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

Thu Sep 19 21:34:54 EDT 2013

Luis,
I'm not disputing your useof your system, just that no one else can do this without your knowledge of the system and/or your patches. We are not an exclusive club in that OS9 should only accessable to those who "know".
We should be dubunking the old OS-9 myth that it's an operating system for programmers and making it more accessable to the average user. Sure, we can build our supr-duper-uber-special drivers for that one piece of odd hardware, but we must not leave behind the user that has a single floppy disk, or the user that only knows how to click the Vcc icon and not know how to set it up. We need to make NitrOS9 a pleasant experience, not a adventure in how to hack a bootfile.

I run as many as 3 emulators at a time on the same machine as well as 1-2 real Cocos all sharing DriveWire from that same machine as a server. I would NEVER expect the average user to even begin to understand how I do this. It took me 2 years to get it all set up and working as smooth as it does. But I would readily make all the tools to do so easily accessable and a good document on how it was done. But, the tools are already available as they're all pretty standard and I've actually started putting together documentation of how to build a "Super Coco/Emulator DriveWire4 System". This is the very reason I was interested in the Turbo drivers for DW4, to speed up the throughput for my Cocos so they don't bog down so much when I'm accessing more than one system.

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
http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
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 9:12 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] DW4 Turbo 230kb mode was : Eureka!

bill the same img i use on my real superide i use on mess. i dump it from my CF 
with dd linux command and use it right way. 

i patched mess to respond accurately to each superide $ff50 adresses. even 
RCAPY, everything works like a real superide. os-9 think he is talking to a 
superide. i dont change a thing on my os-9 img, how could i be using emudrvs?

everything is being emulated on mess so i dont need to change os-9. but it only 
supports LBA mode.

not only this i build and test my distros using my Mess then i just transfer to 
my cf unchanged and my real coco boots up happily.

On 2013-09-19, at 8:50 PM, Bill Pierce <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote:

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
http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
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:

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