Coco Midi & DriveWire

Midi on The Color Computer Using DriveWire 4

Tutorial by Bill Pierce

Drivewire began with those amazing guys at Cloud9.com only to be picked up by Aaron Wolfe, who has done amazing things with it. One of the most unique things he did was to add Midi synthesizer capabilities to the UI. With Drivewire 4, you no longer have to have a Midi synthesizer connected to your Coco to create Midi music with programs like "Lyra" and "UltiMusE III". When you download one of the NitrOS-9 Drivewire distribution packages from the NitrOS-9 SourceForge repository, the MIDI driver is already installed in the boot. With this system, using Midi with OS-9 becomes painless. In this article, I intend to show how to use Drivewire Midi with both "Lyra" with HDBDOS and "UltiMusE III" under NitrOS-9. All of the required files will be available here on this website with the exception of the NitrOS-9 boot disk and the Drivewire 4 server, both of which I will provide links to the "Official" downloads.

VCC Coco 3 Emulator & Midi

Currently, the VCC Coco 3 emulator does not support Midi output. BUT..

There has been a very quiet project going on to allow VCC to support Drivewire and therefore, Drivewire Midi. This project has not been released to the public as the project members are waiting on Joeseph Forgione (VCC author) to release VCC to Open Source as he has been promising to do for quite some time. As a BETA tester for this new version of VCC, all I can say is WOW!! I currently run VCC with 4 virtual floppies, 1 inline VHD, 4 Drivewire VHDs, virtual printer support under OS9, networking support with inetd... and most of all... DriveWire Midi!!! You will be able to run all the RSDOS & OS9 Midi software right from VCC with no external hardware other than the PC that's hosting it !! This includes Lyra & UltiMusE 3

I have already started developement of new software for the new VCC & Midi. It just needs to be released soon so we can share this with the Coco Community.

Just be patient.... It's coming....

[ Edit 05/20/2013]

VCC version 1.43 Beta has now been released. There will soon be a "Using Vcc with DriveWire 4" page comming soon. With the new VCC you have access to the Becker Port interface to DW4 on the same or different host computer. This has given the VCC user a plethora of tools to work with. VCC 1.43 can now be used with NitrOS-9 Becker Boot and HDBDOS for Becker Port. Thisincledes the DW4 Midi capabilities. You can now play Coco Mid files on VCC and never leave the PC.

Details coming soon....

DriveWire4 & Lyra

I will start with the Lyra installation, as it is probably the most tedious to get going.

Thanks go out to Robert Gault who has done the modifications needed to Lyra to not only access Drivewire's midi synth, but to use HDBDOS's 256 virtual disk drives in RSDOS/HDBDOS. Without Mr. Gault, this would have never been possible.

First and foremost, you MUST have the right versions of HDBDOS & Lyra! Mr. Gault has provided 2 configurations for working with Lyra and HDBDOS. With these configurations, only these combinations will work.

Lyra v-2.88 & HDBDOS v-1.4

Lyra v-2.87 & HDBDOS v-1.1

As a footnote, Lyra 2.86 will run with any version of HDBDOS, but will NOT access the drivewire synth. It's configured for serial midi and the Speech Systems/Glenside Midi pak ONLY, though it WILL access all 256 drives.

Any other combinations of Lyra & HDBDOS will crash Lyra and possibly corrupt you disk as Lyra will go off into the wild blue yonder while your disk is spinning in nowhere land.

Installation:

First, you must get HDBDOS running on your Coco system. There are several ways to do this.

(1) Burn an EProm & install it in your Disk Controller.

(2) Transfer the HDBDOS file to a real Floppy disk.

(3) Transfer HDBDOS from the PC using the Coco's cassette input.

As I have no EPROM burner or a computer that allows the use of real Coco floppies, I will describe only the cassette method. For the other 2 methods, just post on the maltedmedia list server and I'm sure someone there will be glad to help you. Also, I will only be describing a MS Windows installation. For Mac & Linux you will have to ask someone familiar with those systems.

This is the method I used. First you must connect the Coco's cassette cable to the PC. Just plug the cassette cable into the Coco as normal, then you must figure out which of the 3 plugs is the input cable and plug it into the PC soundcard's headphone or speaker output. The program I used to make the transfer was Jeff V's "CASSOUT" provided with both the Coco2 & Coco3 emulators. If you are running Windows XP or above, you will have to use "DosBox" or something similar as this program is command line oriented. Also, the images that I have found for HDBDOS are direct images. They have no start, end or exec addresses and you also need a way to get HDBDOS into the ROM area as this cannot be loaded directly. The disk ROM will crash and loading will fail. The easiest way I found to get around this was using a machine language ROM/RAM copy routine that turns the ROMs off and copies the file into high memory the re-executes the ROMs therefore installing HDBDOS. This is a very tricky process.

