[Coco] Re: Coco Digest, Vol 11, Issue 104

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 15:06, farna at att.net wrote:
> > 
> > I'd like to put the OS-9 boot program on cassette. I guess what I need 
> > is the boot track off the drivewire diskette. 
> > 
> > If I could bootstrap off cassette, then I could disconnect from the 
> > cassette as soon as the bootloader is transferred. 
> 
> 
> I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I don't think this will work. IIRC OS-9 has no provisions to use the cassette port at all. I'm sure someone has written a utility to utilize the motor on/off commands, but that's about it. 
> 

OS-9 doesn't bootstrap itself. RS-DOS has the DOS command and that loads
track 34 or whatever, jumps to it, and that boots OS-9, right? Somebody
has to be first. I'm saying I'd like instead of bootstrapping to track34
and boot that way, to instead bootstrap from a program loaded off
cassette. This little program would have to have enough smarts to talk
to DriveWire server so that the rest of OS-9 could be booted up.

Here's my logic:

OS-9 could be bootstrapped from *any* device. Directly accessible flash,
serially read flash, a disk drive, a disk drive emulated on a serial
port (drivewire), or even a cassette drive.

I don't want to use the cassette within OS-9, or even to fully boot
OS-9. I just want to use it to bootstrap os-9. OS-9 for the most part
loads itself utilizing whatever drivers are built into it 

I'd posit the cassette recorder could be an OS-9 SCF device like any
other, but that's beside the point.

Remember that little program that was included with games like Sands Of
Egypt, etc. in the manual? That's the bootstrap. If you can bootstrap
from the keyboard, you can bootstrap from anything.

I guess I didn't mention that I'm a code monkey, so that is what
actually will make this work...

-- John.