDE flash ROM.  It would  
> seem I
> could then keep my physical floppy drives accessible.

Absolutely.  You can download the newly available ROMs from our  
website and flash them into one of the banks of the SuperIDE.

> Remaining concern for me is that I own a CoCo 1 and unless you provide
> DriveWire 2 still and my above presumptions are correct, there is no  
> easy
> way for me to have access to virtual disk images, and physyical floppy
> drives and possible physical hard drives (or Zip drive).

I'm working on that and should have something to report before long.

>
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Boisy Pitre <boisy at tee-boy.com>  
> wrote:
>
>> On Mar 6, 2009, at 7:59 AM, Robert Gault wrote:
>>
>> Boisy Pitre wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Mar 5, 2009, at 9:33 PM, Ryan Pritchard wrote:
>>>> <snip>
>>>>
>>>>> Now where I get lost is that with DriveWire 2 you indicate I  
>>>>> could boot
>>>>> strap NitrOS-9 from a DriveWire virtual drive.  Isn't the  
>>>>> NitrOS-9 Level
>>>>> 1
>>>>> boot diskette either 2 5.25" disks or 1 3.5" disk, since you only
>>>>> include
>>>>> one disk image for NitrOS-9 I presume you are loading the larger  
>>>>> disk
>>>>> image.
>>>>> Does NitroOS-9 support for DriveWire allow for larger disk images?
>>>>> whereby
>>>>> the virtual drives look like larger Hard Drives?
>>>>>
>>>> Yes, that is correct. Under NitrOS-9, you can format a DriveWire  
>>>> disk as
>>>> large as RBF will allow (4GB)
>>>>
>>>> <snip>
>>>
>>> Ryan, I'm not so sure that Boisy answered your question completely.
>>>
>>> NitrOS-9 has a module in the kernel on track 34 called Boot. This  
>>> module
>>> is by default hard coded to read floppies. If you want to boot  
>>> from a real
>>> hard drive via a scsi or ide interface or from a virtual hard  
>>> drive via
>>> DriveWire, the boot module must be replaced with a special one to  
>>> access the
>>> correct hardware. This is done for you (I think) by Cloud-9 when you
>>> purchase their products.
>>> The size of the drive where the main NitrOS-9 system is installed,  
>>> is not
>>> dependent on the interface that talks to the drive as much as it  
>>> depends on
>>> the actual OS-9 / NitrOS-9 software. The size of a disk is stored  
>>> on the
>>> disk's first sector in 3 bytes indicating total sectors, DD.TOT.  
>>> So you are
>>> limited to $FFFFFF sectors. The sectors don't need to be 256 bytes
>>> (standard) but that is still 4GB.
>>>
>>> So when booting via DriveWire or an IDE or SCSI system, you will  
>>> still use
>>> a floppy. The floppy can be a virtual floppy in which case it is a  
>>> 35 track
>>> single sided image containing only the kernel on T17 and the  
>>> os9Boot file.
>>> You can get a feel for this with several emulators using RGBDOS for
>>> emulators. Both the emulator version of RGBDOS and HDBDOS derive  
>>> from the
>>> same RGBDOS sold with KEN-TON SCSI hard drive systems for the Coco.
>>>
>>
>> Robert,
>>
>> Thanks for the in-depth explanation.  Ryan, Robert is right.  A  
>> boot module
>> for DriveWire exists to get the bootfile from the DriveWire server  
>> and
>> bootstrap into NitrOS-9.  The NitrOS-9 disk image that will be  
>> supplied over
>> the weekend will have all of this set up.  You would simply mount  
>> the disk
>> image in the drive, bring up your CoCo into HDB-DOS and type DOS,  
>> then the
>> booting would commence.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Regards,
>
> Ryan Pritchard
> Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
>
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