[Coco] OS9 Lev1 Ver2 / NOS9 Lev1

[Chester A Patterson]

Excellent! Thankyou.

I figured REL had to be there somewhere but I couldn't find it. Tricky
little devil. Gotta get it. Think ded @/d1 will do it?
I'm working straight stock Coco3-512k, I just use emulators to transfer
files back and forth.
OS9L1.2 with the rb1773 works great and boots great, no problems with
BOOT.

My problem is that I am unable to make a working bootdisk other than by
using DECB BACKUP.
I've tried every combination of single & double sided, 35, 40 and 80
tracks, AND cobbler and os9gen (both Nitro V1)

Why OS-9 1.2 and not NOS9 1? It goes back to the same trouble discussed
here many weeks ago about the OS9L2 vs NOS9L2 VDG TERM, some old games
and apps that insist, for some reason I cannot fathom, on NOT working
with NOS9 but do with OS9.
So bit by bit I intend to learn all I can and get to the bottom of this.
Even if it takes me years, which it will, considering everything I've
got to learn! But the REAL reason is that messing around with all this
is a great way to kill a couple of hours each day.

I take it that "OS" in the T34S1 list below is just that, ASCII "O" and
"S", not a file, in order to meet the DECB DOS command's requirement.
Also I assume that what you mean by T34 "S1" is side one of two.

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Gault
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 9:47 AM
Subject: Re: [Coco] OS9 Lev1 Ver2 / NOS9 Lev1

Chester A Patterson wrote:
> Are not these bugs ironed out in Nitro OS-9 Level 1?

They should be.

There are several things that will prevent you from booting a double
sided disk with OS-9 Level1 version2.
It has already been stated indirectly that tracks alternate front to
back on double sided OS-9 disks. Two modules in OS-9 need to know how to
deal with this, Boot and CCDisk. You replaced CCDisk with rb1773 but did
not replace Boot. Since Boot has not been replaced, you may have
problems getting OS9Boot to load.
Also, DECB DOS command does not know what to make of double sided disks.
It expects the boot track to always be on side0 T34. That's fine with
real hardware systems but not emulators which alternate front/back
tracks in the disk image file. That means the emulator or DOS has to
find the correct track which is now at T68. MESS solves the problem with
.os9 images by reading the disk info in lsn0.
Are you trying this on a real Coco or an emulator? If an emulator, which
one?

The OS-9 Level1 version2 T34S1 has the following entries.
OS
Rel or the Level1 equivalent of the Level2 Rel; not shown with mdir.
OS9
OS9P2
INIT
BOOT
You can merge these together to create a boot track but there aren't any
Level1 programs that permit creating the actual boot track. There is
also no program for saving "Rel" from memory as it is not listed.

Is there some reason why you want to use OS-9 Level1 V2 rather than
NitrOS-9 Level1?