[Coco] ROM Options for Glenside IDE, and a 3D-Printed Case

[Mark J. Blair]

I built hdblba.rom from the toolshed source, burned it to an EPROM, and tried it out with my Glenside Barge. Works like a champ! Using a 64M CF card, PRINT PEEK(&H150) reports 198 disks, which seems to be around the right number. I was able to DSKINI disks, load and save files, and autoexec my Standard Basic Diagnostic Utility:

  10 PRINT "BUTTS! ";
  20 GOTO 10

I also tried dd'ing that MiniIDE image to the CF card, and that did not produce results that HDB-DOS could make any sense of. Maybe there's a version/format incompatibility? The Contents.txt file referred to HDB-DOS and Nitros-9 partitions, but I didn't see any reference to partitioning in the HDB-DOS user manual, so I wonder if the MiniIDE image uses a partitioning scheme that the HDB-DOS from toolshed doesn't understand.

Actually, I just dd'ed the first 64M of the larger image over to the CF card, since I was using a mere 64M card. Based on the tech description in the HDB-DOS user manual, I expected that to work ok for the first 198 or so floppy images, and fail if I tried to access the following images. But maybe I am mistaken about that.

I'm happy that it works. I haven't tried plugging in a floppy controller yet, because I was too lazy to either drag out the MPI or pop open the floppy controller to pull out the Disk Basic ROM for use in the Glenside's Y cable sockets.

I keep having a recurring urge to redesign the Glenside IDE card into a CF-only adapter with a ROM, fitting into a Program-Pak-sized cart. But I think I should instead make something more ambitious than a mere Glenside IDE form factor shrink.

-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/