[Coco] How to trick Disk BASIC?, or Drivewire sans disk controller...

[Aaron Wolfe]

I run DriveWire with no floppy controller, MPI or anything except the
DW ROM with HDBDOS in it.  The rom pak i have came from Cloud9,
there's little in there except the eprom itself.  I think there should
be a way to do what you are trying to do.

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> I tried an experiment that hasn't yet achieved complete success.  Maybe
> somebody has some ideas about how to make it work.
>
> As a result of some discussion on the forum on coco3.com I decided to try
> modifying an Orchestra 90CC cart so that it could be used as a Drivewire
> client without a disk controller.  (
> http://www.coco3.com/community/2010/01/can-a-coco-3-sound-like-a-c64/comment-page-2/#comments
> )
>
> The ROM on my Orch 90 is a 28-pin ROM, which makes it easy to do this
> modification without a socket adapter.  I was successful in
> non-destructively desoldering the original ROM and installing a socket.  I
> then tested the Orch 90 with the original ROM put back in the socket.
>  William Tell Overture.
>
> Pin 26 on the Orch 90's ROM is left NC.  I wired it via a toggle switch to
> VCC and GND so I can select the upper 8K or lower 8K of a 27128 (16K) EPROM.
>  In one half of the EPROM I put a copy of the original Orchestra 90 ROM, and
> in the other half I put a copy of the Drivewire 3 HDB-DOS.
>
> When I switch it to Orch 90 it works fine.  But HDB-DOS apparently isn't
> happy that it isn't in an actual disk controller -- I don't get the Disk
> BASIC screen, but a garbled text screen.  The same thing happens if I put in
> a 2764 with the patched Disk BASIC out of a Disto Super Controller II -- the
> garbled screen looks identical.
>
> I assume that the Disk BASIC ROM is checking the floppy disk controller
> hardware and not finding what it expects.  Is there some sanity checking
> done in Disk BASIC that could be skipped if we just want to run from a
> Drivewire server and have no need of actually accessing real floppy drives?
>  One of the main objectives here is to do without real floppy drives,
> controller, or an MPI.
>
> JCE
>
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