[Coco] Coco drives single and double side question.

[Frank Swygert]

I recall that there was a "hack" to access the back sides of the drive with a jumper wire. It is unusual now, was used occasionally in the early days of the CoCo when surplus double sided 360K drives were just becoming available. I made the modification to my first double sided drive. Most people stopped using it because DECB could be modified to access the back, and the wire literally makes the drive two single sided drives -- always. Even OS-9 can only access those drives as two single sided drives. If you want to use OS-9 it would be better to remove the wire and modify DECB. Alternately, you can type in the modification as a program and put it on the "front" side of a disk. Then you can always load and run that program to access the "back" sides of the disks. Some programs won't run from the back side, as they use the RAM area of the CoCo and read from the ROMS (mostly CoCo2 programs), or they write to the drive they loaded from. Most should work though. 

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Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:41:18 -0500
From: Ghislain Harvey <ghislainharvey at videotron.ca>

Thank for this verry valuable info.
I think that was confused me is that My father (who own the coco3) Have the
DISTRO controller and 2 "hand made drive" they are not standard. They are
not tandy official drive.
I talk to him a bit and DECB isn?t supposed to be hacked. He say the is 2
special wired he connected to drive that allow access to the other side of
the disk when we DIR2/DIR3.
I checked and Indeed there are 2 wired numbered 1 and 0.
I may take a picture for people here today because it is very special and
unusual.

-- 
Frank Swygert
Publisher, "American Motors Cars" 
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