[Coco] Hello and a few questions

[farna at att.net]

Louis, what Gene was trying to convey is that the CoCo DOES use standard IBM drives. You just need a controller and a cable with the correct connector for the controller (an edge card connector for a CoCo controller). Tandy used a flat cable with no twist in it, but the IBM cable with twist can be used with one or two drives. A flat cable is preferred so that the back sides of a standard double sided drive can be used. Tandy used a different method for accessing the back side and a cable with a twist will not work for that.

All you need is a Coco disk controller and a 360K IBM type floppy drive to read your old Coco disks. That the CoCo would use standard IBM drives is one reason I bought my first one. CoCo disk controllers shouldn't be hard to find or cost more than building your own. 

If you have an IBM compatible computer with a 5.25" drive you could read the coco disks with it and use Drivewire to transfer to the CoCo over the serial port. Someone else will have to help you with that though, I don't use Drivewire or a CoCo any more. You could also use one of the emulators on the IBM compatible and read the disks with it, I think. 

The CoCo will need a 360K drive, which can be hard to find now. The 1.2MB drives can usually read a CoCo disk on an IBM clone, but don't write to that disk with one. If you do a Coco wouldn't be able to read it any more. You can use 720K 3.5" drives also, but only OS-9 will use all the capacity. 

The standard CoCo drive was a 160K single sided drive, but it will work with a 189K single sided or 360K double sided just fine. The CoCo just "sees" one side and 160K regardless unless it has been modified to read 40 instead of 35 tracks.


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Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:49:57 -0500
From: Louis Ciotti <lciotti1 at gmail.com>

My main reason for wanting to get an IBM type drive is to read my old
COCO floppies directly on my COCO2.  And since I cannot currently
locate a COCO Floppy, I figured if someone had gotten an IBM drive
working on a COCO I could do this.  All of my floppies were used under
Disk Extended Color Basic.



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