[Coco] A CoCoSDC alternative to the Drive Switch button

[Guillaume Major]

Hi Robert,

In case you didn't know, I have created Coco SDC versions of many OS-9 
games. They are all running NitrOS-9 including level 1 games. You can get 
them from the archive:

Level 1 games : 
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Disks/Coco%20SDC/OS-9/Level%201/Games/
Level 2 games: 
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Disks/Coco%20SDC/OS-9/Level%202/Games/

Drivewire and Becker port versions are also available.

Guillaume



"Robert Gault"  a écrit dans le message de groupe de discussion : 
5CD1E0DD.2090604 at att.net...

  The CoCoSDC has a button on the circuit board that when pushed can swap 
mounted disks on drive #0.
That is better than an actual disk swap on a Coco but is almost impossible 
with the wrong type of
case for your CoCoSDC.

  Some OS-9 programs such as Interbank Incident by Tandy were designed to 
run from a hard drive as
well as the floppies that come with the game. Using the COPYBANK command 
that comes with the game,
you can set up, for example, the directories /DD/Games/IBI and 
/DD/Games/IBI/CMDS and transfer the
contents of the three game disks to these directories on your hard drive.
  I have found it convenient to copy the .vhd I use with MESS and VCC to the 
CoCoSDC. I have worked
out two methods for running IBI on the CoCoSDC without disk swaps or button 
pushes. The first has
the .vhd mounted in drive0 and an IBI boot disk in drive1. The second has 
the boot disk in drive0
and the .vhd in drive1. I suspect that anyone wanting to use the .vhd and 
HDBDOS on the CoCoSDC will
have a .cfg file with the .vhd in drive0 so I'll describe that.

  So, the new boot disk takes somewhat more work with the .vhd in drive0 but 
here is how it can be
done. First the game is a LevelI V2 OS-9 product and probably won't run 
under our current NitrOS-9
LevelII systems. That means you need the software in the original OS9Boot 
file. Luckily the LevelI
versions of rbsuper and llcocosdc work with OS-9 LevelI V2. Unfortunately 
Boot needed to be changed
to work with drive1 instead of the default drive0.
  I extracted Boot from T34 on the disk, disassembled it, and change all 
input to $FF40 to drive1,
and placed Boot back in T34. OS9Boot was separated into it's modules and I 
deleted D0, RS232, T1,
PRINTER, and P (as my Coco just has 512K and I did not an Out of Memory 
error) and merged the rest
with rbsuper, llcocosdc, and ddsd0_cocosdc (renamed to H0) into a new 
OS9Boot file.
  You can use dEd to change $44,$C4 (DD) to $48,$B0 (H0) in the ddsd0 file 
as the game docs imply
that /H0 is hard coded in the game. I deleted the original OS9Boot, copied 
the new OS9Boot to the
boot disk, and adjusted LSN0 for the new DD.BT and DD.BSZ values. I also 
deleted from the root
directory the file "floppy" and made sure the one byte file "hard" was 
present.
  The startup file was edited to read:
-x
chd /h0/games/ibi; chx /h0/games/ibi/cmds
ex bank

  Now with my .vhd in drive0 and the new IBI boot disk in drive1, DOS1 
starts the game and it never
asks for a disk swap.

========
I would have preferred to actually place the new Boot disk in the Basic 
section of the .vhd which
would have made things simpler. I've not yet been able to get that to work.

Robert


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