[Coco] DriveWire 4 Installation

[Aaron Wolfe]

For what it's worth, when I wrote DriveWire 4, it was intended to
simply run from wherever you put it.  There was no installer or
starter pack or anything more than a .zip file you unpacked somewhere
and started using.  It does absolutely need to be able to write to its
own configuration files, so it makes sense that putting things into a
"special" area like the Program Files directory in Windows causes some
issues.  At the time I was developing it, I was trying to support
Windows/Linux/Mac/*BSD etc so making it sort of standalone and system
agnostic seemed like the only practical approach.  And since DW4 has
no need to touch anything outside of its own files, that mostly worked
OK.

I don't know how these starter packs containing DriveWire work, but a
copy of DW4 in one directory should not have any impact on a copy that
lives in another directory.  Of course you can't use the same serial
or TCP ports at the same time, and opening the same disk image from
multiple instances can lead to some interesting results, but other
than that one copy shouldn't interfere with another.

Perhaps confusing the issue is that a single copy of DW4 can run
multiple "instances".  I added this so that you can talk to more than
one CoCo/fpga/emulator at the same time *without* needing more than
one copy of dw4.  When you see " instance 2 and running on port 6800"
that doesn't mean more than one copy or drivewire is running, it just
means the running copy has more than one instance configuration and
the one the user interface is talking to is the one doing tcp on port
6800.  In the Config menu there is a little tool called Instance
Manager that will show you all the instances currently configured and
let you start or stop them and choose which instance the UI is talking
to.  If you don't need one of the things you see there, you can just
delete the corresponding <instance> section from the config.xml file.
I don't think I ever added a way to do that from the GUI.

-Aaron


On Thu, Feb 9, 2023 at 2:48 PM Rob Rosenbrock via Coco
<coco at maltedmedia.com> wrote:
>
> No, I didn’t run the installer. Out of habit, I unpacked the file to see if it would run on its own - and it works just fine. (I have my reasons…)
>
> I’ll back up a bit:
>
> I ran across the ‘starter kits’ and decided to try them out since I don’t have a drivewire cable for my CoCo3 yet.  Yesterday I installed both the Xroar and Vcc kits which led to having two copies of DriveWire in the Program Files folder: DriveWire4 4.3.3o and DriveWire 4.3.3p. I assumed that one would overwrite the other, but it didn't. Looking at what I did before, the program seemed to operate within its own folder, so there shouldn’t be any issues with multiple copies and I let it pass without removing one.
>
> The first installation (4.3.3o) works if I run it as an administrator, but there are some issues. At the top of the window it shows that it is instance 2 and running on port 6800. It’s the only copy running, and VCC is configured to use port 65504. It works, though...
>
> The second installation doesn't work at all. I still get the splash screen for a moment and then nothing.
>
> I’m guessing that something did happen between these two installations. I’m inclined to uninstall it and try again.
>
> I intend to install DriveWire on another computer located next to my CoCo3 instead. I also have a CoCoFPGA - and I think it just needs a basic serial cable - so I may be able to test over there instead.
>
>