[Coco] Midwest Gaming Classic (was) MicroSD Drive Pak

Darren A mechacoco at gmail.com
Sat Mar 13 10:12:35 EST 2010


On 3/13/10, Steve Bjork wrote:
>
> At the time Sands of Egypt was written, Tandy did not allow the use of
> ROM calls to talk to the floppy drive. The word was Disk Basic would
> have an update and the location of key disk I/O subroutines could move.
> As you know, the code did move around a bit from version 1.0 and 1.1.
>

That doesn't sound like a reasonable explanation.  All Disk Basic
versions (even 1.0) had a table at the start of the ROM containing the
address of the Disk I/O subroutine as well as the location in RAM
where its parameter block resides.  This technique was common for ROM
code (and also used in the Color and Extended Basic ROMs to provide
indirect entry points to the publicly documented routines).

I suspect that the desire to implement copy-protection features in
some of DataSoft's products was  a more likely reason to develop an
independent driver.

Darren



More information about the Coco mailing list