[Coco] Nitros9 3.2.0 6809L2 on real hardware

[tim lindner]

Ray Watts <rayanddoraleew at earthlink.net> wrote:

> In fact, if anyone can explain how to use the .dsk conversion and
> manipulation tools on Mac Sys OS 9.1, I would be eternally greatful.

I have spent many-a-hour trying to come up for a solution for this. It
comes down to this:

Attaching a 5 1/4" drive to a Mac.

During the early Macintosh II period Apple did sell a 5 1/4 drive
attached to a NuBUS card to help people transfer their Apple ProDOS
disks. But nothing that would read a disk like the CoCo's format.

Currently there are 5 1/4 disk USB drives. But they use an internal
USB<->SCSI coverter and aren't accesable to write the proper drivers for
reading CoCo disks.

Another option I thought of was aquiring a PowerComputing Macintosh that
had an ISA bus. Then an ISA Catweasel could be attached and Tim Mann's
CW2DMK software could be ported to run under Mac OS. But that machine is
very hard to come by.

A new option is to aquire a PCI Catweasel, and a new Macintosh with PCI.
Then port CW2DMK (version 3). This should be possible but I don't feel
like buying a PCI Catweasel card when I already have an ISA version.

So what I finally did is get an old PC. Pentium-90 in my case. They
arn't hard to find for free. 5 1/4 inch drive can be bought from Cloud-9
if you can't find one localy. Then use DSKINI and RETRIEVE (under
MS-DOS) to make floppies. I have my PC on ethernet so I can FTP disk
images back and forth.

-- 
tim lindner
tlindner at ix.netcom.com                                            Bright