[Coco] DriveWire

[Steven Hirsch]

On Sat, 7 Mar 2009, Boisy Pitre wrote:

> On Mar 7, 2009, at 8:38 AM, Robert Gault wrote:
>
>>> ?? Why not?  I use DriveWire on my CoCo 3 alongside an IDE hard disk and a 
>>> floppy.  This is under OS-9.
>> 
>> Your comparing apples and oranges. Boisy might explain this better but here 
>> goes.
>> 
>> Under OS-9, there should be two drivers on the boot disk one for the IDE 
>> and one for DriveWire. That means when you try to access your Coco IDE 
>> drive, the signal flows through an interface/controller in your MPI. When 
>> you try to access your PC, the signal flows through the bit-banger port via 
>> DriveWire.
>> Under Disk Basic HDBDOS, there is not room in ROM for more than one driver. 
>> It will be one of the following, scsi, ide, or DriveWire. (Boisy may have 
>> found a way to fit both scsi and ide.) So there is no way to access both a 
>> ide hard drive and a PC .vhd drive from a single ROM image under Disk 
>> Basic. You can access the floppies on the Coco while HDBDOS accesses the 
>> PC for drives 4 and up but that is a different issue.
>
>
> Right.  Just to clarify Steve, you can do this under NitrOS-9 because of the 
> extensible nature of the OS and its access to memory resources.  On the Disk 
> BASIC side, under HDB-DOS, it's:
>
> 	FLOPPY AND (IDE OR SCSI OR DriveWire)
>
> Someone (Frank?) posted the other day a wishlist, one item being using all 
> these devices under HDB-DOS at once.  It cannot be done under the current ROM 
> size limitations that we have to work with, or without expanding the syntax 
> of the existing HDB-DOS commands.

Ok, missed that qualifier.  I know almost nothing about HDBDOS and rarely 
use it.


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