[Coco] NitrOS-9 V3.3.0 and DriveWire

[Boisy G. Pitre]

Hello everyone,

I've had a few days to get my head out from under school work and wanted to throw out some ideas about the NitrOS-9 Project and where I see it going.

As most of you know, the NitrOS-9 Project has grown massively in scope.  There are all sorts of disk images that can be created, from the OS disk images itself to the Sierra games, and more.  Moreover, myself and a few people are actually actively maintaining all of this work.  

What complicates this is the sheer number of bootable configurations we are supporting.  For the OS alone we have:

NitrOS-9/6809 Level 1, NitrOS-9/6809 Level 2, NitrOS-9/6309 Level 2

For each of those we have:

40 Track DSDD, 80 Track DSDD, 40 Track DSDD 50Hz, 80 Track DSDD 50Hz, DriveWire Boot

And in the case of the 40 Track images there are two disks because the entire OS distribution cannot fit on all of them.

Then there are the additional packages, like all of the Sierra games (there are over a dozen).  Each of these are using multiple disk configurations.  It's becoming a lot to maintain.

In order to make all of this manageable, I am considering the following:

- Drop 80 Track DSDD support for the OS and have only 40 Track DSDD disk images.  This should take care of most people who have 40 track disk systems.  Those with 80 track disk systems can still boot off the 40 track images but will have to make their own custom 80 track boot disks.  This would leave each OS with: 40 Track DSDD, 40 Track DSDD 50Hz, and DriveWire boot disk images.

- For all other packages (Sierra games, other games like Koronis Rift, Rescue on Fractalus, etc) we will drop the floppy disk images and make these disk images exclusively DriveWire bootable. This means that those images will no longer be floppy bootable; it also means games that require 2 or 3 or 5 disks (like the Kings Quest series) would run off of one nice image.

Since the DriveWire servers (Java based, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) are free and readily available for download, I don't see this as much of an issue.  Most if not all CoCo users have a PC, and would need one anyway to build real disks from the floppy disk images.

So to recap, the OS would still be distributed with floppy based boots for convenience to those who want to work with NitrOS-9 on traditional 5.25" 40 track DSDD floppies, but all other packages would be DriveWire only.
--
Boisy G. Pitre
http://www.tee-boy.com/