[Coco] DW4 Nitros9 and floppy disk access

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 13 January 2019 09:37:13 Walter wrote:

> Gene
>
> Not sure about that.  Could have been but it is a 5.25 inch drive and
> I never saw an Amiga with anything else other than a 3.5 inch!

Ah, then the 5" drive would have had those parts. When you said Chinon, I 
automatically thought it was a 3.5" drive. Theres a slim chance it could 
be a 96 tpi drive too.

> And this particular drive is the one I created every one of my
> floppies with so I know it's background.
>
I sit corrected. :) Probably low on caffeine yet, only had one cup of 
yesterdays leftovers so far. More under construction so that will be 
fixed shortly.

> Walter
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Coco [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On Behalf Of Gene
> Heskett Sent: Sunday, 13 January 2019 10:33 PM
> To: coco at maltedmedia.com
> Subject: Re: [Coco] DW4 Nitros9 and floppy disk access
>
> On Sunday 13 January 2019 09:13:54 Walter wrote:
> > Some more info.
> >
> > With the miniFlASH in slot 3 and the FD-502 in slot four.
> >
> > If I start the CoCo with the MPI selector set to slot 3 I get the
> > behaviour described before.
> >
> > If I set the MPI to slot 4 then I get the DECB and I can access the
> > floppy but HDB-DOS does not start. But I suppose this is to be
> > expected.
> >
> > If I start the MPI on slot 3 again and after HDB-DOS has started I
> > change the MPI selector to slot 4 I can access both DriveWire and
> > the floppy drive.  Now we're talking!
> >
> > However I'm not sure I like changing the MPI selector while it is
> > on!
> >
> > Is there a way I can do this via software?
> >
> > And one last thing.  Only the real Tandy floppy drive works my crazy
> > Chinon floppy drive doesn't work! I can hear the Chinon floppy
> > trying to read but it just re-attempts several times and then
> > errors.
>
> Potential trivia fact for the day.
>
> That Chinon drive may have been rescued from an Amiga computer, whose
> floppy drives contained no index pulse generator because the amiga
> floppy access was via trackdisk, reading, and writing a whole track at
> a time. Because it was a read-modify-write setup, it could start
> reading a track at any point in the disks rotation, would then search
> the track buffer for the needed info, and conversely could start a
> rewrite of the track at any rotational point in the disks rotation. So
> it needed no index pulse to synchronize the data to a fixed location
> on the disk, and Commode Door was cheap & sleazy enough to make Chinon
> leave those 30 cents worth of parts out.
>
> Cheers, Gene Heskett
> --
>
>
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Cheers, Gene Heskett
--