[Coco] Announcement: CoCoBoot Project's first Alpha release

[Aaron Wolfe]

Looks like some alpha-type wrinkles which I'm sure can easily be sorted out.
 Don't let that be discouraging though, I think this is one of the most
exciting things to happen for the coco in quite some time.

I've been playing with what I guess would be a pre-alpha version of CoCoBoot
for a few days, and while I'm sure there is even more that can be done with
it, here are some examples of what can been done already..

menu based boot up from basically anything, fdd, ide, dw etc.
copy disks between any supported drive types
load rom images over drivewire into ram and exec them (works for some roms,
not others) or right into the superide's flash slots soon..
select roms from the superide's flash slots and reboot to them
fully control the drivewire server right from cocoboot's prompt, exactly
like using the dw command in os9

plus everything can be customized, automated, etc using the built in forth
language, which is really quite fun to play with.
I'm sure there are many more handy things that can be done with cocoboot,
its quite impressive.





On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:20 PM, Brett Gordon <beretta42 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have decided that my "CoCoBoot" project is complete enough for it's
> first alpha release.
>
> CoCoBoot is an effort to modernize, and unify booting strategies for
> the Tandy Color Computer.
>
> 1. Provides scripting to the end user to allow maximum flexibility
>   in creating new way to boot their CoCo.  This scripting ability
>   is provided by a token threaded FORTH compiler.
>
> 2. Allows one boot loader to impliment the various different ways a
>   CoCo can boot: via the DOS, CLOADM, LOADM commands in BASIC, as
>   well as BASIC's cartridge interrupt, and DECB's external ROM paths
>   too.
>
> 3. Provides routines for accessing different disk-based hardware: FDC,
>   IDE, DriveWire, ROM.
>
> see the release's "HELP" file more more info:
>
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/cocoboot/
>
> --
> Brett M. Gordon,
> beretta42 at gmail.com
>
> --
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>