[Coco] Off List?

[Joel Ewy]

Leonard wrote:
> Wasn't there a Os-9 package for the Atari, or was it the amiga?  Where would
> you get something like that today?  Is it even available, or could Nitro
> Os-9 be made to run on these systems?
>
> Leonard
>
>   
I do recall reading of a port to the Atari back in the day, but not the
Amiga.  There was also a version that ran as a user process under
MacOS.  I doubt any of these are currently available, but maybe somebody
else on the list knows better.

As for getting NitrOS-9 to run on a '68K system, of course it would
require a considerable amount of work to port the 6x09 assembler to
68000.  I guess that the general program flow logic would be there and
sound, and that much could perhaps be preserved.  And there are assembly
source code translators from 6809 (though probably not 6309) to 68000. 
But I strongly suspect that they wouldn't result in assemblable code
without a whole lot of programmer intervention.  Maybe it would make a
quick & dirty first approximation.  But it would still require a lot of
hand assembly.  Would a port of NitrOS-9 to the M68k be compatible with
OS-9/68K?  To make it so would require even more work.  Not to make it
compatible would be odd.  Why shouldn't I be able to run my MM/1
software on my Amiga?

Aside from the practical concerns there is the issue that the current
owners of OS-9 still sell OS-9/68K, whereas they have long since
relegated the 6809 to obsolescence.  There might be objections to such a
thing.  I have long thought that a complete clean-room re-implementation
of OS-9 would be cool, but that's not really what we're talking about.

What about a port of the uClinux kernel (which was ported to the Atari
at one time) with an added OS-9 compatibility layer?  This would work
like WINE, where OS-9 system calls are translated on-the-fly to uClinux
system calls.  This would also take a lot of work, but wouldn't be
completely re-inventing the wheel, and would add all kinds of modern
functionality.

JCE