[Coco] Question about MPI behavior

[Frank Pittel]

I have to admit I came along late when it came to attaching a floppy
to my coco and using an mpi. Not knowing any better I put the floppy
controller into slot one and never had any trouble with it.

Since I found that the convention is to put the floppy controller in slot
4 I've been putting the floppy controller into slot 4. I put my SuperIde into
slot 3 and after my machine loads hdb dos I switch the MPI to slot 4. I've
noticed that hdb dos "knows" where the superide is and has no problems with
this.

The Other Frank



On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 08:55:47AM -0500, Robert Hermanek wrote:
> Anyone know why the MPI manual states that a drive controller must
> be in slot 4?  I would think with the POKE trick discussed here, a
> controller would work in any slot as long as you set the active I/O
> properly.
> 
> And that got me thinking about someone's previous post, asking if
> you can run more than one disk controller in a system, and we got
> into talking about changing I/O ports/etc.  If you had more than one
> disk controller in MPI, after booting the ROM in one as per normal,
> in slot 4 etc, what would stop you from using the $FF7F poke to
> switch your I/O to slot 3 and using the devices conencted to another
> disk controller?
> 
> I have no plans to do or test this, but someone was asking about
> multiple controllers a few days (weeks?) ago...
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Darren A" <mechacoco at gmail.com>
> To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Monday, April 16, 2012 7:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Question about MPI behavior
> 
> 
> >On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Robert Hermanek wrote:
> >>That was the problem, thanks so much. I'm not familiar with the $FF7F
> >>control register, I'll have to look at the MPI manual for that.
> >>Sounds like
> >>if I then wanted to use the registers of the rs-232 pak itself,
> >>I'd have to
> >>POKE myself back to slot 1. Good to know!
> >>
> >
> >The RS-232 pak hardware registers are not selected by the SCS* signal.
> >They are fully decoded through the address lines and will always
> >respond, regardless of the active slot.
> >
> >Darren
> >
> >--
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> >Coco at maltedmedia.com
> >http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
> >
> 
> 
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