[Coco] VCC direct VHD vs DW

William Carlin whcarlinjr at gmail.com
Fri Jun 16 06:42:27 EDT 2017


Technically you can have 3 hard drives mounted at one time in VCC.  You
have the standard Hard Disk 0 RGB style hard drive.  If you use one of you
MPI slots for the Glenside IDE you can also have a master and slave IDE
hard drive(s) mounted as well.

I think of DriveWire as the CoCo's version of network drives or network
attached storage.  You can literally attach anything to DriveWire.  From
other downloaded VHD's to floppy disks to disks located on a web server,
ftp server, SMB/CIFS share, inside of a .ZIP file (mounts VHD but no
changes are written back).  Once you become familiar with the 'dw' command,
you can create scripts to automate most of the drudge work of ejecting
drives, modifying the 'dmode' parameters of a /Xx device to adjust the size
of your "network volume", creating the disk in memory on the DW server,
formatting the drive, writing the drive out to physical disk on the DW
server, and finally inserting the written disk to complete the process.

I think the feature I use most in DW is the virtual serial ports to telnet
into NitrOS9.  The VCC window is so small on my laptop I need to use the
Windows telnet in a command prompt in order to see what I'm typing.
Additionally VCC emulates the keyboard just a CoCo and NitrOS9 can miss
keystrokes under heavy load.  When you use telnet, the keyboard is buffered
and characters are read by the serial port as the NitrOS9 can accept them.
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