[Coco] CoCo Flash

[Brett Gordon]

Very cool. This can be flashed from the coco?   This would be a perfect
device for a ROM disk driver for YA-DOS, or even HDBDOS.  How hard would it
be to make something like this do RAM?

Brett M Gordon
On Feb 6, 2016 9:47 AM, "Barry Nelson" <barry.nelson at amobiledevice.com>
wrote:

>  I thought I would mention that after coordinating some firmware changes
> with Jim Brain, I have been successful at writing some software for his
> CoCo Flash multi-cart board. Jim had mentioned to me that he intends to
> show off this new cartridge at the CoCo fest. At the current time the
> software allows loading up to 32k cartridge images into the flash rom,
> which can be either DOS images such as HDBDOS or other cartridge images
> such as games, etc. The default bank has a menu programmed in that prompts
> you to select which DOS or cartridge you want to start. That cartridge
> remains active until you either power cycle the computer, or hold the reset
> button down longer than about 1 second, either of which actions returns you
> to the selection menu. The selection menu is actually written in BASIC and
> is easily edited and customized. The menu is loaded from the first bank of
> the CoCo Flash by a special machine code loader program that loads the menu
> and starts it. I plan to fully document how it all works to allow the end
> users to easily customize the menu and the cartridge to their system. In
> the future I want to see if I can load a ram disk image from the rom
> cartridge, and have a program to save the modified image back to the rom.
> Each bank is 4k in size, there are a total of 2048 banks for a size of 8
> megs. As an example my own cartridge currently has the following software
> loaded:
>
> Bank#s  Program
> 0-1     Menu program, currently only bank 0 is used, bank 1 is reserved
> for expanding the menu.
> 2-3     HDBDOS
> 4-5     Dungeons of Dagorath
> 6-7     Wildcatting
> 8-11    EDTASM+
> 12-15   Tetris
> 16-19   Demon Attack
> 20-23   Shanghai
> 24-27   Thexder
> 28-35   Arkanoid, 32k rom, started by selecting bank 32
> 36-43   Rampage, 32k rom, started by selecting bank 40
> 44-51   RAD Warrior, 32k rom, started by selecting bank 48
>
> This is only an example of what can be done. In addition to loading
> cartridges, on a CoCo 3 it should be possible to actually replace the BASIC
> rom as well by placing your own copy of BASIC in a 32k cartridge image. On
> a CoCo 1 and 2, only 16k of rom is accessible however. I welcome any
> comments or thoughts as I continue to develop the software for this
> interesting piece of hardware. My daughter has also been as assisting me in
> writing some of the software, currently the menu program only display one
> selection screen, she will be adding the programming needed to display
> multiple pages of selections. Also needed is a utility to help plan the
> layout of the cartridge, and work with ccc files. As the flash rom is 8
> megs, I have so far only used a fraction of the space available, and even
> if I add the ram disk image support, it will be challenging to use all the
> space.
>
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