[Coco] 248 errors in NitrOS-9 repository

[Robert Gault]

I've found the cause of the problem but not yet the right correction. This problem of many disks giving 248 errors when being built started about the time that sysgo added a time stamp. That increase in size and also an increase in size of krnp2 has resulted in an OS9Boot file over $5000 bytes.
This bootfile size should not be a problem but the utility os9.exe seems to barf specially with game disks when a large number of .dat and text files need to be copied to the root directory. Many examples of this are in the 3rdparty/packages directory, mostly in sierra.
 
A very quick workaround for this problem is to add to the OS9FORMAT command    -c2   for these disks which will increase the the number of sectors per bit in the FAT. There won't be any 248 errors after this change. However, this should not be needed and must be a bug in os9.exe as one can easily add missing files to these disks while running OS-9 without changing DD.BIT.
A second workaround is to remove sysgo from the OS9Boot file. That requires more changes to the makefiles but does leave the disk format alone.
A third workaround which is more of a proof of concept than a real fix is to remove the dts time stamp from sysgo and use an older smaller version of krnp2 from a repository version that did not have 248 errors and had OS9Boot files less than $5000 bytes. Again the game disks will build without errors.
 
Robert