Hello,
I would like to share with you a beta version of my project:
A DOSPlus Extender for Drivewire & CoCo-SDC
About one year ago, I was first introduced to Drivewire thanks to Tormod and Ken.
I found that accessing individual files via the DLOAD command was a good solution, but
I felt that we should be able to access the files inside any virtual disc as well.
This meant that the DOS had to be modified to work via Drivewire, creating an HDB-DOS like for the Dragon
I began to toy with DDOS11C and DDOS12A but soon I got some difficult problems with a few important commands
that I was not able to solve, so I forgot about that idea.
Later, on May 2015 I tested the DOSPlus4.9b and fortunately most of the problems I had before were gone or
turned to be easily solvable. I added more hooks to use more and more DOS commands until I was able to use
all of them via Drivewire on adapted vitual discs (VDK files)
In the meantime, I bought a CoCo-SDC module (Darren Atkinson’s design) for my CoCo3 and I found frustrating the fact that,
despite it was ‘hardware’ compatible with Dragon, there was no software to use it till the extent that you need a CoCo
to flash whatever you wanted to put in any SDC bank!
Fortunately, Darren came to help, allowing me access to the communications protocol for that module and gave me
some technical routines to detect the presence of hardware components. My biggest kudos!
From that moment on, I began to add new commands to my extender in order to allow the user to work with the SDC module too,
even commands for flashing / reading the banks have been included.
My test-set was a Dragon64, a Tandy MultiPack Interface, a Lafumat’s disc controller with twin 3.5” floppies and a CoCo-SDC module.
Ken has worked hard as beta-tester and contributed with many great ideas in the analysis / brainstorming phases of this project. Thanks a lot!
The version I am sharing right now seems to be stable, but it should be considered a beta version anyway.
I plan to upload the source code as soon as no more changes are needed to work with it.
So your feedback (comments / suggestions) will be highly appreciated!!
More explanations come in next posts ...
cheers
pere