[Coco] FAO - Phill & Gene

[Joel Ewy]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Monday 30 April 2007, Steve.Lancaster at moorestephens.com wrote:
>   
>> Phill - If you ever manage to develop a MMC / SD storage system for the
>> Dragon / Coco put me in the queue for one.
>>
>> Gene - Where can I get a Glenside IDE adaptor from? How do you format the
>> SD / MMC card so that the Coco can read files from it?
>>     
>
> Dunno Steve, I'm not a Glenside person, too far away.  As for using one of 
> those $3 gizmos on an ide controller, everything I've ever written to the CF 
> cards I use in the dd-wrt based router, was written with dd, which is the equ 
> of addressing a device on the os9 bus with the /d1@ syntax, where you get the 
> whole thing with no regard for any file system structure.  I've done that 
> with the adaptor on the end of the ide cable, or with the CF card plugged 
> into one of those $30 universal card thingies that plugs into a usb port.  
> The usb gizmo is handier though.
>
>   
If you use CF on an IDE interface on the CoCo, it will behave just like
an IDE drive, and you will format it accordingly.  Most of the cards
come formatted with a DOS (V)FAT file system.  If NitrOS-9's msf file
manager can be used with drives bigger than floppies, it might be
possible to use them to transfer data between CoCos and PCs, with the
caveat that when used in IDE mode, CF cards are not hot swappable. 
Otherwise you'll just have to wipe out any existing FAT partition and
format it for RBF / HDB-DOS.

I've used the little adaptors to plug directly into the IDE interface on
a PC motherboard (without even a cable if you get the right gender
connector on the adaptor) and boot LEAF (Linux Embedded Appliance
Firewall, was LRP -- Linux Router Projet) to turn old PCs into NAT
firewall / router boxes.  My dad's digital camera came with a tiny 8M CF
card.  Can't get too many pictures on that.  But you can fit a lot of
LEAF on it.  Pretty slick.

JCE