[Coco] MicroSD Drive Pak

[Roger Taylor]

Progress report on the Drive Pak:

Ok, Sean Noonan is to be the first recipient of a 2GB MicroSD Drive 
Pak which is going out tomorrow morning.  He's going to demo it at 
some computer show so I encouraged him to post his feedback here on 
the list soon.

I'm waiting on the new cases with slots to arrive soon.  The other 
boards will be here in less than a week.

Sooner or later I need to make more sales in order to maintain my 
orders for the modules that I solder to the board.  All other parts 
are well in stock.  I think I have 20 pending orders which I'll try 
to knock out 2 or 3 per day, if that gives you an idea of when your 
pak is coming.

It's been a long ride on this big project and getting the CoCoNet ROM 
ready to drop in a Drive Pak or Wireless Pak (or any 28-pin socketed 
pak for that matter).

I think the whole CoCoNet thing might be confusing to some, so I 
wanted to explain it a little better:

Just get the ROM in some pak of yours and you'll get any mix or match 
of 6551 drives, bitbanger drives, FDC drives, and Drive Pak drives, 
with DRIVE 0 being automatically assigned the most likely primary 
system depending on what paks you have inserted.  You get real disks 
and virtual disks any way the system detects you can support them.

The Drive Pak has a bootable copy of NitrOS-9 on it, but I'm working 
to move it off of a 1.4m floppy image to a 30mb image to stock with 
lots of goodies.
The 6551-bootable copy of NitrOS-9 is being examined by Robert Gault 
at this time in hopes to expand it to 30mb as well and go from there.

If you've never turned on a CoCo and booted into NitrOS-9 over the 
air using only a small game-pak sized cartridge and no wires 
whatsoever, you're in for a treat.

mix or match (only one pak needs the CoCoNet ROM):
Drive Pak w/CoCoNet ROM
Wireless Pak w/CoCoNet ROM
EPROM Pak w/CoCoNet ROM
your own pak w/CoCoNet ROM

CoCoNet 1.0 will probably get some feedback for improvements, and 
I'll keep improving the client/server features over time, as well as 
add more Drive Pak features.

How can you load your own stuff on a Drive Pak?  For one, you can use 
a bitbanger cable and just mount the PC-hosted disks you want to copy 
to the pak.  BACKUP # TO #.  Done.
-- 
~ Roger Taylor