[Coco] working with physical floppy drives under NitrOS-9 via DriveWire

[Robert Gault]

Chris Oliver wrote:
> All,
>
> I leverage HDB-DOS (burned onto an eprom in slot 1 of the MPI) to DOS to the latest Coco1 NitrOS-9 disk image (that has been loaded into the Disk 0 slot in DriveWire).  Loads up great.  Can work with virtual drives (/X1, etc.) perfectly fine.
>
> So — now I want to be able to access the physical floppies.  I have the orig 3029 Tandy controller, with a pair of the orig Tandy floppy drives.  Is there any way to run NitrOS-9 via DriveWire, and yet be able format and use physical floppies?  Would be great if I wasn’t restricted to virtual drives…
>
> Very curious — let me know!
>
> Chris
>

Chris,

Read the docs for HDBDOS to see how to access floppies under Disk Basic. 
It will apply in this case even though you are running a Becker mod of 
the ROM.
The commands DRIVE ON and DRIVE OFF control whether you access floppies 
or not. The default is DRIVE ON with the floppies turned off; drives 
4-255 either Drivewire or hard drive.
A variation on the OFF command is DRIVE OFF n  where n is the last 
floppy number to be available. So DRIVE OFF 0  would give you a floppy 
on drive0 but Drivewire or hard drive disks on 1-255.

NitrOS-9 needs to contain drivers for Drivewire , hardware hard drives, 
and floppies in OS9Boot for universal access. You decide which 
descriptors will be used to access floppies. Convention is that /D0, 
/D1, /D2, and /D3 are floppies and /X0 - /X255 are Drivewire and /H0 - 
/H# are hardware hard drives. There are some other names such as /I# 
/S#  and  /SD#  in use.

Robert