[Coco] Reading/Writing Model I/III/4 Disks on a CoCo

[Mark J. Blair]

I have a TRS-80 model 4p on the way from eBay, so now I'm trying to figure out how to bootstrap floppy images onto disks for it. I have not yet found something comparable to DriveWire for the CoCo or ADTpro for the Apple. So, this has me wondering whether I might be able to use my CoCo to create disks for the 4p from downloaded images, since that's the only thing I have at the moment that reads and writes 5.25" MFM diskettes. Don't anybody go and remind me about my little KryoFlux boondoggle just now. :)

So far, I haven't found much documentation about the low-level formats of the various model I/III/4 operating systems. Do any of y'all know whether any of those formats are compatible with the CoCo's disk controller and firmware? For example, would DSKI$/DSKO$ be able to read and write raw sectors on a TRSDOS 6.x floppy? I understand that the stock model 4p drives should be single-sided, but I'm not sure yet whether the default TRSDOS 6.x and LS-DOS 6.3 formats confine themselves to 35 tracks.

Has there been any prior work done towards reading/writing model I/III/4 disks on the CoCo or vice versa?


-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/