[Coco] .cas & .bin files with drivewire

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 1:02 PM, John W. Linville
<linville at tuxdriver.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 09:24:48PM -0500, Robert Gault wrote:
>> Jeremy Michea wrote:
>>> I have a whole whack of .cas and .bin files on my PC that I'd like to use on a real coco but as far as I can tell, I can only use dsk files with drivewire. Is there a way to use cas and bin files directly with drivewire or is there a way to use an emulator to create a virtual dsk file out of these cas and bin files?
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> Jeremy
>>>
>>
>> You don't want to do either. CAS files must be played out through the PC
>> sound card into a tape recorder or directly into a Coco to use them on a
>> real Coco. BIN files need to be placed on a .dsk image which could then
>> be mounted in Drivewire.
>> There are several support programs associated with various emulator
>> packages to either play cas files directly or convert them to wav files.
>> Similar programs will put files onto .dsk images.
>
> True enough.  OTOH, it seems like a SMOP to make the DW server
> automate the creation of a (possibly virtual) disk image containing
> only a selected .BIN file.  An enhancement on top of that could be
> translating the contents of a .CAS file to a .BIN or .BAS file (as
> appropriate) for use with the previous suggestion.  Now, we just have
> to wait for Aaron to get bored with his new BBS... :-)
>

I don't know enough about how .bin/pak files work to be sure, but
don't they require a little more than just getting the bytes into a
file or ram?  I've heard tale of fancy bank switching techniques and
such.  If anyone wants to describe what's needed in a bit of detail,
I'm happy to give it a shot.

The "Toolshed" has great tools for manipulating .dsk images.  If there
is a way to turn a .bin or .cas into the sequence of bytes needed to
be a DECB or OS-9 file, the toolshed can certainly put those bytes
into a .dsk properly.  There may even be tools for that kind of thing
already in the toolshed, I'll have to take a look.

I'm not bored with it yet, but the BBS the website are down for now as
I'm using the CoCo quite a bit trying to help get a new version of
DriveWire ready.  Should be back to normal in a couple days I hope.
-Aaron

> John
> --
> John W. Linville                Someday the world will need a hero, and you
> linville at tuxdriver.com                  might be all we have.  Be ready.
>
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