[Coco] CoCo3 questions / Cloud 9 Super IDE interface

[Mike Pepe]

Steve.Lancaster at Moorestephens.com wrote:
> Hello all

Hey Steve
> 
> 1) Is a floppy drive necessary for a CoCo? - I ask because 5.25 inch disks 
> are hard to source and although I have a 5.25 floppy drive (that I use on 
> a BBC Master computer) I'm not sure if it is CoCo compatible.

Necessary? No- but the cassette gets old pretty fast!

If reading existing CoCo 5.25 floppies is not an issue, I heartily 
recommend using 1.44M PC floppy drives. All you need to do is modify the 
cable slightly to alter the drive select line, and use 720k media. As 
Joel pointed out, being an 80 track double sided drive, using only 35 of 
those tracks (and only one side to boot) does waste 3/4ths of each disk. 
However the 720k media is more robust, the 1.44 drives are readily 
available, and the combination works well.

Also with a relatively simple mod, certain CoCo floppy controllers can 
be modified to work in high density mode. I've actually done this.

> Going back to the Super IDE does anybody know if it is possible to 
> transfer .dsk images to the CF card by drag and drop (on a PC with a card 
> reader) or does the transfer have to be done using a CoCo emulator or a 
> utility like Omniflop.

This would only be possible if the PC has some sort of filesystem driver 
compatible with whatever it is that the SIDE interface is expecting to 
read from the CF card. Not having one I'm not sure what it wants, but 
I'm assuming that it's not reading an MS-DOS filesystem and translating 
that to the CoCo somehow. It probably contains OS9 RBF format filesystem.

-Mike