[Coco] Dragon SuperDos and Drivewire....

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 18 October 2012 17:47:50 Phill Harvey-Smith did opine:

> Hi All,
> 
> Here's the problem, I'd like to try dropping the Drivewire routines into
> SuperDos, so that that DragonDos disks could be accessed via a Drivewire
> server.
> 
> However at the lowest level I/O SuperDos deals with cylinders, heads and
> sectors, whereas DW is completely LBA based. Now SD does record the
> geometry of a disk in it's directory track, however this is track 20,
> this is of course read when a disk is first accessed as on a physical
> disk it is always in the same place c=20,h=0,s=1.
> 
> With the standard emulator format files which used interleaved sides,
> this will mean for a double sided image that the directory track will be
> in a different position to the single sided image, which would be a
> problem.
> 
> Is there a call in the currently existing DW protocol to get this
> information from the image ? Or to get the file data length of the
> image, even the max LBA sector number would give a hint.
> 
> Or if anyone has any suggestions of a way of dealing with this problem ?
> 
> As far as HDB-DOS goes, I gather from various things that I have heard
> on here that you can have up to 255 virtual disks, are these all
> accessible at the same time, or do you need to mount up to 4 images that
> act as if they where 4 physical drives ?
> 
> Cheers.
> 
> Phill.

AIUI Phill, HDBDOS only switches the first 4 drives in and out.  If the 
mechanical drives are 'out' then HDBDOS can, I believe, do a dir from any 
of those 255 virtual drives.  But to make sense, they need to be formatted 
in the rsdos format.

I don't use it much as rsbasic and I never willingly shared the sidewalk. 
;-)

Somebody else that knows far more than I will no doubt correct me. :)

Cheers, Gene
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