[Coco] ML Disk I/O examples?

Mark McDougall msmcdoug at iinet.net.au
Fri Apr 13 09:45:32 EDT 2007


Robert Gault wrote:

> The best examples with line by line comments will be found in the 
> Unravelled series. A search of the Web will find several sites.
> http://www.coco3.com/unravalled/disk-basic-unravelled.pdf

Thanks Robert, but I actually started with exactly this document. There's a 
very brief description of a few 'routines' such as File Open, but it's 
fleeting at best. And nothing to actually read a record that I could see at 
first glance?!? I stumbled across DSKCON in Pac-dude, which Unwravelled 
doesn't even bother describing.

If I had the inclination, I'm certainly capable of 'learning the 
fundamentals', or rather, learning the peculiarities of Coco RSDOS - I've a 
couple of decades experience with device-level I/O on everything from 8-bit 
micros to Linux/XP - it's just that I'd rather copy an example and get onto 
the real job at hand. After all, I'm just trying to read a binary file into 
memory - I'm sure that's been done hundreds of times.

I'm guessing from this thread that things aren't as cut-and-dry in 
DECB/RSDOS as other platforms? It's pretty straightforward for example, in 
TRS-80 Model I/III NEWDOS/80, to do file I/O from ML - the interface is well 
documented and when I had to do similar a year or 2 back, it took me about 
10 mins to get it right...

Oh well, I guess I'll have to spend a night "re-inventing the wheel" as 
David suggested. At least I will learn something along the way...

I'll check out your Mlfinder Robert - thanks!

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"



More information about the Coco mailing list