[Coco] SDC and drivewire images...

[Michael Christopher Robinson]

Gauntlet II is available as a disk image, how do I get that onto an
SDC?

I have a box of old 5.25" 360K floppies.  They may still work, but I
don't have a 360k disk drive anymore.  They are way past end of life.
The 512k upgrade came with a 5.25 inch disk with a test program on it.
Again, no longer have a disk drive that's compatible.  An IBM PC
running Windows 98SE has a 5.25" high density disk drive that might 
be able to read COCO disks with the right program.  COCO disks are
formatted differently than Windows 98 floppies were.

I have a drivewire 2 cartridge from Cloud9, and I'm running drivewire 2
via Windows Emulator on a modern AMD FX Linux computer.

I've lost two favorite progams that were on disk, Flight Simulator I
and The Sands of Egypt.  Still have the disks for those programs, but
they may not read even if I had a 360k disk drive.  If I get an SDC, I
want The Sands of Egypt and FLigh Simulator I loaded onto it.

Thoughts on doing a modern color computer follow:

Consider a COCO 1/2/3 compatible 16 bit computer.  This could 
be called the COCO 4.  The real test, run proprietary programs for 
the COCO 2 and COCO 3 at the correct speed.  There is the possibility
of doing a 32 bit or 64 bit computer also.  Isn't the color computer
completely out of copyright now?  With Radio Shack going bankrupt, 
it should be no problem to make a modern clone and call it a COCO.  
The clone should fix the PMODE 4 problem that the COCO 3 had.  On 
the COCO 3 Pmode 4 is in black and white.  As I understand it, the
COCO 3 had a design flaw that drove Radio Shack to abandon it.  
Imagine  a computer with an 8 bit mode that can emulate a COCO 3 
fully at normal speed or super high speed.  The 16 bit version 
can support up to 64 megs of ram.  A 32 bit version can support 
4 gigs of ram.  Do a 64 bit COCO clone, you can support as much 
memory as the current IBM clones.  Considering that multiple core
computers are common now, how about a multi core computer where 
one core is the 6809 or 6309 and another core is the modern 64 
bit computer?  For simplicity, one could have a standard 6809 
processor that can parallel process with a 64 bit cpu.  Essentially,
build a COCO3 without the problems that the original had and be able
to turn on a 16/32/64 bit processor in parallel to do modern 
computing.  A color computer 6809 parallel processing with a 64 bit
ARM processor might be interesting.

A modern COCO clone can use a standard ATX tower where you can have 
one 8 bit slot like the COCO 3 has and a higher bandwidth slot times 
3, say a 32 bit PCI slot.  Programs can come on cartidges with a PCI
connector or an 8 bit ISA connector and one 3.5" slot can house an 
SDC.  A floppy controller that is COCO 3 compatible can be integrated
onto the modern COCO motherboard.  Drivewire support integrated 
into flash memory on the motherboard in case you want to hook to a
drivewire server via serial port.  For the COCO 1/2/3 ports, have a
USB based box that provides them.  This way you can use COCO style
joysticks or switch to USB based joysticks.  Integrate a gigabit
network card that can be software disabled or that disables
automatically in COCO 3 mode.  Run in 16/32/64 bits mode at 2.0+ Ghz.

A COCO clone should work without a hard disk or SSD.  Port a full
graphical interface to the clone, like FLTK.  Make Freedos 1.2 work 
on this clone.  Port Linux to this clone.  Consider a Freedos 1.2
porting with FLTK into flash memory integrated onto the motherboard.
Most important, get a grass roots effort going to publish a magazine
like the Rainbow electronically.