[Coco] OS9/68K on Atari SatanDisk

[billg999 at cs.uofs.edu]

> On Monday 24 June 2013 10:42:07 billg999 at cs.uofs.edu did opine:
>
>> > On Mon, 24 Jun 2013, Bob Devries wrote:
>> >> Has anyone here tried to install OS-9/68000 on an Atari with a
>> >> SatanDisk ACSI interface?
>> >>
>> >> I don't know if it's possible; I'm hoping it is.
>> >>
>> >> The Microware version came with FDISK on its TOS start disk, but that
>> >> doesn't work on large disks. :(
>> >>
>> >> Don't know if there's a more up-to-date version.
>> >
>> > I was considering a SatanDisk for exactly that purpose, but the
>> > designer didn't know anything about OS-9 (or the Atari Unix-like
>> > variant - forget the name) and couldn't guarantee it would work.
>>
>> Too bad we don't have a NitrOS9/68K.  :-)  I have a couple of different
>> M68K boards just crying for something like OS9 to run on them.
>>
>> bill
>>
> That is probably not farther away than a translator to drive the m68k
> version of gcc's assembler.  Niros9 source code is there for anyone to
> download just by doing an hg clone of the repo.

I still haven't had the time to look at all the source, but I thought
it was all in 6809/6309 assembler.

>
> OTOH, linux for the m68k boards is alive and well,

Linux is much to complex (read bloated!!) and much harder to do
device drivers for strange hardware.  That was always one of the
biggest attractions (at least to me) of OS9.  One lean, mean OS.
The boards I have also have very limited memory and that was another
of OS9's strengths.  (I ran multi-user, multi-tasking in Level 1 with
only 64K of memory.  try that with Linux!!)

>                                                   I actually had it
> running on my amiga 2000 once, at perhaps 1% of the speed of amigados
> because it had no knowledge of the extra hardware and memory present in
> that box.  I've no clue if it ever drew drivers for the PP&S 68040 card
> with 64 megs of memory and a scsi interface, or any of the other drive
> interfaces other than the commie approved scsi, the A-2091.  That would
> have brought it up to speed. But that one time, running on 2 megs of ram
> and 1/2 meg of the 2 megs of chip memory, it spent 99% of it time
> shuffling
> stuff in and out of swap.  Needless to say, that 1Gb drive was recovered
> for amigados use.
>

64 Megs of memory!!  Try 4M.  It does do SCSI, though.  CMD Controller
on QBUS emulating MSCP.  :-)

bill