[Coco] drivewire suggestions

[Aaron Wolfe]

There is really nothing CoCo centric in the DriveWire protocol for
disks.  The virtual serial portion does include a few OS9 specific
features, such as tracking some escape character settings in the SCF
driver and sending notifications of closed network connections that
are in turn used to send OS9 signals, but these do not have to be used
at all, or they could be used in another way on another platform quite
easily.

Changing the DriveWire 4 code to use a sector size other than 256
bytes is trivial.  I'll add a setting for sector size in the next
release.  As long as requests can be translated into a linear set of
logical sectors, and the total # of sectors will fit in 24 bits, I
would not expect any problems.

If someone creates a platform side interface for another system, I'll
make sure DriveWire supports it.

-Aaron


On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 9:54 PM, Bob Devries <devries.bob at gmail.com> wrote:
> As I understand it from reading the documents, the drivewire server currently only grabs 256 bytes when it is asked to get a sector. If the disk image is supposed to be based on 1024 byte sectors, then the server would need some kind of setting to select the sector size, or the client side would need to tell the server what size sectors it is expecting.
>
> Regards, Bob Devries
> Dalby, QLD, Australia
>
>  ----- Original Message -----
>  From: Steven Hirsch
>  To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
>  Sent: Friday, July 16, 2010 11:41 AM
>  Subject: Re: [Coco] drivewire suggestions
>
>
>  On Fri, 16 Jul 2010, Bob Devries wrote:
>
>  > [dons flame proof jacket]
>  >
>  > While I understand that the drivewire server was originally written
>  > exclusively for the Coco, it seems to me that it could be made more
>  > versatile if it were capable of handling disk images of various sector
>  > sizes.
>  >
>  > This would make it usable with other computers, provided that
>  > client-side drivers could be written for those computers.
>
>  I was thinking about what it would take to network an Apple IIe from DW.
>  The common super-serial card can do 57.6 k baud for sure and perhaps 115.
>  The IIGS should be capable of 230, since native localtalk transport
>  operates at that speed.
>
>  Something tells me that the game port on a IIe can be bit-banged
>  considerably faster, but it's been a while.
>
>  I think the sector size issue can be worked around with deblocking code in
>  the clientside driver.
>
>  Steve
>
>
>
>
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