Rumor has it that Bill Yakowenko may have mentioned these words:
[snip]
>In case it's relevant, it is a Radio Shack Color Computer 2,
>with a standard controller cartridge. (The label has wandered
>off, so I'm not sure whether it is the older or newer model of
>controller.)
If I'm not mistaken, the 1793 was used in the original version of the
controller - the 1773 was used in the later controllers. I believe (one of
the) fundamental difference(s) between the 2 are the 1773 does not require
a 12V line, and most CoCo2's & all CoCo3's don't supply 12V on the
cartridge port.
IIRC, to use an original 1793-based cart on a non-12V-supplying CoCo, you
need to use a Multi-Pak interface, which does supply 12V to the carts.
This is all conjecture & speculation, however, as I've never used an older
12V-requiring disk interface... (I may *have* a few, but I could never
afford floppy drives until the FD-500 came out, which is a shorty-5V only
controller).
The only "drivers" I ever wrote for that beastie were data-conversion
proggies to read a raw drive in Basic09 & read some foreign formats &
filetypes... I once wrote a "Dual-Format" floppy program to xfer files from
OS-9 to RSDOS -> I can tell you that the timing used for lowlevel
formatting on the floppy was *very* lax in RS-DOS compared to OS-9... To
get it to work at all, I had to LL format a disk in OS-9, then HL format
only tracks 0-16, then I had a program to write a custom GAT on Track 17
for RS-DOS, saying only tracks 18+ were accessible to RS-DOS. I then had a
program which could copy a file from the RS-DOS "partition" to the OS-9
"partition" and back...
HTH,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Bugs of a feather flock together."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Russell Nelson
zmerch_at_30below.com |
Received on Fri Mar 26 2004 - 10:44:55 GMT