[Coco] [Color Computer] Dumb drive question?

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/14/03 12:20:31 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
jimcox at miba51.com writes:

> Well, it seems there are a lot of use who are having 
>  senior moments lately?  Are the 5.25" drives for the CoCo 
>  DSDD or SSSD, or what.

The earliest Radio Shack Coco disk drivers were single sided 35 tracks, 
though you could usually squeeze another track or two with hacked software.  These 
old drives used the spiral head-stepping cam, and necessitated the clunky 35 
ms stepping rate, though mine always sounded better, and worked OK, at 20ms. 

At some point Tandy went to double-sided drives, probably because nobody was 
making SS any more.  Tandy didn't bother to tell you this, since BASIC ROMs 
were limited to SS.

Any half-height drives are pretty sure to be double sided.  They will also 
use crystal-controlled AC motors, so you don't get to play with the little speed 
adjustment screw any longer :-)

Tandy's stock OS9-L1 driver (CCDisk) was hard coded to SS also, no matter 
what you put in the device descriptors.  There were 3rd-party replacements that 
not only respected the double-sided descriptors, but were smaller and less 
buggy.

OS9-L2 for the Coco3 respected DS descriptors from the beginning.
--Mike K.