[Coco] dw 3

[Frank Pittel]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 01:49:03AM -0500, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> >
> > 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 :)

After sending this email I saw your post about how dw4 will allow copying from
one .dsk image to another directly. That is truely an amazing capability and a
major leap forward. I'm intersted in how I would copy a file from say virtual
disk 1 on a given .dsk file to virtual disk 30 on another. From the syntax I saw
in your example I get the impression I could only copy from say virtual disk 1
in a .dsk image to another virtual disk 1 on another .dsk image. I hope I'm
making sense.

I think a big part of the problem is that we're all using the same words to mean
different things and different words to mean the same thing and that's confusing
all of us. :-) As a Unix sys admin I've found over the years in order to have a
technical conversation we all need to agree on the meaning of words, terms and
language. :-) Is it to late to agree on the meaning of terms and words. :-) It
may speed things along.

> 
> > 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:

I understand it's a limitation of the underlying premise of the "rsdos" that
hdbdos is an extention of. I don't think many people in those days would have
believed people would be connection (or wanting to connect) terrabyte sized
harddrives and gigabyte sized flash memory card to a coco!!


> 
> 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.

Do I lose programs in ram at the time I make the switch? I keep the hdbdos
images in the flash images in the superide card and can "fire them up" at will.
 
> 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 :)

I have a 256meg CF card split between os9 and hdbdos and spent some time trying
to figure out how to access the hdbdos "virtual disks" on the CF card from os9
but quickly got confused and the got a headache just before giving up. I also
didn't spend a lot of time trying and I may be making it harder then it really
is.

Alas, the reason I want to be able to access drivewire and my CF card at the
same time is so I can copy files between my CF card and .dsk files on my pc via
drivewire. Having to go through floppies is a pain but it works. One of these
days I'm going to spend some time learning how to work with toolshed so I can
use that. I'd also like to spend some time working with the ramdrive that I seem
to remember is included with hdbdos. If that doesn't get destroyed when
switching from the ide version of hdbdos to drivewire that may be a solution.


The Other Frank