[Coco] Drivewire for dummies?

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Robert Gault
<robert.gault at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Jeremy Michea wrote:
>>
>> Ok, I'll admit when I read the threads and posts here they're all pretty
>> much way over my head :)
>>
>> So basically what I want to do is play games on my coco and am trying to
>> find the easiest cheapest solution. Disk drives are about impossible to find
>> so I tried cocotape which works fine for some games but not others.
>>

Honestly for casual use, you might find running one of the emulators
available a simpler way to go.
These run a "virtual" coco right on your modern PC or Mac, complete
with virtual disk drives, etc.

>> Will drivewire be that cheap easy solution to just transfer disk images or
>> .bin files over to play the games? I tried reading the manual online at the
>> cloud9 site and sadly, it seems too complicated for my feeble old brain to
>> grasp. Can someone dumb it down for me and let me know if this isn't the
>> best solution for what I'm looking to do, what is?
>>
>> Thanks from the technically challenged :)
>>
>
> Drivewire or other similar programs will require a disk controller because
> the software is a patched Disk ROM. If you already have a disk system, you
> could load Drivewire from disk, but if you had a disk system you would not
> need Drivewire.
> It is kind of a Catch-22 situation as disk controllers are harder to find
> than drives.
>
> So, if Drivewire is what you want, just buy a disk controller with Drivewire
> from Cloud-9. You will then be able to use your PC's hard drive as a
> platform for Coco disk images. Drivwire permits each disk image on the PC to
> be used by the Coco as if it were a real Coco drive.
>

You can use DriveWire in two ways without any disk controller.  One is
to get a ROM pak with one of the DriveWire roms in it.  However, there
is another option which does not require any hardware (other than a
coco cassette cable).  Boisy has created a .WAV file of the DriveWire
code that can be loaded via the cassette port and EXECed.  You can
play the .WAVs from your PC or an MP3 player.  In this way, you
wouldn't need any hardware at all!  Maybe he can elaborate on this
option.

> You can't "transfer" disk images "over" to the Coco unless you actually have
> a Coco disk system with drives. You imply you don't.
> What you do is load programs from the disk image on the PC into the Coco
> memory and run the programs.
>
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