[Coco] [Color Computer] Older site.

[Willard Goosey]

>Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 19:17:46 -0800 (PST)
>From: Dan Olson <dano at agora.rdrop.com>

>I'm not too familar with the inner workings of the 1000, I do have an 
>external SCSI controller for it (the same as used with the 500) and I 
>guess I assumed that the ROM had enough smarts to look for a hard drive 
>before booting off of floppy.... I mean, it's an old computer, but not 
>that old.

>From what I understand, they wanted/needed to ship the 1000 before
Kickstart (the proper boot ROM) was finished.  So, instead, it has a
small stupid ROM that is only smart enough to load Kickstart off
floppy.  Once Kickstart is in the WOM (Write Only Memory :) (the
1000's special RAM where every other Amiga has ROM) it takes over and
boots Workbench normally.

Amiga 1000 fanatics will tell you this is a feature, not a bug. :-)
Indeed, the 1000 port of OSK took advantage of this to load *itself*
into the WOM -- even on a machine with no regular memory protection
it's unlikely for the WOM to get trashed.

So even if your hard drive controller doesn't have a built-in ROM, you
may be able to merge the driver with your Kickstart image.  If so,
Kickstart should find the hard drive when it scans through all the
drives for a boot disk.

You'd have to bug one of those Amiga 1000 fanatics I mentioned
earlier.  I know there's at least one on this list but he hasn't said
anything yet...  I have an Amiga 2000, and I don't know as much about
IT as I'd like to.  We've pretty much exhausted all I know about the
1000's quirks.

>With Workbench 1.3 you're not going to be running the latest programs
>anyway.

Yeah, I finally got frustrated enough to upgrade to AmigaDOS 2.  I
liked 1.3 but the software I wanted to run just wouldn't deal. :-(

>Really?  But the CoCo has it's DOS in ROM, the hard drive controller 
>doesn't have boot code??  I just assumed it did, but don't even have a 
>floppy drive for mine so what do I know.

The only two CoCO bootable hard drive controllers I know of are the
old Burke & Burke, and SuperIDE. 

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
   --- Yacko