[Coco] Beyond disks (was Re: Coco -> Arduino -> Drivewire and back again... the arduino code... for connecting via the serial)

[Nick Marentes]

On 22/06/2014 12:54 AM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> I've always respected your opinion, heck I even made a "lite" UI for you
> that as far as I know noone else has ever used :)
>
> In this case, I think you are in the minority though.  Both the survey and
> the comments here indicate a lot of people do make use of the "beyond
> disks" features in DW4.
>
> When I see people like Bill P, Bill N, william, Boisy, Brett, etc (sorry if
> i missed someone!) writing new coco programs that use the networking and
> other features of DW, that's the biggest reward I can imagine.  People
> writing new software for the coco is awesome, and if DW helps that happen
> then I think its a success.
>

I don't think many people even know about the LiteUI version do they?

The lite version is great! A smaller less resource hungry and quicker to 
load/shutdown version of Drivewire which sits (in my case) always at the 
bottom right of my PC desktop showing me the basic status at a glance of 
the drives connected to the CoCo.

Although, I must admit, I use it less nowadays since I bought the CoCoFDC.

My game development CoCo is very minimal comprising of a standard 512K 
CoCo3, the CoCoFDC cartridge and a CM-8 monitor. That's it, and I do all 
my coding and debugging on that. My development disk images are 
available within a second of powerup and I can be running Robert Gault's 
assembler and my source loaded within a minute after powerup.

I love my CoCoFDC! I can keep all my DSK images on the CoCoFDC SDcard. 
It's also quite portable!

I have a drivewire cable plugged to my PC sitting unconnected that I can 
attach whenever I need to retrieve a new DSK or, most importantly, do a 
backup of my development files to to the PC hard disk.

I use an Amiga 4000 to create graphics and sound files that I transfer 
to my PC (via 720K floppy) and then use a utility to add it to a DSK for 
transfer to the CoCo via Drivewire.

This is where it would be nice to have Drivewire be able to simply take 
a file and insert (or extract) from a mounted DSK image.

I would have also liked it to be able to create OS-9 hard disk images 
including the ability to view the image to add/delete to the image. This 
takes some of the burden off trying to do it within OS-9 on the CoCo and 
would be ideal for CoCo OS-9 novices like me. It's important we strive 
to take the "edge" of OS-9 to allow more people to appreciate its power 
rather than be put off by it's high learning curve.

Just let me know if I'm wrong about the abilities of Drivewire with 
regards to this file management. Am I being blinded by the friendliness 
of the Lite UI version and not seeing all the potential of the full UI 
version?

Nick