[Coco] CoCo3 and OS-9

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 21 September 2005 11:06, Andrew wrote:
>All,
>
>With all this talk about the OS-9 and such, I thought I would ask,
>partially for my benefit as well as for others who may not have given
it
>as much thought as myself - how do you set up a real (and/or
emulated)
>CoCo with OS-9?
>
>I would be interested in both setting it up with floppy drives (and
RAM
>disk?) and/or hard drives. Do you need a floppy drive to use a hard
>drive? What do you need to use a hard drive (I know at one time there
>were MFM and SCSI adaptors for the CoCo, presumably you could use one
of
>those if you can find one - or, use one of the IDE adaptors from
> Cloud-9?).

Whew!  So many questions.  Some may get short shrift.

First, Mark also sells a scsi adaptor, I have one, with a 1gb drive
on it.
>
>Recently there was discussion on booting OS-9 from the hard drive - I
>didn't follow it too closely, but it seems that this is a difficult
>thing to set up (?)

With HDB-DOS custom burnt into the adaptors eprom, booting from the
hard drive is one of the menu choices at double reset or powerup.
>What about a real-time clock - is this a needed thing, or a luxury?
 
RTC's are a nice to have luxury, I've had 3 of them over the years. 
The one in the TC^3 scsi controller seems pretty bulletproof.

> I
>suppose it depends on what is planned to be done with the system. How
>about extra memory? We know 512K is a comfortable "minimum" - but can
it
>be done with only 128K (maybe with a hard drive or external RAM
>drive)?

128k will limit os9, but only occasionally.  With 512k, you should be
good to do anything you want to do.

>Or setup on a CoCo 2 system? Is it possible (today) to get larger
>expansion memory (like you could in the day up to 2 meg)? From where
>(Cloud-9?)...?

I don't know if Mark is doing a 2 meg kit.  I have one of Tony D's 2
meggers in mine, it makes a very nice 1.5 meg ramdisk.

>How about where you get the software? Can you still buy it and/or
>multi-vue and other packages?

Some of it may yet be had in the form of replacement disks from RSU
for a nominal fee, but no docs of course.

> I was looking at the rtsi archive, and
>noticed some stuff there - can this be used to set up a system? What
>about the free (open source? freeware?) OS-9 reimplementation (can't
>remember the name)? Is there a freeware multi-vue? What about
>development tools, like BASIC-O9 (I think that is right)? What about
>applications and other useful tools?

Os9 has turned into nitros9 as it has been ported by the users to run
on the considerably improved Hitachi HD63(A/B/C)09EP.  This has some
enhanced features that make it somewhat faster at the same clock
rate.  Os9 was dissed, and essentially re-written to take advantage
of the features of this new cpu.  Then after all the bugs (we hope)
had been swatted, it was then made so that it could run on either cpu
without needed to re-assemble it.  It is now considerably faster
than the OEM releases.  See and get it at <http://www.nitros9.org>

>In short - I would be interested in seeing a FAQ or something for
>someone relatively new to OS-9 on the Color Computer to allow them to
>set up an OS-9 system that ranges from a simple system (I have played
>with it briefly using a single floppy drive and RAM disk) to a
>multi-drive hard disk based system with all the bells and whistles.
>Also, info on doing something similar using emulators (which is the
best
>emulator for this - do they all work to some degree, or is there one
>which is best?) would be useful for those without real hardware.
Also,
>links to information (or the information itself)...

Emulators I know little about so I'll let others recommend/warn about
those.
>
>I think this would be a useful resource everyone interested in OS-9.
I
>probably wouldn't be using it immediately, but I have always been
>interested in playing with it, and probably have more than enough
info
>to get it all set up - but it feels like this information is really
>scattered for me (not that it is a problem) - I couldn't imagine what
a
>complete newbie would feel like - probably overwhelmed...
>
>Thank you all,
>
>Andrew L. Ayers
>Glendale (Phoenix), Arizona

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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