[Coco] No MPI - any suggestions?

[Joel Ewy]

Mark McDougall wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> First an aside:
>
> Tonight I managed to setup my PC to be able to write coco floppy
> disks. Not
> sure if anyone else has done it this way, but I created a bootable DOS
> (Win98) CD-RW using Bart's Boot CD <http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/>
> together with
> David Keil's Coco3 emulator and a sample of DSK images, as my hard drives
> are NTFS and hence not readily readable from DOS.
>
> Amongst a pile of 1.2MB drives I found one that appears to work
> reasonably
> reliably and have installed that in my PC as floppy drive A.
>
> Now I can boot from CD into the Coco 3 emulator and read/write real Coco
> floppy drives, despite the fact that I have WinXP and NTFS partitions.
>
> But back OT:
>
> I have an FD-500 controller and floppy drive rescued (I believe) from a
> TRS-80 Model 4P. It is able to read and BACKUP disks created on my setup
> described above. So far so good.
>
> However, in a few weeks I will be wanting to test my flash carts with
> rompack binary images currently residing on my PC. Obviously I can
> transfer
> them to my Coco via disk, but that precludes me plugging in the flash
> cart!
>
> Can anyone suggest how I could transfer binary rompack images to my
> coco and
> also have my flash cart accessible without an MPI?
>
Could you put your disk ROM image in the flash cart and then just make a
Y-cable?  I guess you might have to hack the floppy controller so it
didn't try to address the ROM.  I used a ROM-less RS-232 PAK alongside a
Disto Super Controller II with 4-in-1 on a Y-cable for years.  Or do the
addresses for your bank switching CPLD conflict with FDC registers?

JCE
> Or better yet, has anyone got an MPI they don't want???
>
> Regards,
>