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

[Arthur Flexser]

Doing this from cassette seems kind of clunky.  Much nicer would be to put the
boot program in a Rompack, IMHO.

Art


On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, John R. Hogerhuis wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 
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