[Coco] DW4 beta 1.4

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 10:36 AM, Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Darren A <mechacoco at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 3/13/10, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>> > On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 9:00 AM, Jason Law wrote:
>> >
>> >> I've had a bit of a look at it, so it's all Nitros9 yeah?
>> >>
>> >>
>> > Yes
>> >
>>
>> The DW4 server will still support the Disk I/O features in HDB-DOS, correct?
>>
>
>
> Yes.  DW4 does everything that DW3 does and uses the same ROMs and protocol to do it.  It is 100% compatible (unless I've made a mistake, and in that case I will try to fix it :)  DW4 just doesn't offer any significant *new* features that can be accessed without OS-9, nor does it improve existing features for a BASIC user.
>
> In fact, the user interface at this point requires OS9 as the UI is provided via OS-9 commands (this will hopefully be augmented with a web interface in the near future but OS9 commands will always remain a very useful way to configure DW4).
>
> I would probably not recommend DW4 for a BASIC/DOS system, as there seems to be no compelling reason to change and DW3 works very well.  However, it will provide all of the same functionality as DW3 in a basically identical way if you do choose to use it this way.
>

PS -  I don't mean to sound anti-BASIC :)  I was a BASIC user for my
first 27 years with the CoCo.  If I could make the new features work
for BASIC I certainly would, however my hands are tied by the fact
that the routines BASIC uses to talk to the DW server are in the
HDB-DOS ROMs you already have, and so they are not able to be easily
changed.   In the interest of making the new features work with all
the existing ROMs out there, I was limited to OS-9.  There we can
extend the protocol any time we want because our routines are just OS9
drivers.

If someone is interested in making a new HDB-DOS rom and can create
ROM routines to handle the protocol extensions and provide some sort
of BASIC interface, I'd be happy to work with them to try and bring
the new features to BASIC as well.


>>
>> Darren
>>
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>