[Coco] Re: OS9 Getclock

[Rodney V Hamilton]

In article <40F58406.3040906 at charter.net>, 
jadonaldson at charter.net says...
>
>
>Boisy,
>   Thanks for the reply. It feels great getting back into NITROS9 again. 
>I now have both a laptop and
>a desktop running the May 14, 2004 release.
>    I still can not get NITROS9 to format or read my 360K drive or the 
>720K drive. Both DSKINI.exe and RETRIEVE.exe under MSDOS works with the 
>drives. I have been able to use DSKINI to make both a 40T and a 80T boot 
>disk and then used RETRIEVE to copy them to a DSK and the DSK's do boot 
>on the emulator. I understand that IBM thinkpads have a floppy problem,
>but the desktop is a IBM 486 DX2. It uses a standard floppy cable, so I 
>would expect it be
>compatible. I am running DOS 6.2 on the desktop.
>
>John Donaldson

John, if your descriptor is set correctly, you should be able to access
the 720K drive with no problems.  The 360K drive may not work properly
due to a flaw in the emulator's disk I/O code in which it treats a 360K
drive the same as a 1.2M drive and assumes it also uses a 360 rpm speed
instead of the actual 300 rpm rate.  Amardeep S Chana pointed this out
in a Jan 5 2001 post to bit.listserv.coco and included a workaround to
get the emulator to use the correct speed by setting the BIOS type for
that drive to 720K.  (see note on Jeff Vavasour's webpage, (or google
for "Re: Re: Emulator file retrieval" in bit.listserv.coco)

On 26 Jan 2003, Amardeep posted a source code patch to bit.listserv.coco
that might fix the problem.  Maybe someone with knowledge of 8x86 code
could try it out and post a binary patch to the emulators - it looks to
me like the revised code would be the same size, so we should be able to
do a "modpatch-style" debug/hex edit fix.  (the subject thread was
"Reguarding Jeff's TRS-80 COLOUR Emulator retrieving coco formatted disks"
and Amardeep's reply+patch info was dated 2003-01-26 09:54:26 PST)

Sorry I can't help more at this time but I'm fixing a zapped filesystem
on my main email/news/www system (power outage from a Florida lightning
storm during disk I/O) but I hope to be back up sometime tomorrow.

Rodney V Hamilton