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aaronwolfe

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  1. I do not know all of them, but it is mostly the later and/or coco 3 only rompaks. Super Pitfall, Thexder, and Robocop are some I believe.
  2. Yep, many of the ROM Paks try writing to themselves as a simple form of copy protection. If that is all they do, they'll probably work fine in one of the SuperIDE's rom banks, as they are read only from the coco's perspective (unless you are running the special flashing software). Some paks went a step further and have bank switching or some other logic behind their address space, those cannot be used with anything that just presents static values like rom/ram/flash. The code has to be changed not to do that kind of thing. I think the more popular paks have been modified to work from disk, if you hunt around on the web.
  3. Yes, for BASIC, and for OS-9 it provides a hard disk partition. some have been converted but not all. some games can also be flashed into the superIDE's four rom slots (Downland lives in my superIDE there also are some newer games that used bank switching in the rompak and cannot be used this way, and some games that never were transferred to disk. no universal rule there.
  4. (full disclosure: I am not a cloud9 employee but I work closely with them on some projects) The SuperIDE does indeed do more than the Drive Pak. I am constantly surprised by all the stories of people waiting and waiting for a DrivePak and not getting one. I'm no longer surprised they are getting ripped off, sadly that seems to have become par for the course. What surprises me is that they order one in the first place when a clearly superior offering has been available since long before the Drive Pak was ever created. As you can see on the cloud9 website, the SuperIDE has tons of features and it's performance blows the doors off the DrivePack. I won't reiterate that info. Just wanted to let you know that they do exist, you will get one if you order one, and they work great. I have one myself and use it regularly. The ability to flash multiple coco roms in the different slots is super handy for some projects I work on, without that I'd have probably worn out a few eprom burners and wasted lots of time. It sounds like a very cool device. This device and the MicroSD Pak confuse me somewhat in functionality. Most of my other similar devices (uiec, sio2sd, CF7, etc) allow me to put disk images etc on them and then boot or use them. Is that how these work? From reading the manual on the SuperIDE, I couldn't tell exactly what it did, although it did seem like it could do a lot of different things. Yes, both the drivepak and the superide are ways to put a bunch of disk images onto (something) and then use them as if they were floppies (or hard drives, in the case of OS9). In the case of the drivepak, the (something) is a microSD card. With the SuperIDE, (something) is either a CF card, an SD or microSD via adapter, or any IDE device.. the superide has 2 channels so you can connect both a CF/SD card and a regular IDE device at the same time as well. The SuperIDE is a proper disk controller in the same style as the hard disk controllers that were available in the CoCo's heyday. The coco rom or os9 drivers talk directly to it as a disk device using the regular I/O area in the memory map, and any emulation of logical drives is implemented on the coco. With the DrivePak, the coco sees it as a serial port so its a little different (and a lot slower). In the end, both will let you use modern media to store/access lots of CoCo disks. Hope that is clear
  5. (full disclosure: I am not a cloud9 employee but I work closely with them on some projects) The SuperIDE does indeed do more than the Drive Pak. I am constantly surprised by all the stories of people waiting and waiting for a DrivePak and not getting one. I'm no longer surprised they are getting ripped off, sadly that seems to have become par for the course. What surprises me is that they order one in the first place when a clearly superior offering has been available since long before the Drive Pak was ever created. As you can see on the cloud9 website, the SuperIDE has tons of features and it's performance blows the doors off the DrivePack. I won't reiterate that info. Just wanted to let you know that they do exist, you will get one if you order one, and they work great. I have one myself and use it regularly. The ability to flash multiple coco roms in the different slots is super handy for some projects I work on, without that I'd have probably worn out a few eprom burners and wasted lots of time.
  6. As someone who just got back into older computers a couple years ago, I can totally understand the comments here about the CoCo community. It is not always a fun place, and that is unfortunate for a group with so much to offer. Despite the negative types, there are many people who carry on creating great projects on the CoCo. In just the short time I've been involved I've seen: The first full screen video player for the coco (can play full length movies!) which made it to Hack A Day: http://hackaday.com/2011/04/21/tandy-color-computer-coco3-color-video-playback/ An awesome FPGA implementation that takes the CoCo to new heights (I dare not say "coco 4") : and more info at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CoCo3FPGA/ A team of coco fans including myself won the Retro Computing Challenge Winter Warmup competition with DriveWire (we even created the CoCo's first web server): https://sites.google.com/site/drivewire4/ Long and short of it... the coco community is to a large degree what you make of it. There are some really great people doing great things. I've met lots of new friends and am certainly glad I did get involved. In fact I'm packing up to go meet some fellow coconuts in Dallas right now... So don't be scared, ignore the negative folks, and you will find lots of people who just like playing with this great old computer. (from the mailing list): The Cloud-9 team are about to embark from our respective locales to Arlington, Texas for the Vintage Computer Festival Southwest 2.0. We'll be met there by Gary Becker, of CoCo3FPGA fame, so it's sure to be a fun weekend. Attending this show is a new venture for us. Cloud 9 has been supporting the CoCo community by attending the CoCoFest in Chicago for nearly two decades, but we hope to introduce potential new coconuts to the great things that the CoCo community is doing by expanding to new shows like the VCF. If you're in the Dallas area, stop by our booth and say hello. I will also attempt to provide a live webcam feed at www.cloud9tech.com if it is possible, so be sure to check the website for details over the weekend. The show is Saturday and Sunday.
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