[Coco] CoCoNet status

[Roger Taylor]

At 06:34 PM 11/8/2009, you wrote:
>I don't have a multipak.  In addition, I want to keep using my
>floppies for RSDOS and booting my floppies for NitrosO9.  How can I
>use my floppies and use Roger's pak at the same time?

A Y-Cable?  All ROMs would have to be disabled except for the one in 
either of my paks.  Only one pak needs the CoCoNet/DECB ROM in 
it.  It handles real 1793 floppies, MicroSD floppies, 115200 bps 
bitbanger floppies, and 115200 ACIA floppies at the same time.  Even 
with an MPI, only one pak needs the ROM in it.



>   There seems to
>be many talented hardware guys in our community, why don't we have a
>replacement for the multipak?
>   I'd like to have a hard drive (for
>NitrosO9 AND my floppies AND Roger's pak and a real serial  port and a
>parallel port (I've got a mint HP Laserjet 4 I'm dying to get working
>with my coco and a serial modem I'd like to hook up and run a REAL
>coco BBS).  I am really hankering after Roy's VGA converter too.  I'm
>looking at the prices of these things (pak, hd, vga) and I'm looking
>at $300+ (and that's not counting the serial/parallel pak (which
>doesn't exist either)).  I want to buy things from Cloud Nine and Roy
>and Roger but I just don't have the cash right now.  And even if I had
>the cash, I wouldn't have a multipak to plug the stuff into.  I don't
>even think you can buy a fracking Y cable these days. Hardware people
>- build the MP replacement so I can plug the hardware in.


I'm trying to eliminate the need for these hard-to-get devices. It's 
time to emulate or eliminate the dying peripherals.

I do realize there is a chicken-and-egg problem for some users 
depending on what all they're trying to do.  There's ways to get some 
programs into the CoCo.  I can take a bare CoCo and CLOAD or CLOADM 
programs from my laptop using the cocotape.exe utility.  Look in the 
Rainbow IDE menu and you'll find the DLOAD command which should let 
you DLOAD stuff into your CoCo 1 or 2 over a bitbanger cable.  If you 
could somehow get Boisy's DW3 patches into Disk BASIC, perhaps you 
would then be able to save your real disks over to the PC in an 
archive, then once you get a virtual drive system like my pak, you 
could copy them back over without even needing your floppy controller 
plugged in.

Sometimes a little creativity can be used to achieve some of the 
things that seem to baffle most newbies and some oldie users who 
never had a need to look into this stuff before... getting your real 
disks or real hard drive backed up on your PC so you can copy them 
back to digital drives on the CoCo.  But then, until a 1793-emulating 
virtual drive pak is made, some stuff won't run from a virtual drive system.

Btw, the original "8K" CoCoNet would run as a patch you could install 
at run-time if you wanted just by LOADMing it into an All-RAM mode 
CoCo 1/2 or any CoCo 3.  Now it runs only from ROM because it's 16K 
and works with any CoCo automatically.

There will be a lot of ebay CoCo hunters who just want to run a bunch 
of games/apps and get OS-9 all on a mini pak.  I've targeted that 
group of CoCo users who won't be so lucky to find an MPI, real drive 
system, or hard drive, etc.  My little scheme as been well thought 
out but long coming, starting with things like CCASM, Portal-9 IDE, 
Rainbow IDE, which paved the way for me to develop with light speed 
compared to the old ways.

I get criticism sometimes for some of the features of CCASM, but I 
can tell you this, if we had that kind of assembly power back in the 
80's, things would have been much different for the CoCo 3.  We never 
saw it's full potential, mainly because of the size limit of floppy 
disks and the inability to make huge programs that loaded into 
extended RAM by using the standard LOADM.

Now, with something like a flash pak or MicroSD pak, you could create 
a bunch of 256-disk partitions and use some for data logging, some 
that could very well contain massive games taking up hundreds of 
disks, and distribute such a game or app as a partition file that a 
user could install.  I realize that not many people will enjoy cool 
stuff like this, but whoever wants to can come to me for a rather 
simple solution.

I've also targeted the 6809 embedded users who want to take an 
otherwise junk CoCo 1, 2, or 3 board, plug in a pak and turn the 
board into a super smart embedded computer.  All those ports on the 
back would be wide-open for the real world, with a mini pak 
containing NitrOS-9 and hundreds of floppy and hard drives on a 
pinky-nail sized memory card.  Data logging would be the simplest use 
that comes to mind.  Robotics is a more creative idea.


-- 
~ Roger Taylor