Re: uDW - the DriveWire microserver
Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2014 3:20 pm
I completely agree with sorchard. I got my uDW just before Christmas and have spent a bit of free time playing with it. The approach with a completely self-contained DriveWire adapter and server really makes DriveWire easy to adopt for new users, and I really wanted to test just how easy it was to get started. Here's a quick summary.
I started out with a plain vanilla Dragon 64 with a DragonDos disk controller.
I ran into a few minor issues trying to get this to work.
-- Rolf
I started out with a plain vanilla Dragon 64 with a DragonDos disk controller.
- Managed to find a battery (for the onboard real time clock) and a micro SD card (2GB) lying around collecting dust.
- Copied the files from Tormod's demo collection to the SD card. Renamed the NitrOS9 disk image to DRIVE0. See this thread for details and downloads.
- Attached uDW to the printer port.
- Power on the Dragon and watch the uDW box respond with a welcoming green blinking light.
- I tried Tormod's DWLOADR.BIN program for accessing the uDW without having to modify PROMs or anything. Following the instructions in the uDW manual I was able to set the real time clock, list the files on the uDW server, play a game of FlagonBird and so on.
- The moment of magic was booting NitrOS9 from the uDW and having the clock set automatically. The magic lasted until i ran mfree and noticed the whopping 3k available memory. Anyway, this is cool.
I ran into a few minor issues trying to get this to work.
- As a Windows guy, I found the .tar.xz compression of Tormod's demo files a bit puzzling. I'm also a Linux guy, so dropped into my Linux VM to decompress the packages.
- My first SD card didn't work well. uDW responded well to all commands not accessing the card, but consistently reported ?MO ERROR for all file access. I swapped the orignal 2 GB card with a 32 GB card that I also had lying around. It worked instantly. When reformatting the 2 GB card to FAT32, that card also worked.
-- Rolf