[Coco] 3.5" drives

[Rob]

I've got my Coco in storage, so I can't pull any specifics.

Some years ago, I bought an expansion drive for one of the Tandy 1000. (SX?)
I successfully grafted this onto my FD501. I think this was just a standard
720K 3.5" drive, Double Sided, and mounted in a case with nothing but a
cable. I don't know why I did it, (It was an expensive floppy) but it
worked.

I simply made a cable that plugged into the cabinet and ran to the external
drive. Nothing special, but I do recall that I had to make the pinout match
and bring 5v and 12v to it. (I can't remember how I handled addressing.) I
suspect that to do the same with a regular drive, you'd have to make your
own adapter cables and mount it in the cabinet.

RSDOS treated it just the same as the 5.25" drive. No extra storage, and
single sided.

OS-9, however, was able to make use of the drive. As I recall, I had to
change my OS-9 boot disk to inform it of the specifications of the drive,
but it gave me 720k storage on one disk.

I never tried to read an MS-DOS disk, so I couldn't answer to that.

I don't recall the size of the King's Quest game that was sold, but I
managed to condense all of the disks down to just one disk.

Rob

-----Original Message-----
From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On
Behalf Of James Dessart
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 10:15 AM
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Subject: [Coco] 3.5" drives


I'm interested in putting a 3.5" drive on my CoCo, since 3.5" floppies are
still available in stores, and I do have a couple of Macs that can
read/write to them (even in PC format).

My current setup is an SCII, with two 5.25" drives in the FD-501 case (sold
or traded the controller long ago). One is the original single-sided drive,
and the other is a double sided drive.

What I'd like to have is the double sided 5.25" and add a 3.5" to the
system, getting rid of the single-sided drive. Will this work with RS-DOS?
And what would I have to do to get it working in OS-9? Could I use high
density diskettes? Would I be able to read MSDOS FAT formatted diskettes
from OS-9? Would I need to make any hardware changes?

I have an order for DriveWire placed, so that'll maybe alleviate my desire
to do this... :)

James


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