[Coco] The thrill of CoCo'ing again.

[Christopher Barnett Fox]

Evening, all,

After well over 20 years, I'm CoCo'ing again and loving it. I was a member of the Richmond (Virginia) Area Color Computer Organization (RACCO) back in the 1980's. Re-learning everything I once knew is very slow-going. Aging brain filled with too much minutiae, I'd guess.

Three things set me back on the CoCo path:

  1.  Finally setting aside the time to build an RGB to VGA solution for my CoCo3. I used a Wei-Ya AVC-011 converter, which required only a custom cable be constructed to create a reasonably crisp image. It's so much better than the CoCo3's composite out could manage! 80-column mode is finally legible! True, it's nowhere near as good as Luis's FPGA solution, but it's good enough for now.
  2.  The CoCoSDC: Thank you to Darren for designing this amazing CoCo enhancement, Zippster for making this run of boards, and Tim for the case. What an excellent package!
  3.  DriveWire: This is so cool it's almost eerie.

With these three things, I've reached a state where I expect to pick up steam re-learning fairly quickly. A few questions, though,

  1.  I have access to DriveWire, CoCoSDC, and a single FD-502 drive. With this configuration, is it possible to:
     *   Copy a real floppy (Double-sided? Either DECB or OS-9 Lvl 2 formatted?) to either a DSK image on the CoCoSDC or DriveWire?
     *   Copy a DSK image from either DriveWire or CoCoSDC to my single FD-502 to make a real floppy?
     *   (I have a number of old OS-9 Lvl 2 boot disks that assume a two double-sided floppy drive system.)
     *   There's no way to get the DOS command to boot from anything but Drive 0?
     *   There's no way to get either DECB to read and copy double-sided, or to get Nitros9 booted from CoCoSDC or DriveWire to see my single FD-502 drive, since it's physical drive 0?
  2.  DriveWire 4 on OS X Yosemite crashes often. What's the most stable environment for running DriveWire? I have plenty of hardware and operating systems at my disposal, and am comfortable with all versions of Windows, Linux distributions, and OS X.

Thanks for your help, everyone. This is an amazing community.

Christopher