[Coco] Your stock CoCo is DriveWire-ready out-of-the-box (was: DriveWire for dummies?)

[Boisy G. Pitre]

Christian,

This is an interesting approach, but it has some caveats as you mentioned.  And the fact that it must be typed every time you power up the CoCo.  You could save it to cassette, but then, why not use the DriveWire cassette loader in that case?

The goal is to maximize the number of people who can get a real CoCo connected to their computers in a usable fashion, while minimizing the number of steps and the additional hardware necessary to do it (which minimizes hassle too).

If all CoCos had FLASH instead of ROM, this wouldn't even be an issue :)  But we have to deal with the designs that are baked in.  And even the DLOAD approach would require additional steps on the CoCo 3 because of the munged code in the BASIC ROM.

So far, it's either with a cassette cable and drivewire cable, or a ROM pak and drivewire cable. The lack of availability of ROM paks (and the necessity of burning ROMs) makes the cassette cable and drivewire cable approach the most universal one, in my opinion.

Boisy

On Dec 23, 2009, at 10:34 AM, Christian Lesage wrote:

> Here is a short program that lets a CoCo 3 accept input from the bit banger port instead of the keyboard:
> 
> 1 READ N,AH$,AL$:IF N=0 THEN 5
> 2 A=VAL("&H"+AH$+AL$)
> 3 FOR I=A TO A+N-1:READ D$:POKE I,VAL("&H"+D$):NEXT I
> 4 GOTO 1
> 5 DATA 2,,F6,2C,2,1,8D,C2,F7,1,8D,FC,F6,1,A1,C1,39,1,A1,99,39,5,A1,CB,86,1,7E,8D,BD,,,
> 
> It is under 200 characters if you remove the spaces. It allows you to remote-control the CoCo 3.
> 
> Speed is 1200 baud. The cursor is disabled because of the delay it would impose between two characters. There is one catch: you lose input characters when the screen scrolls. Just don't let that happen, i.e., send a CLS, wait a little bit, send a BASIC line, wait for the interpreter to crunch it, and then repeat that sequence until your program has been uploaded completely. Then RUN it.
> 
> The idea is that the DriveWire server could send a BASIC program that would restore the DLOAD command. (In fact, the first four lines of the previous program could be reused for that purpose, only the DATA portion needs to be updated.) I do have a DLOAD patch somewhere for the CoCo 3; just let me find it and I will post it.
> 
> Christian
> 
> 
> Boisy G. Pitre wrote:
>> I don't know if it's acceptable to type a 200 character BASIC program each time you power on the computer, but hey, i'll listen :)
>> 
>> It sounds interesting enough... provide some details...
>> 
>> On Dec 23, 2009, at 8:59 AM, Christian Lesage wrote:
>> 
>>  
> 
> 
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Boisy G. Pitre
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