[Coco] f83 for the 6809 -- It'a Alive!

[Chuck Youse]

On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 01:28 -0700, Brett Heath wrote:
> Hello All
> 
> I've been away for a couple of years but some may remember that i
> occasionally made noises about a port of Laxen & Perry's f83 to the CoCo.
> 
> A few weeks ago I noticed that I once again had the necessary tools
> (and the time!) to
> resurrect the project. After som debugging  the f83 kernel is running
> on Jeff Vavasour's CoCo 2 emulator under dosemu at one of my linux
> consoles.
> 

Two words:

SUPER COOL

> At first blush it looks like there's no simple way to get BDOS to take
> care of translating from logical file position to track/granule/sector
> from outside of Basic. Which means I'm gonna have to read and parse
> the directory (and probably the FAT) to keep track of where things
> are. If this is the case, there doesn't seem to be much point in going
> through Basic at all beyond the simple functions provided by DSKCON,
> since I'll have to maintain my own copies of most things anyway, and
> it's a Bad Idea to have two unrelated pieces of software running at
> the same time when they both think they're in charge of a particular
> piece of storage space, particularly directory and FAT storage space.

I am not an expert on the Disk BASIC side of things, but I believe you
are correct; the only "documented" entry point is DSKCON, which does not
deal with FCBs.  You're probably best off just using DSKCON and writing
your own filesystem routines, either compatible with Disk Basic's format
or not!

I'd love to get my hands on the F83 when you're done with it!  Excellent
job!

C.