[Coco] Coco Flash

[Barry Nelson]

> Rietveld Rietveld rietveldh at hotmail.com  <mailto:coco%40maltedmedia.com?Subject=Re%3A%20%5BCoco%5D%20Coco%20Flash&In-Reply-To=%3CDM5PR14MB13066996F36BE374E3D80D85B61F0%40DM5PR14MB1306.namprd14.prod.outlook.com%3E>
> Mon Apr 24 00:12:54 EDT 2017
> 
> I have both the SDC and now the Flash pak. The SDC is great. Iy emulates the disk drive and let's me access all my. Dsk files.
> The flash pak let's me 'own' all of the program paks without really owning them.   That is I can download the. Bins and install them all onto one pak.    With the built in menu I can load any pak as easily as I could if I owned them individually.
> With the SDC I load a disk image that contains a copy of the rom pak but the disk image is limited by size and can not obviously hold all 72 pak roms. So you end up having to insert different. Dsk's that contain the pak rom you want to run
> The real advantage, at least for me, is to have all of the rom pak images available at one time
The CoCo SDC and the CoCo Flash do different things.

The CoCo SDC’s primary purpose is to emulate a disk drive. The SDC has flash rom functionality, but it is limited. It can only hold 8 roms at any one time, and all 8 slots are 16k. You can not load more than 8 roms into a CoCo SDC, no matter how small they are, and you can not load roms larger than 16k either. The flash rom banks in the CoCo SDC are intended mainly for loading alternate disk controller rom images, not games, although you can get some game roms to run from there.

The CoCo Flash was designed and built with the intention that almost any rom cartridge can be loaded into it, even games that are larger than 16k that included special rom banking hardware and run in their original unpatched form. It’s disk support though is almost non-existent and is limited to being able to load and run a DriveWire rom image. The two products complement each other.

I hope the formatting on this text table makes it onto the mailing list.

					CoCo Flash			CoCo SDC
Is compatible with all disk software	No				Yes
Is compatible with all rom software	Yes				No
Max number of rom images supported	2046				8
Runs 2k roms				Yes (takes up 4k)		Yes (takes up 1 of 8 16k slots)
Runs 4k roms				Yes				Yes (takes up 1 of 8 16k slots)
Runs 8k roms				Yes				Yes (takes up 1 of 8 16k slots)
Runs 16k roms				Yes				Yes
Runs 32k roms				Yes				No
Runs 64k roms				Yes				No
Runs 128k roms				Yes				No
Runs 256k roms				Yes (None yet exist)		No
Runs game roms				Yes				Yes (you may need to type EXEC &HC000 or EXEC &HE010)
Runs DOS roms				Yes (but no disk hardware)	Yes (with full disk emulation)
Emulates a floppy controller		No (but you can run DriveWire)	Yes
Emulates a hard drive			No (but you can run DriveWire)	Yes