[Coco] Newbie questions

[Robert Gault]

Sean Margules wrote:
>    For the life of me I'm not sure what RGB dos is good for, because it doesn't seem to recognize anything in the disk drives. When I type "dir" The screen comes back with "drive = 0             free=68". It does apparently read the hard drive
>   though ("dir 255" shows OS-9 hard drive boot and it works).

Sean,

Both RGBDOS and HDBDOS are replacements for the Tandy Disk ROM which permit 
access to hard drives. These hard drives (real or simulated) are formatted to be 
equivalent to first an OS-9 partition and then 256 separate 35-track normal 
(Disk Basic) disks.
Both of these DOS default to having all of the 256 "drives" active at boot. That 
means you can't access any of the 0-3 floppy drives until you issue a command to 
switch to floppies for those drives.
DRIVE OFF    - drives 0-3 floppies 4-255 hard
DRIVE OFF n  - n=0-3 drives 0-n floppies
ex DRIVE OFF 1  - drives 0-1 floppies 2-255 hard drive
DRIVE ON     - drives 0-255 hard

There are many other advantages to RGBDOS but the main one is having both a 
large OS-9 "drive" and 256 Disk Basic "drives" all running at the same time.

A simple Google search for these dos will give you all the information you need 
to use them. The pdf included with VCC is out of date and the reference to 
RGBDOS should now be
http://aaronwolfe.com/robert.gault/Coco/Downloads/Downloads.htm
Or you can go to the documentation at
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/ROMS/RGBDOS/Readme.txt
The similar HDBDOS is at
http://www.frontiernet.net/~mmarlette/Cloud-9/Support/HDB-DOS%20User%20Manual.pdf

Robert