[Coco] The thrill of CoCo'ing again.

[Robert Gault]

Christopher Barnett Fox wrote:
><snip>

>       *   Copy a real floppy (Double-sided? Either DECB or OS-9 Lvl 2 formatted?) to either a DSK image on the CoCoSDC or DriveWire?

You can certainly do it with Drivewire. Presumably you can do it with the SDC.

>       *   Copy a DSK image from either DriveWire or CoCoSDC to my single FD-502 to make a real floppy?

Yes you can. Use HDBDOS for Drivewire as your disk ROM. That can be just LOADMed 
into memory with a Coco3.

>       *   (I have a number of old OS-9 Lvl 2 boot disks that assume a two double-sided floppy drive system.)

Not a question. :)

>       *   There's no way to get the DOS command to boot from anything but Drive 0?

You can boot from drives other than drive0 but must change the Boot module and 
the DD module. The current version of Boot assigns the last byte of the module 
to the drive from which you want to boot. That will take care of getting the 
kernel and OS9Boot into memory.
Stock Disk Basic hard codes DOS to drive0 but you can easily get around that 
with a Coco3 by POKEing memory or by using a replacement disk ROM like HDBDOS 
that accepts DOS# as a command.


>       *   There's no way to get either DECB to read and copy double-sided, or to get Nitros9 booted from CoCoSDC or DriveWire to see my single FD-502 drive, since it's physical drive 0?

With a Coco3, just change the drive table in memory with the POKE command and 
you can access the back sides of disks. That means you can BACKUP double sided 
disks in two passes. If you run NitrOS-9 on the Coco then you can access disks 
as true double sided disks.
NitrOS-9 distinguishes Drivewire disks and floppy disks via different descriptor 
names; /X# for Drivewire and /D# for floppies. No problem reading drive0 on the 
Coco.

>    2.  DriveWire 4 on OS X Yosemite crashes often. What's the most stable environment for running DriveWire? I have plenty of hardware and operating systems at my disposal, and am comfortable with all versions of Windows, Linux distributions, and OS X.

Drivewire works quite well with Windows systems, I use WinXP. I believe it is 
quite stable with Linux systems.

Robert