[Coco] DriveWire 4 Installation

[qbancoffee]

DriveWIre 4 is packaged packaged with Java 17(JRE) and a batch file 
launches DW4 using that specific standalone JRE so both in the case of 
the unzipped archive and in the case of the installer, you are never 
installing Java to your system. You can run it how you like without 
having to worry about it breaking your existing installation.


On 2/9/23 10:30 PM, Rob Rosenbrock via Coco wrote:
> 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
>