[Coco] DriveWire 3

[Joel Ewy]

Boisy,

First of all, thank you for this generous gift to the CoCo community.  
May it drive the sale of many cables and ROM cartridges.  In any case, 
it should help many existing users to stay in the CoCo game, and aid 
potential new and returning CoCo users in getting started, which can't 
be anything but good for all CoCo users and vendors.  We all benefit 
when more people use the CoCo.

Last night I made up a cable, burned DW3 into a 2764, and popped it into 
an old Disto Super Controller.  Works like a champ.  I'm using the 
Windows server for now, but will try out the Linux server and probably 
also the MacOS one eventually.

A couple questions:

1.  It appears to me that the only way to transfer files between server 
disk images in HDB-DOS is through real floppy disks on the CoCo.  E.g.  
I want to make a disk image for games and one for image files, etc.  I 
have individual disk image files on the server.  I can select said files 
with "drive#[0-3]".  I can automagically expand these disk image files 
by writing to a virtual drive number >0.  But once I've issued the 
"drive#" command, the virtual disks in the other image files on the 
server are inaccessible.  I could do a "drive#0", then "drive off 1" and 
copy data to a real floppy disk, assuming I have a floppy drive hooked 
up as drive 1.   Then I could do a "drive#1" command and "drive off 1" 
again, and then copy the data from the real floppy to a virtual disk on 
a different image file on the server.

Am I right in thinking that's the only way to do what I'm trying to do 
in HDB-DOS, or am I missing something?  It would be really cool to be 
able to do something like:  "backup 254#0 to 5#3" or "copy 
"hicolor.bin:254#0" to 5#3".

Just for fun I tried loading a ramdisk program that installed itself as 
drives 2 and 3.  I wanted to try using that as an intermediate location 
for moving files between disk images.  As I expected it stomped on 
DriveWire.  I haven't tried all of the ramdisk programs I have, but I 
suspect the result will be the same.

2.  Some concern has been expressed that since the CoCo 3 version of DW3 
runs the CoCo in high-speed mode, some auto-running games might be 
unplayably fast.  Would a potential solution to this simply be to use 
the CoCo 2 version and set the server accordingly?  (With the obvious 
caveat that it would only run at 56k...)

Thanks again for making this available.

JCE



Boisy Pitre wrote:
> As the saying goes, the only way to fight fire is with fire.
>
> So starting today, DriveWire 3 is now a free downloadable product from 
> Cloud-9.
>
> You can go to our website at http://www.cloud9tech.com/ and click on 
> the DriveWire announcement on the main page.  It will take you to the 
> DriveWire 3 page, where you can now download DriveWire HDB-DOS ROMs 
> for the CoCo 2 and CoCo 3.  Of course, you will need to burn your own 
> EPROM in order to take advantage of these images.
>
> For those of you who don't have an EPROM burner or cable, we've 
> dropped the price of our HDB-DOS ROM Pak to $20, and are still making 
> cables available for $10.
>
> The server software for Windows and Mac will go up sometime today.  
> The Linux server on SourceForge has been updated to handle the new 
> protocol features.
>
> Documentation and NitrOS-9 images will be go up this weekend.
>
> Regards,
> Boisy G. Pitre
> -- 
> Tee-Boy
> Mobile: 337.781.3570
> Email: boisy at tee-boy.com
> Web: http://www.tee-boy.com
>
>
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