[Coco] Trouble writing to CoCo floppies from PC

[Rogelio Perea]

On Wed Nov 26 2014, John Goerzen wrote:

So I have now managed to read all my CoCo floppies on PC, and I'm now trying
> to write some CoCo floppies.  This is proving harder.
>
> I used DSKINI.EXE from the COCO2EMU suite.  It went through the motions and
> seemed to work, but the resulting disks produce I/O errors on the CoCo.
>
> I had to set the BIOS to 720k instead of 360k for reading.  I also did this
> for writing, because at the 360k setting, it would appear to work fine for
> the first few tracks, and then generate a write error starting at track 16
> on any diskette I used.  (At the 720k setting, it appeared to write OK.)
>
> Is there a CoCo program that could, say, read a DSK image from audio and
> write it (slooooowly, I guess) to disk?  I don't have a CoCo serial cable,
> so I'm just wondering how I could get these wonderful CoCo programs that
> I've downloaded to the CoCo.
>

Spent my share of time going over the method you are using now (PORT &
DSKINI emulatro utilities) and my mileage did change depending mostly on
the PC hardware & software (OS: Windows 95/98/Me/XP) used, in my experience
I found that the newer the OS on the PC the less unrestricted access any
application had to the hardware, hence more weird problems here and there,
ended up keeping an old AT class machine with both a 5.25 and 3.5 floppy
drives to sneaker net CoCo files back and forth, eventually I stopped using
that setup year ago.

By far - and this was not until recently - the best way I have seen ever to
port CoCo files back and forth is the CoCo SDC card. I had tried Roger
Taylor's CoCoNet and Drivewire and those do work but nothing beats the
straight-out-of-the-box simplicity and of the SDC. If you have a Multipak
interface, the real CoCo disk controller can be used in conjunction to the
SDC card, any DSK image you have on the SD Card can be copied over to or
from a floppy disk, either file by file or with the BACKUP command.

-- RP