[Coco] Real floppy + CocoSDC + DW & Nitros9, and other sundry ?s

[Christopher Fox]

Fellow Coconauts,

A few questions (I know some of which may have already been answered on the list, but my query-fu is weak today).

1. Is it possible to have access to real floppies, CocoSDC and DriveWire all in one Nitros9 session or from RS-DOS? I’m looking for ways to grab backups of my physical media before they suffer some horrible bitrot. Guessing I’d back up as .dsk format somehow? I do have a Coco 3-upgraded MPI.

2. Looking at the Nitros9 repository of built dsk images, I see both “*_becker.dsk” and “*_dw.dsk” variants, but under Format both are listed as for “DriveWire 3/4”. What’s the difference?

3. What’s the latest stable version of Nitros9 that’s considered the “community standard”, i.e. what most are running? In the sourceforge release folder<http://sourceforge.net/projects/nitros9/files/releases/>, I see v3.3.0 as the latest, last modified April 2014?

4. What’s the latest working version of DriveWire, and what host environment have you found to be most stable? I do have an idle RaspPi (RaspPi 1 Model B), if there’s a suitable packaged environment. I recall someone might’ve been working on one?

5. I understand it’s possible to build Nitros9 and many other packages from source. If I wanted to dabble in this space, is the documentation available here<http://sourceforge.net/p/nitros9/wiki/Building_NitrOS9/> still current?

Thanks so much for your time and assistance, everyone!

Christopher