[Coco] DriveWire on the Raspberry Pi in five easy steps.

[Bill Pierce]

Allen, there is no form of Wiki for the Nitros9 dw descriptors. Basically, it just a /t1 driver on steroids :-)
The error problem is probably that the dw4 server does not return actual Os9 style error numbers, so somewhere along the line of communication, the error number gets assigned and may not be the actual error that was encountered, just what the driver "thought" may have happened (my theory anyway :-)
To me, the benifits and capabilities of dw4 beyond just the disk access stuff makes it almost a nessecity to have it in the boot... telnet, PC console, Midi, printing, moving files between PC and Coco, ftp access, etc.
Coco too far from the PC? just use a wifi or bluetooth usb adapter (yes, they work).
And hopefully with the upcoming version... Coco networking! (Coco to Coco).
And dw4 can live nicely along beside the sdc drivers. Then you don't have to pull the sd card, insert it in the PC, copy images from the PC to the sd, then insert it back in the sdc... just copy them from dw4 "/Xx" to "/SDx" and never leave Nitros9 or the Coco.. much easier.

But all that aside, it's much easier to show people to use the new Nitros9 dw disks than have them load it every time they want it. Remember, they may not have an sdc... or a floppy... or an HD... dw may be their only form of I/O. It was mine until recently.
 

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-Contributor, Co-Editor for CocoPedia
http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
E-Mail: ooogalapasooo at aol.com


 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Mon, Feb 9, 2015 9:51 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] DriveWire on the Raspberry Pi in five easy steps.


> On Feb 9, 2015, at 8:43 PM, Bill Pierce via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com> wrote:
> 
> Allen, you can drop the "load drivewire drivers" step as all the Nitros9 repo 
disks that support dw already have the drivers. It would be better to tell 
people to update their NitrOS9 install to the current dw supported version 
first. This should eliminate those errors you are seeing.

Noted. Though I would assume if they are using the DriveWire .dsk images, they 
already know about DriveWire. ;) For me, it was how to use it with a standard 
NitrOS-9 boot quickly. I am at least glad you can load some modules and use it. 
I don’t plan to have them in my boot except when I want to use them, but we’ll 
see. Right now I much prefer the speed of CoCoSDC.

...
> Also, the drivewire drivers will ONLY work with NitrOS9 and I'm not sure how 
far back this goes as far as version, but at some point, even that breaks. DW 
will not run on vanilla OS9 at all.

Good to know. I did not know that.

The #207s are problematic, though. Plenty of RAM free, and worst case is I would 
lose the remainder of the 8K that I loaded the modules in to — shouldn’t even be 
an issue unless DW is doing some real dirty stuff I don’t know about (beyond all 
the IRQ masking and accessing hardware directly).

David Ladd has a real cool Pi update script, too.

http://dwladd.com/?p=98 <http://dwladd.com/?p=98>

The DW wiki doesn’t mention all the descriptors I see, so I need to find out 
where the rest of the documentation is. I will do my best to flesh out the 
section on CoCopedia.

		— A


-- 
Coco mailing list
Coco at maltedmedia.com
https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco