[Coco] Just another peek...

[Aaron Wolfe]

Again FWIW, the Coco3fpga does the heavy lifting at least for DriveWire.
It presents a standard FD 501 interface to the CoCo and does the DW stuff
behind the scenes.  So you use a standard DECB rom, not one specially made
for DW.

I think doing the same with other types of storage makes a lot of sense
(assuming it is possible with the room on the fpga).

On Fri, Oct 9, 2015, 8:39 PM Mark McDougall <msmcdoug at iinet.net.au> wrote:

> On 10/10/2015 7:32 AM, Dave Philipsen wrote:
>
> > My guess is that we'll have the DE1 booting from the SD card in fairly
> > short order but it could be some months as I have not found any other
> > volunteers as of yet to help on the coding and my time is a little
> > stretched right now.
>
> My $0.02 worth...
>
> You're really going about this ass-backwards and creating more mess and
> confusion along the way. We don't NEED more media support in software,
> it's only going to muddy the already muddy waters.
>
> You should be looking at making the FPGA do the heavy lifting via
> hardware emulation. My Coco 1/2 implements the 'standard' Cloud9 IDE
> interface via the opencores OCIDE controller core. That interfaces
> directly to a CF card, for example. I've got read support working on the
> SD card - not via any convoluted driver quasi hardware setup - but via a
> back-end interface that make the SD card look/act like disk media on the
> back end of an IDE controller. Not 1 byte of additional software/ROM
> required.
>
> The coco is already confusing with FD-50X, Super/GlensideIDE, Drivewire
> and CocoSDC hardware. Add DECB, (Nitr)OS9, HDBOS and Drivewire software,
> and it's becoming unmanageable. Now you want to add SD card support in
> software as well, across DECB and NitrOS9? That's just nuts!
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> |              Mark McDougall              | "Electrical Engineers do it
> |  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> |   with less resistance!"
>
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