[Coco] Update: os9gen on 128k coco3, rs323 pack
Michael Furman
n6il at ocs.net
Sun Feb 15 12:30:29 EST 2009
Robert and everyone else:
Thank you very much for your help getting os9gen to work. I wanted to
let you know that it worked and I have been trying to create working
3.2.8 and 3.2.6 boot disks all weekend.
There are many potential issues.
It looks like both of my source 3.2.8 disks created from the
distribution images have bad sectors or hard-to-read sectors. Some of
the 3.2.8 boot disks that I create with the term_vdg driver have the
issues I mentioned previously, that it gets i2xoC then hangs. When I
try to use the 80 col term I get a Nitros9 boot message then the
system hangs. Unfortunately I don't have a desktop PC with a floppy
drive in it currently so I can't write new images out to continue with
this.
I have been using the silly default line editor. I learned that
without giving it additional memory, it doesn't read the entire
standard.bl file into memory. It doesn't truncate the file but it's
still rather weird. After figuring this out, giving the editor enough
memory and building yet more disks the hangs mentioned above still
happen. This doesn't appear to be the problem.
I made a boot disk using 3.2.6 and added the sc6551.dr and
t2_sc6551.dr modules to it. this booted up. When I tried something
like echo hi >/t2 the system hangs. Not sure what's going on. Any
specific rs323 handshaking issues I need to be aware of? I even tried
booting the standard unmodified disk and manually loading the driver
and descriptor with the same result. This might be due to some
additional problems:
I tried using the rs232 pak ROM and it seems to hang occasionally. My
RS323 pack no longer has its black plastic case. I don't think this
in itself is a problem but it's been unprotected for many years (some
kid took it out of the box to look at it and lost the parts, hmm, I
wonder who that is...) I know that static discharge is less of an
issue with mounted parts than it is with unmounted parts, but still...
I have to wonder if there's any damage to this board...
I'm using an MPI that has not been modified for use with a coco3. I
need to order a new PAL and get this done.
Seems like I have more problems than good news to report. I will go
off and continue playing around to see what I can get to work. It is
also apparent that I need to get some additional hardware...
--Mikey
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