[Coco]Re: Transfer utilities

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 09 October 2005 13:45, Roger Merchberger wrote:
>Rumor has it that Gene Heskett may have mentioned these words:
>>For that you have only 2 choices Glen.  The floppy interface
>>specification at one time had 4 drive select possibilities, but when
>>double-sided drives came on the scene fairly early, the last, DS3, was
>>moved and converted to a side select signal, leaveing only 3 active
>> drive selects available.  So if you want double sided drives, then 3
>> is the limit, _unless_ a special decoder board is placed in series
>> with the cable, between the cable connector and each drive to allow
>> the decoding of a 1 of 8 that can be had with the 3 bits/wires
>> normally used as drive selector addressing.  Its possible, and it
>> would be nice to have, but AFAIK, nobody has actually done it except
>> the maybe the coco based BBS in chicago, Sand-V I think it was called.
>>  The gents name that ran it was Mike IIRC.
>
>So you're saying with that mod that it's possible to have up to 8
> drives?

Yup. and Bob Devies just chimed in and said he's done it.  He must have
just came out of hibernation as its springtime now in Assieland. :)

>Smells like CoCo Floppy RAID to me! ;-)

Yeah, but it would be even slower than one floppy without external help
in the form of a very expensive controller.  Thats put the idea off,
several times here.  Slow is relative though.  Even with code optimized
for the 6308, the lack of dma means its takes 11 seconds to move a
megabyte in a memory to memory copy.  6809's take about 13 seconds.

>Laterz,
>Roger "Merch" Merchberger
>
>--
>Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
>zmerch at 30below.com
>
>What do you do when Life gives you lemons,
>and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????

You set up a stand and sell it to others.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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