[Coco] working with physical floppy drives under NitrOS-9 via DriveWire

[Barry Nelson]

 I checked and the latest NitrOS9 DriveWire bootable image available appears to have full floppy disk support for devices d0, d1, and d2. It is available here: http://www.nitros9.org/latest/nos96809l2v030300coco3_dw.dsk
You should be able to just access /d0, etc, like normal. I believe the drive descriptors for the floppies are setup for double sided 40 track disk, and should work with 35 track single and double sided disks also. If you need 80 track support, you will need to use the dmode command to change the floppy device descriptors. I have used my recently downloaded local copy of this disk to copy DriveWire disk to physical floppies, and vice versa.

> Chris Oliver chris.w.oliver at me.com 
> Sun Oct 18 07:43:08 EDT 2015
> 
> All,
> 
> I leverage HDB-DOS (burned onto an eprom in slot 1 of the MPI) to DOS to the latest Coco1 NitrOS-9 disk image (that has been loaded into the Disk 0 slot in DriveWire).  Loads up great.  Can work with virtual drives (/X1, etc.) perfectly fine.
> 
> So — now I want to be able to access the physical floppies.  I have the orig 3029 Tandy controller, with a pair of the orig Tandy floppy drives.  Is there any way to run NitrOS-9 via DriveWire, and yet be able format and use physical floppies?  Would be great if I wasn’t restricted to virtual drives…
> 
> Very curious — let me know!
> 
> Chris