26 Aug
2002
26 Aug
'02
8:35 a.m.
Rumor has it that Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) may have mentioned these words:
On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Lawrence Walker wrote:
That's about it... otherwise it was a standard drive...
In referring to the "360k" do you mean
the model (RS 25-1060) that shipped
IIRC for the 1000HX ( ?) ? I just checked my COCO M.502 drive and the edge
connector is slightly different. It would be nice to have a useable 2nd
drive
for my CoCos.
I don't know what butchery they might have done to later models (probably
just putting the power through the ribbon cable). On the original Coco, the drive was interchangeable
with the drives for
the Model 1 (*), and consisted of a "standard" drive mechanism in a case
with power supply, and a card edge extender to bring the 34 pin card edge
of the drive to the outside for cable hookup.
Radio Shack did the drive select through missing pins in the cable. Each
drive had ALL of the drive selects turned on! If you use a more
"normal" cable, then open the case and deselect the drive selects that are
not wanted.
Hmmmm. seems that for drive select 3 (fourth drive), they used a pin that
was originally intended for something other than drive select. 34? (side)
6? 8?
THAT could complicate things slightly if you need 4 drives, or use the RS
cable.
Dunno which pin it was, bit it was the Side Select pin that they used, so
if you need to use 4 drives, you can only use SS drives... otherwise, the
CoCo's limited to 3 DS drives.
(*) NOTE: one exception to the interchange of drives
between Coco and
Model 1 was that the earliest drives for the model 1 were Shugart Sa400
drives that only went to 35 tracks, and thus would FAIL on the top 5 or so
tracks.
Noper - RS-DOS is designed for only 35-track operation, so you won't have
any problem with those drives. OS-9 also assumes 35 tracks on any bootable
software sold thru RS; OS-9's also smart enough to recognize SS floppies if
you've booted with DS drivers.
HTH,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch(a)30below.com
What do you do when Life gives you lemons,
and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????