[Coco] RiBBS, 68K OS-9 in emulation

[Joel Ewy]

Ron Bihler wrote:
> Thanks,
> So the bread crumbs continue.
>
> Anyone know Charles West in Oklahoma?  I passed the code to him.
>
> Was KRiBBS shareware as well?  Is there a MM/1 Emulator since I will
> never see one of them.
>
> Ron
> ...

Now Ron, if you had read every single word I wrote in one of my previous
posts, you wouldn't have to ask this question!  :)  I know, I'm way too
verbose...

"

>>How well does OS9 or Nitro9 what I gather the new update work under
>> emulation?
>>

>6809 (Nitr)OS-9 works great on a CoCo emulator. 
>
>To the best of my knowledge, there is no emulator that will run
>OS-9/68K.  I tried to boot Personal OS-9 for the Atari ST on several
>different Atari emulators, but no joy.  Even ARANYM, which runs
>Debian-m68K won't boot it.  Bob Devries (I think) says that Atari OS-9
>actually makes use of the Atari ROM code, which one would think would
>insulate it further from the underlying hardware and make it even less
>machine-dependent.  Maybe I'm just not using the proper ROM images.
>
>Somebody has made a CD-i emulator for MS-Windows, but it only runs some
>of the games (last time I tried it) and is cripple-ware.

"

So there you have it, FWIW.  

Seriously, I would love to see some kind of emulator that can run OS-9/68K.  It really wouldn't have to faithfully emulate the hardware of any particular 68K computer exactly in order to run most OS-9 programs.  Somebody might need to develop a few OS-9 driver modules for the emulated hardware.  I think that an Atari emulator like ARANYM would be a very good start.  As I mentioned above, it runs Linux for crying out loud, it shouldn't be too difficult to get OS-9 running on it.  And the Atari version of OS-9 is actually not made of pure unobtanium.  The video modes supported by ARANYM are better than what the MM/1 could do, and I'm sure there are modes that correspond to most of the MM/1 modes commonly used in KWindows.  After OS-9 is running on the emulator in some fashion, bits of the emulation code could be replaced one piece at a time by emulated hardware that looks and works more like the MM/1 (or the MM/1b / AT306) if you wanted an emulation more faithful to the hardware.  And once you've done that, it wouldn't be hard at all to turn it into a CD-i emulator.  And there would be considerably more interest in that than the MM/1.

I would think that BBS software would be a great candidate for running on an Atari OS-9 emulator, though it sounds from some of the other posts like at least one version of your software was modified to use KWindows, so that might have to wait until somebody ported that to ARANYM or made the ARANYM video code compatible with the 66470 VSC.

I really think that something like ARANYM or MESS would be a good starting point.

JCE