[Coco] Drivewire help needed

[Roger Taylor]

At 04:45 PM 10/18/2010, you wrote:
>Strange that I've never seen these messages before today. Nothing 
>ever showed up in that log window before.
>
>Would you happen to know why drivewire wouldn't load games like 
>Zenix (just goes to a black screen and nothing) or any game that 
>uses a "DOS" command. I get an OS9 boot prompt but again, it just 
>freezes the coco or hangs even though all these games work fine under VCC.



One major problem the CoCo world has had to deal with for years is 
the lack of unique filename extensions for the various virtual disk 
formats.  All authors went right for the ".dsk" extension without 
hesitation, claiming it as their own.  Even the old DSHRINK.BIN 
program (a floppy disk archiver) stores disks into a filename ending 
with ".dsk", but it was the first and should really be the only 
format stored using the .dsk extension.  Not the case.

I think disk images should be renamed to .dmk, .jvc, .os9, .vhd, 
etc.   It's really a huge mess.  Somehow you're supposed to look at a 
.dsk file and determine by the naked eye what programs can read/write 
to it.  Luckily, if you see one that's 158k in size, that's a 
standard 35-track 1:1 sector data format disk, and the most common 
and compatible disk.


-- 
~ Roger Taylor