[Coco] Altera DE1 CoCo3FPGA

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 10:47 AM, John Kent <jekent at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
>
>
> On 21/10/2010 12:47 AM, Robert Gault wrote:
>>
>> John,
>>
>> You will need to be more precise with your questions. As asked, "I've
>> forgotten though how to mount disk images under the CoCo BASIC", the
>> question is meaningless.
>> A real Coco does not use disk images but real floppies, 5.25 or 3.5".
>> Emulators running on advanced PCs use images and mounting of the disk images
>> is specific to individual emulators.
>>
>> I think you want to know how to mount a .dsk image in Drivewire but I
>> can't be sure. If that is what you meant, just start the Drivewire server
>> and click on the slots in the Drivewire image and a window should appear
>> asking for the location of a .dsk, .or9, or .vhd image.
>> If you are asking about mounting disk images with the Altera / TerASIC DE1
>> board, I haven't a clue.
>>
>> Robert
>>
>
> Hi Robert,
>
> Yes, basically I was asking how to mount disk images under drive wire.
>
> The CoCo3FPGA project is an FPGA (Field Programmamble Gate Array)
> implementation of the CoCo3 which has the hardware for the CoCo, GIME, VDG,
> CPU chips and all that programmed at it's basic logic level in Verilog and
> VHDL. Gary Becker designed all the video and keyboard logic and so on and I
> designed the CPU core.
>
> It has been implemented on two FPGA boards, the Digilent Xilinx Spartan 3
> starter board and the Terasic Altera Cyclone 2 DE1 board. The CoCo3FPGA is
> implemented entirely in silicon and does not have floppy disks as such. It
> runs on drive wire over an RS232 port. I've noted some post on this list
> regarding it, so I assumed that members of the list were familiar with it.
>
> I assumed the the BASIC ROM included some basic file management functions
> such as listing the files on the disk and loading and saving files but I
> guess that depends on the version of the ROM. I was wondering if there were
> any documents that covered the basic files commands of the CoCo. I didn't
> want to have to wade through the assembly code of the BASIC ROMs to work out
> what was going on.
>
> I would assume that the drive wire interface would allow a disk image from
> the PC file system to appear as a virtual floppy disk drive. The floppy disk
> image file used on the PC would be selected by the server software on the PC
> and the disk image appear as just another disk drive on the CoCo. i.e. just
> a tunnel between the PC and the CoCo.
>
> What I'm not familiar with is the BASIC commands for accessing the floppy
> drives.
>

Manuals, etc can be read at http://cococoding.com

Basic's main commands for disk access are:

DIR
LOAD"file.bas"
RUN"files.bas"
EXEC"file.bin"
DOS (which loads an operating system like os9 off disk)

There might be some others but those should get you started.


> John.
>
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>
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