[Coco] Newbie questions

[Nick Marentes]

Sean Margules <s_man501 at ...> writes:


> I CAN use an external HDBDOS ROM image to access drivewire and then type
"DOS" to boot a drivewire compatible
> Nitros9 boot disk in the 0 disk slot of the drivewire server.
> 
> I CAN'T figure out how to run any games or programs from the FD-502 drive
or the drivewire drives when I'm
> already inside Nitros9. I can "dir /d0" to see whats there. I even figured
out how to "chx /d0/cmds" but the
> system freezes when I try to use what one would think would be the boot
command (Sierra, AutoEx, etc.)


If you are a complete newbie, then you should start at the very beginning.

HBD-DOS, Dricvewires and Nitros-9 is startinbg at the end and you will get
turned off by the whole affair before even getting started. I know of a few
people who did just that and ran away with negative impressions of the CoCo.

First of all, start with a standard Tandy RS-DOS ROM and avoid Nitros-9 or
OS-9 until youy get to grips with the general "CoCo way of doing things".

This will allow all the RS-DOS games to work too.

You may find, you don't need HDB-DOS and drivewire on an emulator (VCC) so
much until you start wanting to access hard drive partitions.

And I suspect your drivewire has been configured to run as hard drive by
default which is why you're having trouble with games. There should be a
setting in the Drivewire server to turn on "HDB-DOS Translation". This will
treat the floppy drives back to the original mode.

OS-9/Nitros-9 is not user friendly from a newbie point of view unless you've
had some exposure to Unix like command line environments.

Nick