[Coco] Still having newbie issues

[Greg Law]

Stephen Pereira wrote:

> Hello again, all,
>
> I am still having a problem with two programs that I can get to work on 
> the VCC emulator, running on my MacBook Pro in Windows XP on Parallels, 
> but I cannot get them to work on my physical system.  One program is Zork 
> I, and the other is Disk EDTASM.  Both of these .DSK files have been 
> downloaded from the Color Computer Archive.
>
> My physical system is a CoCo 3, recently purchased from Cloud-9.  I made 
> up an EPROM cartridge, and I have HDB-DOS in EPROM, also purchased from 
> Cloud-9.  I am using Drivewire 3 at the moment, served up on a Dell Mini 
> laptop running Windows XP.  Everything works great in this setup, but I am 
> stymied by the fact that I cannot get these two programs to work, even 
> though both do work just fine with the VCC emulator.
>
> I even went and purchased a Tandy FD-500 floppy disk controller ($50 plus 
> $10 shipping on eBay) so that I could power up with Disk Extended Color 
> Basic to start, then CLOADM HDB-DOS into my machine so I would have all 
> the original CoCo ROMs in place, and HDB-DOS in RAM.  Still no dice.
>
> I realize this is a trivial thing in the big picture, but why can I get 
> Zork II and Zork III to run fine (now that I have my EPROM cartridge 
> properly configured and running correctly) but not Zork I?  What is it 
> about my setup that I cannot run Disk EDTASM?
>
> I would greatly appreciate any ideas that you folks might be able to 
> offer.  Thanks, in advance, for all your attention and assistance!

Disk EDTASM loads its own version of DOS into memory and bypasses the ROM 
code, so this is likely why it doesn't work. I can't remember the name of it 
offhand, but if you dump the BIN file you'll see the name in there 
somewhere.