[Coco] A little help with DriveWire

[Joel Ewy]

Marcus Vinicius Garrett Chiado wrote:
> Boisy, can you copy disk images from the host PC to a CoCo floppy, say by
> using DECB's BACKUP command using DriveWire? The DriveWire documentation on
> the Cloud 9 site doesn't mention one way or the other whether the BACKUP
> command works. I believe Marcus mentioned in an earlier post that he is
> getting a disk system. If this works, then he
> can run his OS-9 and Sundog (etc) games from a real floppy disk.
>
>   
>> Yes, BACKUP does work...
>>     
>
>
> Totally cool! That´s exactly what I want. Besides DriveWire, I also bought a
> complete disk drive system (including an EPROM that will be installed into
> the disk drive interface, according to Mark). My original idea is:
>
> 1) Load a desired image (game) into CoCo´s virtual drive on the PC. Let´s
> say, the game Thexder.
>   
Just a note.  Thexder is a cartridge game, not a disk game.  Most if not
all of the cartridge games can be copied to disk.  I used to run
Microbes and MegaBug that way.  Some of the newer cartridge games are a
little more challenging to copy to disk, as they are larger than the
size allocated to ROM Paks, and have multiple memory banks that have to
be switched in separately, copied, and switched back out.  I have
Thexder on ROM cartridge, and remember it to be a CoCo 3 game, therefore
one of the later games.  But I never checked into how difficult it was
to copy to floppy.

If you do want Thexder specifically, you may have to see if you can find
a cartridge on eBay or something.  But it's also possible that somebody
has copied it to disk and put it somewhere where you could find it on
the Internet.
> 2) Insert a blank disk into CoCo´s actual disk drive unit.
> 3) Sector copy Thexder to the actual disk, thus copying it from the PC.
> 4) Run Thexder from the actual disk.
>
>   
Sounds like you should be able to do this with the system you've ordered
from Cloud 9.
> Keep in mind, my friends, I´ve got not a single CoCo actual floppy to play
> with. Zero.
>
>   
As I mentioned in an earlier post, os9archive.rtsi.com should get you
started.
I've got the same situation with the Apple 2gs and the C=64 and C=128. 
Someday I'll sit down and wire up some cables I can use to get some disk
images onto them.  But CoCo is just more fun!

JCE