[Coco] Dragon SuperDos and Drivewire....

Phill Harvey-Smith afra at aurigae.demon.co.uk
Thu Oct 18 17:05:04 EDT 2012


Hi All,

Here's the problem, I'd like to try dropping the Drivewire routines into 
SuperDos, so that that DragonDos disks could be accessed via a Drivewire 
server.

However at the lowest level I/O SuperDos deals with cylinders, heads and 
sectors, whereas DW is completely LBA based. Now SD does record the 
geometry of a disk in it's directory track, however this is track 20, 
this is of course read when a disk is first accessed as on a physical 
disk it is always in the same place c=20,h=0,s=1.

With the standard emulator format files which used interleaved sides, 
this will mean for a double sided image that the directory track will be 
in a different position to the single sided image, which would be a problem.

Is there a call in the currently existing DW protocol to get this 
information from the image ? Or to get the file data length of the 
image, even the max LBA sector number would give a hint.

Or if anyone has any suggestions of a way of dealing with this problem ?

As far as HDB-DOS goes, I gather from various things that I have heard 
on here that you can have up to 255 virtual disks, are these all 
accessible at the same time, or do you need to mount up to 4 images that 
act as if they where 4 physical drives ?

Cheers.

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.



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