[Coco] DriveWire 4 Installation

[Bill Pierce]

Aaron, If you think back (I know it hurts, but...), the "official" release of DW4 was a pain in de butt to open more than one instance, requiring a cmd line sequence, editing the XML file, etc, etc. That's why you sent me that dev version with the "VPortSniffer" in which had the "Instance Manager", which allowed me to open multiple instances from the UI. It also allowed me to share VHDs across instances without having to "sync" them. You had also removed a lot of the "Info" & "Warning" messages, which scroll the "Server" window, which eat up time slices and bog down the data flow.
Yeah, it was a little buggy as it wasn't finished (feature wise), but it still worked fine. I still use it over the official release. What would be cool is to take these features that makes it useful and add the to the official release code. That would make the ultimate DW4.


-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Wolfe via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Cc: Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com>
Sent: Thu, Feb 9, 2023 3:10 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] DriveWire 4 Installation

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