[Coco] OS9-L2 vs NitrOS9

[George Ramsower]

 Thanks everyone, for such good input on this. I'm inspired now to try once 
again, to build a boot disk for my coco3 which uses a hard drive. I still 
have the stuff  in a bootlist file on my hard drive to run OS9Gen to make 
another Nitros9 boot disk and the script to build the CMDS directory and the 
STARTUP file.


 When I tried to use Nitros9 previously, I could not get it to see the hard 
disk. I think it was something in the Dmode util that came with Nitros9 that 
was messing with me.
 It is obviously different.  The suggestions offered from this list did not 
work and finally, I gave up.

 My OS9-L2 system is stable. I've left it running Basic09 programs for days, 
sometime weeks at a time, monitoring things and it just keeps chuggin' along 
like an old steam locomotive. Slow and steady! That's my coco.

George

> From: "George Ramsower"

> I'm curious about this:
>
> Nitros9 is somewhat faster than OS9 and requires a Hitachi 6309 chip. Of 
> course, there's Nitros9-6809 but still, it's Nitros9.
>
> In recent times, some folks have introduced new hardware which is really 
> cool stuff but, the drivers and whatever other software provided in the 
> package claim to be  Nitros9 stuff.
>
> There are a few of these hardware things that interest me. Next month, I'm 
> getting three of those Pupo style? keyboard things to put a PC type 
> keyboard on a coco.  It's a Plug-N-Play thing that will work. I'm almost 
> out of keyboards now.  I think it's Cloud 9 that handles or makes those. 
> It would eliminate that darned, fat and cumbersome ribbon cable I use to 
> relocate the Coco keyboard.
>
> The vendors which have other products that interest me, advertise they 
> provide Nitros9 drivers.
>
> This is why I haven't acquired any of the latter items available to date. 
> I have asked the vendors if those drivers would work on my OS9 L2 system 
> and haven't received replies.
>
>  So there are two questions in this post...
>
> 1. Will a Nitros9 driver work on a Mircroware OS9 system on a 64K CC  or a 
> CC3?
> 2. Have we abandoned OS-9?
>
>  I suppose if #1 is FALSE and  #2 is TRUE, then I'm in real trouble. I 
> think it would take me months to convert to Nitros9, given the time I have 
> available. I'm using three cocos at this time. One has a hard drive, the 
> CNC coco is not just a CNC coco. The ports are versatile and I have 
> numerous OS9 boot disks with special boot files, startups and 
> software(B09) dedicated to the task at hand. Some use graphics. Converting 
> all this stuff to Nitros9 would be a monumental task I think. The third 
> coco is a 64K unit and does simple tasks for my house. I use OS9 on that 
> one also. I have about a dozen special boot disks for that one.  The 
> computer with the hard drive only has three. The CNC coco has now has 
> fourteen boot disks. Only two operate the milling machine. The rest do 
> suff like  operate my darkroom/enlarger, monitoring the weather(looking 
> for water), turning lights on and off... and more
>
>
> Heck! It seems I"m being left in the dust behind the pack while using OS9 
> L2...... Dangit!