[Coco] Questions about SuperIDE

[Rick Taylor]

Ok, so, I've got a restore/put it in a PC case project going on. What I want
when I finish:
- a coco in a PC case
- with a hard drive of some sort, running some flavor of OS/9, NitrOS/9 be
better. an RSDOS partition would be good, too
- capable of running a terminal session on a serial port
- capable of using drivewire

What I have :

- a coco 3 with a 512k expansion board
- a very, very fragile RLL ST-250R which Boisy will be getting to put on a
CD
- multiple known good floppy drives, and a FD-502
- a multi pak, board only, running off the PC power supply
- an MFM drive, and a controller coming in the mail (WD1002, MFM version)
- the cocoXT expansion board
- a modem pak about halfway to being a rs232 pak, and a bunch of Max232
chips
- a soldering iron
- a six pack of sierra nevada pale ale


Currently we've got the MFM drive sorta working but with an RLL conroller,
which is of course bad, and unreliable, and old hardware to boot, so I'm
thinking of canceling that effort.

What I'm thinking of doing is getting the SuperIDE controller, which will be
too big to fit in my PC case with the multi pak, using the multi pak with
the FD-502 and floppies long enough to get the superIDE set up with a hard
drive with RSDOS and OS/9 partitions (kind of like the vcc demo hard drive
is), and then, once the SuperIDE is sufficiently set up, ditching the floppy
drive and multi-pak board entirely, and running the SuperIDE on a Y cable
with the RS232 pak.

This should give me the capability to run Drivewire on the bitbanger port,
which means I can still load 'floppies', and also have a shell session on
the RS232 pak, which will give me the telnet type ability I want.

So, my questions are:
- will this be a viable setup?
- are the RS232 pak and the SuperIDE are going to play well together on a Y
cable?
- Am I going to run into problems if my Y cable is too long? What's the
maximum length I should go for here?

Thanks! If I'm not clear enough on what I'm doing let me know and I'll try
to explain more.

BTW, pics of the windmill I am tilting at are here :

http://s145.photobucket.com/albums/r226/coder32768/CoCo%20in%20a%20PC%20Case/