[Coco] The perfect mas storage for the coco

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 26 June 2013 12:55:19 Darren A did opine:

> On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 6:59 AM,  <billg999 at cs.uofs.edu> wrote:
> >> A little further investigation... These are all over E-Bay. They run
> >> from $30 to $80 US. Do a search for Floppy Emulator. Most come out
> >> of China.
> > 
> > I just took a look.  Think I'll be getting one as soon as my Army
> > retirement check arrives.  :-)
> > 
> > The one I looked at said it emulates a 720K 3.5" floppy.  I know
> > they work on a COCO so it should be possible to make this thing
> > do something, anyway.
> 
> I have one of those 720K floppy emulators from China.  They are locked
> to 512 byte sectors and 9 sectors per track.  While a CoCo controller
> is capable of accessing the device, the format is incompatible with
> all existing software.
> 
> Darren
 
I wouldn't make quite that air tight a statement Darren. There isn't, 
except for driver size, any reason the same deblocking code that is in the 
hard drive drivers couldn't be transplanted into the floppy driver.

In fact, with some infant mortality to be expected, that code could be 
split out of the hard drive driver, made into another module and using a 
common buffer area, use that code to handle the 512 byte/sector disk as 
easily on a floppy as on a hard drive.  I would recommend allocating an 8k 
block of memory for that, known only to RBF and this module for that 
function, because there really really needs to be a separate 512 byte area 
for each devices buffering.

This would not be a 'simple' rewrite, but perhaps something to be included 
only in a level3 setup.  But that is not a project that with 78+ year old 
wet ram, I want to try, so I'll hope some of our 'younger guns' might take 
it upon themselves to do that.  I think one would have to expect that with 
all that byte shuffling, the 11 second megareads I got at one time will 
take a few seconds longer.

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Cheers, Gene
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