[Coco] Newbie questions

[Bill Pierce]

Hi & welcome Sean... Good to see some new blood :-)

I think I see your problem right off the bat.
The Sierra games you are trying to run require several special drivers and a particular teminal (/term) & driver.

Since you are booting into nitros9 from the becker port, you are most likely booting up with "cogrf" or "cowin" as the display driver. All Sierra games require "covdg" which is a 32 column green screen (old Coco 2 style).
This is why when booting the games disks alone works as they have the proper boot on the disks.

Also, there has to be several drivers named "vrn" and "vi" in your bootfile for Sierra games and "ftdd" and possibly "nil" for Flight Sim and Sub Sim.

The reason behind this is the Sierra games as well as Flight Sim and Sub Sim were all developed before the "Developement System" disk was released by Microware and Tandy. This disk included the new windows drivers and graphics handlers that are default on the Nitros9 boot disks.
So the early games developers developed their own graphics handlers in the above drivers until Tandy released the later drivers. Most games developed after then used the newer drivers. As far as I know, those games are the only ones with those requirements.

To have the best of both worlds, you must create a boot system with both "CoWin" and "CoVDG" with "/Wx" descriptors and "/Vx" descriptors in the same boot as well as "VRN", "VI", "FTDD" and possibly "NIL" (yes you can do this)

Then you can boot up in an 80 column screen and when you want to play a Sierra game you type:

shell i=/v1&<enter> (this creates a VDG window)
<clear> key to the VDG window
Sierra<enter>

Being new to OS-9, this may all be Japanese, but I hope it helps :-)


Bill Pierce
"Today is a good day... I woke up" - Ritchie Havens
 

My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Co-Webmaster of The TRS-80 Color Computer Archive
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/
Co-Contributor, Co-Editor for CocoPedia
http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
E-Mail: ooogalapasooo at aol.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Margules <s_man501 at yahoo.com>
To: CoCoList Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Tue, Jan 21, 2014 11:26 am
Subject: [Coco] Newbie questions


Hi everybody. I'm new here, and completely new to the coco3, so please excuse my 
ignorance. My Dad had a black and white TRS-80 (way different machine I know) in 
the library when I was a kid. No games or even a disk drive, but I used to mess 
around with basic on there after school. I looked it up online on a whim and 
found the Vcc emulator. I've been playing with it in my free time for a couple 
weeks now, and it kinda sucked me in. I'm using the 1.43 beta with drivewire 
support. 

Everything I know about this I've learned from google, websites, and a LOT of 
trial and error. 

Ok.... here's some of the issues I'm having

I CAN load a Sierra disk image like kingsquest1_40d.dsk when I mount it in the 
FD-502 Drive 0 slot, boot the system in 'disk basic', and type "dos" to boot 
into Nitros9 when I have a Nitros9 VHD in the hard drive slot.

I CAN use an external HDBDOS ROM image to access drivewire and then type "DOS" 
to boot a drivewire compatible Nitros9 boot disk in the 0 disk slot of the 
drivewire server.

I CAN'T figure out how to run any games or programs from the FD-502 drive or the 
drivewire drives when I'm already inside Nitros9. I can "dir /d0" to see whats 
there. I even figured out how to "chx /d0/cmds" but the system freezes when I 
try to use what one would think would be the boot command (Sierra, AutoEx, etc.)

I CAN'T get RGB dos to recognize any FD-502 drives, although I can get it to 
boot into nitros9 with "DOS 255"

I CAN'T run any .BIN files at all, from any DOS or OS. I try "loadm programname" 
and it will wait and say ok, but when I type "execute" the system will freeze on 
the screen with that little s on it.

I DON'T know how to access a hard drive directory or load data on to it.

 And uh... I don't know a lotta other stuff. I've found resources online, but 
they're a little scarce on the basics, so I figured I'd try you guys. Thanks in 
advance for any tips. : )

--
Coco mailing list
Coco at maltedmedia.com
http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco