[Coco] DW4 Turbo 230kb mode was : Eureka!

[Bill Pierce]

Luis,
You may be using XRoar with DW4 but not with REAL hardware HD drivers. XRoar will access VHDs from drivewire only by using the becker interface which is anything BUT real. I know, I use it myself. I had to build the boots from pieces parts.

And Mess... you may have patched Mess to use sIDE and read CFs but again, you are not using "real" driver, you are using patched Mess.
To access VHDs in Mess with a standard "off the shelf" installation, you will need emudsk unless they've added HD hardware emulation in the last version.

And Vcc. There is an sIDE "Emulator" that comes with the latest version 1.4.3b that will read "images" of CFs and the Becker port will read DriveWire VHDs only....  Again... not "real". But to use VCC's native HD slot in OS9, you will have to have emudsk.

Again... this becomes the case of it all belonging to the programmer and not the user. You patched Mess, it doesn't come that way and very few would even begin to understand how to apply your patch. A standard download of Mess and a standard Nitros9 HD driver will NOT work. Like I said, unless they've emulated the hardware and if they did... what hardware SCSI ? SASI? IDE? MFM? Ummmm which driver does it need, is there a standard nos9 repo disk for this.? All answers are NO.

And all this comes down to the very point I've been making. The "average" user... not the electrical engineer, not the C or Gaming programmer, the "average" "game playing" or "word processor" user will not be able to set up a complete OS9 system with out knowing how to build and manipulate the repo. Then if they can at least build the repo, half the stuff they would need for a custom boot for their system is not easily accessable.
As a matter of fact there is NO dsk available in the repo for a user to backup to a standard disk to boot Nitros9 from floppy if they wanted to. why? Simple... there are no 35 track SSDD disks in the repo that can be booted from REAL RSDOS. The virtual 40 trk disks will NOT backup to a 35 trk disk.... Yes, there are ways... alternate DOS's, disk conversion utilities, but here we go again... why does there have to be any other way? I got OS9 Level 2 back in the 80s, backed up the master to a workdisk, stuck it in my drive and typed DOS. Do that with the repo. It can't be done without making a new boot.

Bill Pierce
My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Co-Webmaster of The TRS-80 Color Computer Archive
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/
Co-Contributor, Co-Editor for CocoPedia
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E-Mail: ooogalapasooo at aol.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Retro Canada <retrocanada76 at gmail.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Cc: coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Thu, Sep 19, 2013 8:01 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] DW4 Turbo 230kb mode was : Eureka!


i really dont understand this thing about emudrvs. I dont use VCC but mess and 
xroar can work with real drivers.

i even made a patch for mess to support superide so i can dump my CF image and 
run it out of the box on MESS.

what is the point of an emulator that cannot emulate real devices?

On 2013-09-19, at 7:49 PM, Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote: