Nitros9 on Intel: (was) [Coco] COCO4 Emulator

[Gene Heskett]

James Jones wrote:
> Diego Barizo wrote:
>> What is the license for NitrOS-9?
>> The source is available...
>> And about porting it to 80x86, there was/is a version, OS-9000 
>> according to wikipedia, that should work on PCs.
>> Has anybody ever seen/used it?
>
> I have. :)
>
> Problem is, unless things have changed a lot, it would be way too 
> expensive. OS-9 for the CoCo was relatively inexpensive because Tandy 
> bought a license for lots of copies. Without a company like that or a 
> nostalgic multimillionaire former CoCo user to make a similar deal, 
> OS-9000 (or as it is now called, OS-9 for the x86) would cost a lot 
> per copy.
>
>     James
>
FWIW, the gentleman who tried to package & sell an amiga port of os-9000 
has recently joined the ranks of linux users, Digby Tarvan is his name.  
I queried him to see if he was the same about 3-4 months ago, and he 
volunteered that the deal with MicroWare was so binding that at  $600 
AUD for a copy, he wound up losing money on every copy he sold, which at 
that price obviously wasn't very many.  So obviously MW was never 
interested in onesies and twosies
type sales because they would have generated way too much expense in 
support costs for them.

OTOH, I'd submit that a $50 a copy would have paid MW rather handsomely 
as the amiga crowd was very largely a self-supporting crowd.  I dare say 
that one year after kwindows was released for OSK, or if it actually 
came with it (it did not) it would have been hacked & patched until it 
would have been the equal or superior to the Intuition gfx engine that 
ran amigados.  And most of us know how good that was.

Its only achillies heel was the flat memory model that allowed an errant 
pointer in any process to scribble all over the os's executable or 
anything else in memory at the time.  Given that limitation, I dare say 
amiga code was as well audited as any on the face of the planet and 
certainly much better than linux because of that flat memory model.  It 
was largely responsible for the 'guru' anytime he showed up just before 
a crash & self reboot.

-- 
Cheers, Gene