[Coco] Max number of floppy drives with DOS

[rietveld rietveld]

I actually played with this MPI solution last night using POKE 65407,51 and POKE 65407,34 to software select the controllers.  I have a double sided 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 in slot 4 and a pair of double sided 5 1/4 drives in slot 3.
I am just playing around with a RAMDISK to act as the go between. I can copy from physical disk to RAMDISK then POKE a slot select and copy from RAMDISK to the other set of drives.



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From: coco at maltedmedia.com
Sent: May 18, 2021 5:48 AM
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Reply to: coco at maltedmedia.com
Cc: ooogalapasooo at aol.com
Subject: Re: [Coco] Max number of floppy drives with DOS

The limitation of the drives (4s - 3d) is actually not just a a DOS problem but it's the logic of the controller itself. There are only 4 drive select lines with the 4th line being used as a side select when doubles are used.
So just changing the rom will not solve the limitation.
As someone suggested, with a multi-pak and 2 (or maybe 3) controllers, you could have multiple sets of 3/4, but you would still have to write a rom (or driver for OS9) that would switch slots when needed. I remember someone here on the list playing around with 2 controllers in the past.

Bill P.




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