[Coco] First use and impressions of he Coco SDC

[John E. Malmberg]

Finally got a chance to try the CODO SDC.

Amazon had a seller of 2 x 16 GB PNY drives cheap so I got 3 pairs of 
them.  That should give me enough storage.

I am just using it from Super Extended Color Disk SDC Basic for now.

The first thing that I discovered is that the drives 2 and 3 seem to be 
only for drive wire.

I would have liked a way to map them to the real floppy drives 0 and 1, 
or when using the real floppy drives 0 and 1, to use them for mounted 
drives on the sdcard.

I did not see any thing in the SDC manual that I found online about this 
limitation.

The other thing I discovered is that apparently while I can create disk 
images from BASIC, I can not create directories, delete directories etc.
For that I have to shut everything down and move the sdcard to another 
computer.

I then tried to copy a flex-09 disk to the device.  It did not work.

I had the SDC set to be drive 0, and the real floppy to drive 1 and 
tried to boot flex-09 from drive 1.  It loaded the bootstrap and then 
started trying to use the real floppy drive 1 to boot.  So the flex-09 
bootstrap does not see it.  Something to investigate later.

So it looks like I have to both create a disk container on it with track 
0 to be a single density disk and then write a program to read a single 
density track from the the floppy to the COCO SDC.

I have not yet looked to see if there is already programs that will run 
from BASIC to do more file operations, and handle copying various OS-9, 
Flex-09, and MS-DOS format disks.

I was going to try using it with hdb-dos, but my floppy for that appears 
to be MIA, so I need to download a copy from Toolshed.

NewEgg had some 32 GB compact flash cards on sale also pretty cheap, so 
I now have a couple of those to play with.  A brand named "TopRam" that 
I had not heard of.

I did have the SuperIDE utilities disk and copied that to the sdcard.
It identified the flash card.

Due to other obligations, I will probably not be able to try much more 
for a couple of weeks.

I have a switcheroo on order and am waiting for the second scart to HDMI 
adapter.  The first scart to HDMI adapter arrived with something 
rattling in the case and the coaxial audio connector was obviously broken.

Regards,
-John