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

[Boisy G. Pitre]

Christian,

Yes I would.  I take that it would be 7 POKEs and an EXEC?

BTW, Darren Atkinson sent me an email with the following:

--

Hi Boisy, 

I agree that having to enter a program by hand to bootstrap HDB-DOS would be too painful.  Nevertheless, it is possible to restore the DLOAD command to full functionality on the CoCo 3.  Here is a BASIC program that I use to do this.  Of course, pressing the RESET button destroys DLOAD again.


10 CLEAR 50,&H7EFF:A = &H7F00
20 READ B$:IF B$="XX" THEN 50
30 B=VAL("&H"+B$):POKE A,B
40 A=A+1:GOTO 20
50 POKE 53040,127:POKE 53041,3
100 DATA BD,A4,29,9D,A5,80,4D,34
110 DATA 02,26,02,9D,9F,BD,A5,78
120 DATA 9D,A5,27,18,BD,B2,6D,81
130 DATA 2C,27,11,BD,B7,0B,86,B0
140 DATA 5D,27,07,86,2C,5A,10,26
150 DATA 35,20,97,E6,BD,8C,D0,34
160 DATA 02,86,FD,97,6F,35,02,6D
170 DATA E0,27,0F,BD,A5,C7,5D,27
180 DATA 06,BD,AD,19,7E,AC,7C,7E
190 DATA A6,16,7E,8C,85,XX
200 PRINT "DLOAD RESTORED"


Merry Christmas,
Darren

On Dec 23, 2009, at 12:10 PM, Christian Lesage wrote:

> Boisy,
> 
> Let's say I come up with a solution that consists of 7 magic POKEs to type in on the CoCo 3. Would you consider it?
> 
> Christian
> 
> 
> Boisy G. Pitre wrote:
>> 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
>> 
>>  
> 
> 
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--
Boisy G. Pitre
http://www.tee-boy.com/