[Coco] dw 3

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 2:34 AM, Frank Pittel <fwp at deepthought.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 01:49:03AM -0500, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>> >
>> > My thoughts exactly. A lot of this is possible via toolshed but it would be
>> > nice. :-) While I'm dreaming (:-)) it would be nice to be able use the ide
>>
>> I think this is already all possible using the dw4 mode.  If it is
>> not, I will do everything I can to make it possible and easy for you,
>> but I need to understand what is desired.  I am struggling here :)
>
> After sending this email I saw your post about how dw4 will allow copying from
> one .dsk image to another directly. That is truely an amazing capability and a
> major leap forward. I'm intersted in how I would copy a file from say virtual
> disk 1 on a given .dsk file to virtual disk 30 on another. From the syntax I saw
> in your example I get the impression I could only copy from say virtual disk 1
> in a .dsk image to another virtual disk 1 on another .dsk image. I hope I'm
> making sense.

I think this may reveal the crux of our misunderstanding.  In the new
dw4 mode, it's one drive and one disk per one .dsk file.  There are no
"virtual" disks.  DIR 30 gives you a directory of the disk inserted in
drive 30 in the DriveWire software, for instance mygames.dsk.  DIR 29
gives you the directory of the disk inserted in drive 29 in the
DriveWire software, maybe myapps.dsk.  Each .dsk file is one single 35
track floppy image.

You can still talk to the big files with 256 virtual disk images in
them in the standard dw3 mode.  If you like loading tons of disks at a
time, you can make the dw4 mode work a lot like the dw3 mode by
loading and saving disk sets instead of disks individually.  A disk
set does not contain any disk data itself, its just some text that
defines a mapping of drives to .dsk files or URLs.

>
> I think a big part of the problem is that we're all using the same words to mean
> different things and different words to mean the same thing and that's confusing
> all of us. :-) As a Unix sys admin I've found over the years in order to have a
> technical conversation we all need to agree on the meaning of words, terms and
> language. :-) Is it to late to agree on the meaning of terms and words. :-) It
> may speed things along.
>

Yes, it is confusing because we've overloaded the word 'drive'.  We
have the HDBDOS concept of "DRIVE #" being a collection of 256 disks,
and "DRIVE" being a disk inside that collection.  These then map to
DriveWire's "drives" which are pointers to individual files or URLs.
In the dw4 mode, "DRIVE #" does nothing, and "DRIVE" X = whatever is
inserted in DriveWire's drive X.  Essentially, the new mode makes
disks in DECB work exactly like they do in OS9 under dw3.

-Aaron