[Coco] No MPI - any suggestions?

[Frank Swygert]

Hmmm.... the bootable CD-ROM was a great idea for the emulator. Beats a "dual boot" system. You could install a second hard drive, format it as a FAT drive, and use it exclusively for the emulator. Good use for an older small HD (heck even 80GB drives are considered small today!). 

I recall transferring paks to disk without an MPI. Amazing -- that was 20 years ago!! 
You have to tape over the CTS or SCS line on the cartridge -- the one that auto loads it (I don't recall which, but since you've been working on a proto board, you probably do) so the pak doesn't auto activate. You can use a Y cable and read the pak address into memory, then copy to a disk. 

Without a Y cable you do the same thing, but carefully pull the pak out and insert the disk controller between the two steps. You MUST insert the disk controller STRAIGHT in or there is a chance the power line can short to an adjoining line. If you look on a cartridge the power line is slightly shorter than the others to prevent this. Wouldn't hurt to trim that land on the disk controller back. There is a small risk of blowing the CPU (unless you trim the power land back), but many of us did it this way "back in the day".  


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Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2007 00:44:54 +1000
From: Mark McDougall <msmcdoug at iinet.net.au>

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?

-- 
Frank Swygert
Publisher, "American Motors Cars" 
Magazine (AMC)
For all AMC enthusiasts
http://farna.home.att.net/AMC.html
(free download available!)