[Coco] Program to manipulate .DSK images

[Allen Huffman]

> On Jan 13, 2015, at 8:17 PM, Zippster <zippster278 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I have a few questions about available software if anyone knows.
> 
> Is there a piece of software out there to mount / copy files to and from
> CoCo .DSK images on the PC or Mac?  Looking for an easy way to do
> this.

I am using toolshed. It has “decb” and “os9” commands for copying to/from a disk like this:

alsmb:asm allenh$ decb dir DRIVE0.DSK,
DRIVE0   ---  0  B  1
ASMTEST  BIN  2  B  1
ASMTEST  BAS  0  B  1
ASMTEST2 BAS  0  B  1

The syntax is weird because you put in the disk image, path. If there is no path (root) you have to put the comma. I put files to .dsk images in a script file:

decb copy -2 -r -b ASMTEST.BIN DRIVE0.DSK,ASMTEST.BIN

It works great.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/toolshed/ <http://sourceforge.net/projects/toolshed/>

I am using it to automate assembling (lwasm) and putting on a .dsk image to then run in an emulator.

> Also, what’s the best serial communications app for the CoCo side
> for doing xmodem file transfers and the like?  This would be for a
> CoCo2. 

Greg-E-Term was it for the CoCo 1/2 for me. There were others before that, but Greg-E-Term was the best (I think) since it supported high res graphics screens to get 51 columns (or other widths) with upper and lowercase.

> And last, is there a piece of software (coco side) to reroute keyboard input and
> screen output (text) through the serial port so that you can control the
> CoCo using a serial terminal as a console?  If so, what os’s can be made
> available?

Remote terminal drivers. There was a famous one printed in Rainbow, called REMOTE2 or something. It taps in to key in/key out on the CoCo side and echos it to the 4-pin DIN. It’s the type of program BBSes in BASIC would use. There are also XMODEM programs you could run, so you could open up HyperTerminal on the PC, type and program on the CoCO remotely, XMODEM to up/download files, etc. Me and my Sub-Etha Software partner Terry used to stay up all night co-programming on the same CoCo this way, while talking voice on another line. Great times.

I can find a copy of REMOTE if you want, and have a much better one for the CoCo 3.

		— Allen