I found that Roger's "Rainbow IDE" was very useful in getting this done. I just loaded my ROM/RAM routine into the Binary file editor on the Rainbow IDE, then appended the HDBDOS rom to the end of it. After adjusting the addresses for the copy routine to what I needed for HDBDOS, I then saved it as a file on the PC as "HDBDOS.CAS". Then using Jeff's CASSOUT, I loaded the file into the Coco using "CLOADM"HDBDOS". you may have to play with the volume levels a bit before the Coco will load the file. I found that on my system a volume of about 75% on the PC seems to work best, but all systems are different so you'll most likely have to experiment to get it right. Before typing EXEC, I saved the file to a real floppy on the Coco, therefor making a "Boot" disk for HDBDOS with no need to use the cassette load again. I also found and old "DOS" routine that will load and run any file you wish by typing the "DOS" command. I just type "DOS" and in a few seconds, I'm running HDBDOS.

I know this all sounds a little intimidating, but it's really not all that hard. And just to make it all easier, I will provide a completely modded HDBDOS with the ROM/RAM copy routine already installed. All you'll have to do is transfer it with the cassette load method.

Once you have HDBDOS running, everything else is easy. The only thing is the serial cable used for the Drivewire connection. You must modify a Coco serial cable with a DB-9 PC serial on the other end. A diagram for this will be in the download section at the bottom of this page. If you computer is one of the newer models without a DB-9 serial connection, you must buy a USB-2-DB9 adapter cable. I bought mine from Office Depot for $12.99. They had to order it but didn't charge shipping and shipped it direct to my house. Do this in the store as they can bypass the shipping charges. Next you need the Drivewire 4 server from Aarons site. Once you have your cable connected, load HDBDOS on the Coco and Drivewire on the PC. Run the Drivewire configuration wizard and then you're ready to go. Select the VHD you want to access with the Drivewire server and you now have a Coco with access to 256 drives (x4). Copying the Lyra virtual floppies to the VHD can be a little tricky but I just use the VCC emulator to accomplish this task then remount the VHD in drivewire.

UltiMusE III, NitrOS-9 & DriveWire 4 Midi

Drivewire & OS-9 are the easiest to set up on the Coco. The largest part of the process, is getting the DW boot disk to the Coco. If you have done the HDBDOS installation above, then moving a disk to the Coco is no longer a problem. If you do not have HDBDOS installed, then you need a way to move an OS9 disk from the PC to your Coco. I have no PC that has compatable drives to be able to read/write Coco disks from the PC so I used the above method to install HDBDOS and then moved my OS9 boot disks while in HDBDOS. To me, that was the easiest method.

To boot OS9 from HDBDOS, I use the method used on Robert Gaults NitrOS9.vhd used with the VCC emulator. These VHDs will work with a real Coco & drivewire but the bootfile will not. You will need to get a Drivewire boot disk from the NitrOS9 SourceForge repository. Once you have the boot disk, you will need to create a 35 track boot as most of the boots in the repository are 40 & 80 track boots. To do this, you will need to boot the repository disk from HDBDOS on the real Coco. Once you are booted, drive 0 in the Drivewire UI should be "/dd", Drive 1 will be "/X1", 2 will be "/X2" and 3 will be "/X3" as these drivers are standard with the DW boots. All you shpuld have to do, is create a new blank disk in the DW UI in Drive 1, format the disk as 35 trk SS, then run "cobbler /x1", then copy at least "sysgo" to the root, "grfdrv" to the "CMDS" and any fonts, pointers and patterns you need to "SYS" on /x1. You will then need to exit back to HDBDOS to set up your OS9 boot system. The NitrOS9.vhd should already be set up for OS9 on the partition and the RSDOS part. should have the needed files for the setup. Typing "Driveon" then "DIR" should give you a disk of utilities in D0 and "DIR254" should also contain some utilities as well. Using drivewire on a Coco with HDBDOS, there is no easy way to access a virtual floppy and a vhd at the same time. I usually do this in VCC. Mount the vhd in VCC and your new OS9 boot in /d0 in VCC. Under HDBDOS, type "BACKUP0to255". This will copy your new boot to disk 255. Now you will need to link it. You must type RUN"LINK:254". The program will ask for the location of your OS9 boot... just type "255" and hit enter. If all goes well, you will see a "OS9 boot disk linked" promt and the program will end. Now mount this vhd in Drivewire Drive 0. You must have the offset pokes for the RSDOS partition in HDBDOS. The directions for this are in the HDBDOS manual available from Cloud9. These pokes tell HDBDOS and Drivewire where the RSDOS & OS9 partitions are located. I have these pokes permanently save in my HDBDOS boot file so that I don't have to do this every time. If you are using Mr. Gaults Nitro vhd, then NitrOS9 is already installed on the OS9 partition and when your Coco boots HDBDOS, you should get an RSDOS menu with several options, one of which is to boot OS9. With this selection, you'll be booting the from the disk you copied to disk 255.

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