[Coco] DriveWire 4 Installation

[Rob Rosenbrock]

That is the kind of installation I prefer - and my own programs are as self contained. I like to be sure that there are no dependencies on external files, or changes made to Windows. I can remember installations that break older programs by forcing an update on libraries.

DriveWire is slick! I got it up and running with my CoCo3FPGA. The only issue that I had is that I do not remember the switch settings and that led to me (I think) having the wrong baud rate on the serial port. The FPGA makes for a really nice CoCo, but it isn’t very useful if you don’t have a means of storing programs.

I found the instance manager. Very nice touch! I used it to verify that my FPGA was actually connected.

I’ll have to play around with it some more to see if I can connect both the FPGA and a virtual CoCo. For now, I’m going to copy my library over to the other PC.


> On Feb 9, 2023, at 3:10 PM, Aaron Wolfe via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com> wrote:
> 
> 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