[Coco] Drivewire 2.0 review

[Nickolas Marentes]

I have now had the latest preview version of Drivewire 2.0 for over a week
and will provide a review of the product.

Firstly, let me say thank you to Tim Lindler and Kevin Diggs for supporting
me when I made the call for sales of my products in order to raise enough
PayPal credit to make this purchase.

DRIVEWIRE

Drivewire is a package that allows one to use their PC as a Hard Disk server
to the CoCo. The PC and CoCo are linked together via the serial ports and
data is transferred between the two at 57,600 bps when using a CoCo3 or
38,400 bps when using a CoCo1/2.

Drivewire server software is run on the PC side first which allows you to
mount CoCo emulator DSK files to drives 1 to 4. The software constantly
shows you various stats such as Sectors Read, Sectors Written, Read Retries,
Write Retries and more.

Once the PC server end is up and running, the software on the CoCo end is
run depending on what environment you wish to operate.

For RS-DOS, a program called DW.BAS is run which loads and configures the
Drivewire drivers and the user can select which drives to allocate as the
Drivewire drives. I usually choose option 2 which sets the drives so that
drives 0 and 1 remain as my standard floppy drives and drives 2 and 3 are
Drivewire drives. Once the driver has installed, I can attach DSK images on
the PC server and view files from the CoCo as if they were real floppy
drives. I can format disks, backup disks and do most things I could do with
a real drive with the added benefit that everything is on my PC. I say that
I can "almost" do everything, I found that many programs that load in
additional code can overwrite or bank out the Drivewire driver and this
sends it into limbo. Boisy says that he may look into the possibility of
relocating the driver somewhere where it isn't affected to increase
compatibility.

For the OS-9 environment, you have two options to boot NitrOS-9 (or normal
OS-9) from the PC server. The main method is to use the Drivewire CoCo disk
and type DOS as you would normally do to boot OS-9. This loads the Drivewire
boot code from the floppy disk boot track then proceeds to load the OS-9
system from the PC server (you must mount the appropriate OS-9 with the
Drivewire drivers installed as disk 0 prior). The second method is to burn a
copy of the Drivewire boot ROM into your disk controller or replace your
Super ECB ROM inside you CoCo. Boisy provides a ROM for either and also for
all versions of CoCo. I chose to add the ROM into my disk controller and I
set it up to be switchable with standard Disk Basic 1.1.

Now, once I have started the Drivewire PC server and mounted my NitrOS-9
system disk DSK file configured for Drivewire, I merely have to switch my
CoCo3 on and it immediately boots NitrOS-9 from the PC server...just like a
real hard disk attached to my CoCo.

PERFORMANCE

The data transfer of a Drivewire drive appears to be similar to a floppy
drive but the overall speed is a bit faster because there are no seek times
as is the case with a floppy drive. Those who are accustomed to a real hard
drive will find it slower but one must consider the primary benefits
being...

1) No Multi-crap interface required!! My CoCo looks "lean and mean", I only
have a small deskspace available for my CoCo and drivewire doesn't take any
extra space. It's just a CoCo3, monitor and floppy drive unit (and even the
floppy drive could be removed since everything happens on the PC). My PC is
already setup on a table next to the CoCo and I can operate both machines
simultaneously. Wonderful stuff!!

2) It's a lot cheaper than a real hard drive. I don't have money to burn and
I don't use my CoCo enough to warrant paying too much for a hard drive. Most
of my software development has always been under RS-DOS using floppy disks
and this was more than enough. My choice to get Drivewire was more to learn
about OS-9. I had come to the conclusion that trying to use OS-9 without a
hard drive is like pointing a gun to my head and pulling the trigger!! At
least with Drivewire, I can turn the gun away slightly so that the chances
of the bullet hitting me are less!!   :)

 BUGS

Being a preview release, Boisy has a few things he needs to fix/tidy up but
they are not things that prevent Drivewire from working. Boisy will be
looking into these as time becomes available.

Overall, Boisy has done a fine job (as always) and Drivewire is yet another
excellent product from Cloud-9. I highly recommend this product to anyone
who hasn't yet added a hard drive to thier CoCo and wishes to delve into
OS-9. Although my experiences with OS-9 will probably never be "smooth",
Drivewire at least does its best to make things bareable.

Nick Marentes