[Coco] Newbie questions

Wed Jan 22 18:25:27 EST 2014

On Wednesday 22 January 2014 18:06:58 Bill Pierce did opine:

> Sean,
> I think you've confused the use of Dsk images with VHD images.
> RgbDos & HdbDos are BOTH designed to use a 256 partition Hard Drive
> image.. Each partition is formatted into an emulated 180k single sided,
> double density 5.25 disk. The drives referred to by hdbdos are NOT the
> driveslots in drivewire (more on this below).

I think it should be pointed out that these virtual disks, do not in fact 
have ANY partition markers on the disks proper.  Each and ever one of them 
is the product of some fairly simple calculations in the drivers, anchored 
to the drive by a 3 byte figure written into ram for HDBDOS, or for nitros9 
by some numbers stored in the device descriptors.

> You use a drive slot to mount a VHD (virtual hard drive) and then you
> can format (DSKINI 0-255) 256 floppy images on this drive. Do your
> floppy disk mounting in VCC cartidge menu (DRIVEOFF).
> 
> In this way, you have 256 drives in hdbdos (DRIVEON) OR 4 Floppies & 252
> drives in hsbdos. You can mount more VHDs in the other DW slots and
> switch to them with DRIVE #0-255 (NOT DRIVE 0-255) DRIVE 6 will switch
> to "partition" 6 on the VHD...
> DRIVE #6 will switch to the 6th slot in DW (256 more drives)
> 
> You can not move files from one VHD to another without special
> programming and/or setup. Too much to get into here.

Not really, even in HDBDOS, but its more complex than it is in nitros9.

To do it in nitros9, all you need to do is create an si.dd descriptor that 
is identical to the sh.dd descriptor except for its name, and set the stp 
value for /sh to the src virtual disk, set the stp in /si to the target 
virtual disk, and all you have done is to create a 2nd  pointer to a 
different vdisk.  Copy away, using dsave or whatever.

> I know all this is confusing and it all needs different terminology to
> make things much clearer, but that's another argument we've already
> been through here a couple of times. And it was pretty.. The problem is
> that each part of the system was written by different people  with
> different goals and eventually someone made it all work together.
> 
> There's also a way to use each DW driveslot as a drive, but hdbdos
> doesn't see it this way
> 
> Now... in NitrOS9.... you can access each dw drive slot as individual
> large HDs or floppies..... But that's another story....

The one I alluded to above.

Not only that, this second si.dd descriptor does not have to point into the 
first 0-255 vdisk area on your HD.  You can just as easily set its offsets 
so that it would be looking at a 2nd, or 3rd or 4th, bank of 256 virtual 
disks. 512 virtual floppies on your HD, or more depending on how its 
formatted, even several thousand are theoretically possible.  But if your 
memory is no better than mine, you had better have a printed index to tell 
you what is where. ;-)

If anyone with a big drive is interested I can elaborate.

> BTW... The hdbdos installed with Vcc 1.4.3b is specifically designed to
> run with the Becker port and DW. If you want to run Vcc without dw,
> just switch the configuration to RGBDos and do a cold start (hit F9
> twice). <make sure "Enable Becker Port" is unchecked in the bitbanger
> config. The 2 OS's are "almost" identical
> 
> 
> Bill Pierce
> "Today is a good day... I woke up" - Ritchie Havens
> 
> 
> 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: Sean Margules <s_man501 at yahoo.com>
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Wed, Jan 22, 2014 4:00 pm
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Newbie questions
> 
> 
> Ok, so I've been reading the HDB-DOS 1.1 manual, and trying to get the
> backup command to work. The virtual ROM image I'm using is the one that
> came with the 1.43 beta: hdbdw3bc3.rom. Now this ROM will not give me a
> command prompt unless drivewire 4 is running. It boots up just fine and
> beeps, but there is no flashing little cursor, and I can't type
> anything into the emulator. This is true whether or not I have the
> becker port enabled. If drivewire 4 is running I can enter commands.
> DISKOFF seemed to work with drivewire running, I could see the game
> with "dir" but when I tried to "BACKUP 0 to 4" I got an IO error, and
> now no matter how many times I do a hard reset, DISKOFF just returns an
> SN error. This is with HDB-DOS as well as RGB-DOS, with drivewire on or
> off. Stuck again I'm afraid.
> 
> 
> 
> On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 7:10 PM, Sean Margules <s_man501 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> 
> cool. I get it now. I also got a copy of the HDBDOS users manual now,
> thanks to Robert. Stay tuned for more goofy questions.
> 
> 
> 
> On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 6:20 PM, Bill Pierce
> <ooogalapasooo at aol.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Sean,
> The answer to that is no. Driveoff just shuts down virtual drives 0-3
> (of 256 virtual drives) and allows access to 0-3 on real floppies. This
> allows you to copy to and from 0-3 (real) / 4-255 (virtual)
> Drive on turn virtual 0-3 back on and turns of real 0-3
> 
> 
> Bill Pierce
> "Today is a good day... I woke up" - Ritchie Havens
> 
> 
> 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: Sean Margules <s_man501 at yahoo.com>
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Tue, Jan 21, 2014 5:57 pm
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Newbie questions
> 
> Thank you all for the info. If I'm understanding
> correctly RGBDOS doesn't allow
> access to the disk drives because it is substituting a hard drive for
> them. If you want the disk drives you have to DRIVEOFF to shut down the
> hard drive. But if that's the case, how does one go about tranferring
> data to the VHD (since you
> 
> can't read a disk from a drive and access the hard drive at the same
> time)? For instance if I wanted to take DK.dsk and transfer it to one
> of the 256 partitions
> 
> of Nitros9.VHD What would I need to do?
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Cheers, Gene
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