[Coco] Drivewire VHD's

[Aaron Wolfe]

Maybe I am the odd man out, but I find these massive collections of
hundreds of disks into a single file very inconvenient.  No matter how
good a job the indexer/organizer does of documenting the contents (and
often it's not a very good job at all) you still end up having to
search through the thing to really figure out what is what.  Then you
have the challenge of bringing the one or two things you want out of
this monster image into your actual working environment, which
depending on your setup can be non trivial.

To me, it would serve much better to keep each disk (or each program
at least, in the case of a software that uses multiple disks)
separate.  That's not to say you couldn't still organize things, but
packaging the actual disks together into a big image containing lots
of different software doesn't seem like a good technique.  Using
simple directories or better yet web pages describing the content
would be more useful.

Curtis Boyle's CoCo games page is a great example of "doing it right"
IMHO:  http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/coco_game_list.html
Tons of great software along with a very nicely done organization,
screenshots documentation and history.  Not to say every software
collection would or could be that well put together, just an example
of a site I find very handy.

DW4 has lots of tools for dynamically bringing in individuals disk
images or even individual files from nearly any source (local disk/web
site/ftp/etc) with just a click or two.  For instance, you can browse
Curtis Boyle's games webpage right in DW4 and a single click on any of
the disk images there mounts them ready to play on your CoCo.   The
upcoming version 4.1 has a built in library manager that works sort of
like iTunes or other content managers.  It makes organizing your
software library and finding new software from the internet very
simple.

Just my $0.02.

On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 3:44 PM, Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote:
>
> I may be posting something sililar to what you are referring to on my website (below) soon. I have been trying to organize different VHDs into "themes" Games, Apps, Programming, Music ect... If it turns out like I want, I will be linking them on DaBarnStudio site to share with others. I know how hard it is to gather all the stuff together and I've been at it (downloading) for awhile and have gathered most of everything that's out there. The biggest problem is it seems every program (especially pre-"/DD" days) has it's own agenda as to where support files should be. Some can be patched, some already have patches, some just "run" like they should. Then there's the bootfiles...It seems like half the software requires something special in it's boot... VRN, Nil, Midi, VDG, /R0, ect... it get's annoying at the least.
>
> What I'm tryng to do, is to create VHDs with the RSDOS and OS9 themes on the same VHD. RSDOS Vdisk 255 will have the OS9 boot required to run everything on the OS9 partition. I'm finding a lot of RSDOS software will not run (or run well) in HDBDOS because of the software using direct access to disk routines and other stuff that was modified. Then you run into the problem of the software "hard coded" to access drives 0-3. Some can be patched pretty easily for 0-255, some cannot. BUT, having access to the disks, all on one VHD makes it easy to copy it to a real disk and run it from standard RSDOS. Basic programs are usually the easiest to fix. Just change a few lines of code and it's good to go.
>
>
> Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
> https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
> Bill Pierce
> ooogalapasooo at aol.com
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Ormond <markormond at mtxsystems.com>
> To: Coco <Coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Sat, Apr 14, 2012 1:12 pm
> Subject: [Coco] Drivewire VHD's
>
>
> Is there a site with VHD's pre done for Drivewire?
> 'm looking for game collections, etc.
> Or, is there an easy way to convert the files from a drivepak image to a format
> ompatible with drivewire?
>
> hanks,
> ater,
> abone
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