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(a)30below.com |