[Coco] dw 3

[Aaron Wolfe]

>
> My thoughts exactly. A lot of this is possible via toolshed but it would be
> nice. :-) While I'm dreaming (:-)) it would be nice to be able use the ide

I think this is already all possible using the dw4 mode.  If it is
not, I will do everything I can to make it possible and easy for you,
but I need to understand what is desired.  I am struggling here :)

> or scsi version of hdbdos and still have access to drivewire disks. Alas, I've
> mentioned that to Boisy and his response was along the line of no way, ain't
> happening. (then he spent the next 15min going into painful detail on why it
> couldn't happen.) I'm sure I'll be set straight if I'm wrong but the primary
> issue had to do with the size of the rom. My contention is that a coco3 comes
> with 128K of ram with only 64K available directly via rs/hdb dos. The superide
> comes with 4 virtual roms and the ability to access 256 "floppies" or more
>  directly from a CF card. I often think that with creative page switching of ram
> that it can all be loaded in ram and the drivewire/ide/scsi parts of the code
> switched in and out as needed. Of course as time goes on when using my actual
> coco at home I tend to use drivewire and when away from home the CF card so it's
> more of a hassle then anything.
>

This is a limitation, but there are ways to deal with it.  What I do
with the SuperIDE is to put HDBDOS for harddrives in rom slot 0 and
HDBDOS for DriveWire in slot 3.  On power up, we are in hard drive
mode.  I have a tiny basic program on disk 0 of the DECB partition on
the CF card that switches to the HDBDOS for DW:

10 poke &hff59,3
20 poke 113,0
30 dload

Now, if I want to use DW in OS9, I just power on and type DOS.. my OS9
system loads off the superide's CF card and loads the DW drivers.  If
I want to use DW in BASIC (or boot OS9 from DW), i power on and type:
RUN"DW"  (the program above).  The ROM is switched to HDBDOS/DW and
the coco resets instantly.  Ready to go in DW mode.

The only situation this doesn't allow is copying from drivewire disks
to superIDE/cf disks in BASIC.  In OS9, you can do this easily.  There
is a way to mount your DECB disk partition under OS9 and then copy the
DriveWire disks to CF slots, which would solve the problem if I could
figure out how to make that trick work :)


> The Other Frank
>
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