[Coco] Newbie questions

[Robert Gault]

Sean Margules wrote:
> Ok ok. No more Drivewire or HDBDOS till I get a better  handle on this stuff. Promise.
>
>
>

OK guys,

RGBDOS/HDBDOS is not that complicated. Using VCC non-DW as an example, you can 
have several hardware configurations. The default one ought to be for the MPI
slot4 FD-502
slot3 Hard Drive + Cloud9 RTC
slot2 empty
slot1 Orchestra-90
slot select #4

FD-502 config
RGB Dos
Persistent Disk Images, Clock at 0xFF50-51
physical drives A:none B:none

FD-502 Drives0-3 any floppies you want
HD Drive 0 - any hard drive image typically with myharddrive.vhd

By default, RGBDOS has all drives assigned to the hard drive and no floppies. It 
will also automatically run the Basic program AUTOEXEC.BAS (if it exists) and 
that program should be a menu program that permits choices with a single key 
press. Since it would be easy to damage hard drive "drive0" my AUTOEXEC.BAS is just
10 DOS253
This results in the automatic running of AUTOEXEC.BAS on hard drive "drive253" 
which is the menu program selecting for example:
Floppies (0-3) on
Floppies (0-3) off
Clock speed fast            my default
Clock speed slow
Boot OS-9                  assumes OS-9 installed on the hard drive
etc.

To boot OS-9 I backed up a standard single sided, 35-track, NitrOS-9 boot disk 
to hard drive "drive255" and used the program LINK.BAS to adjust LSN0 on the 
hard drive. LINK.BAS should be on one of the "drives" that come with the VCC 
.vhd image. There should also be a boot disk on the VCC .vhd image.
The boot disk MUST use the Boot module that boots from a hard drive.

All of the .vhd images used by the emulators JVC, MESS, and VCC use hard drives 
with a $5A0000 byte OS-9 partition after which follow 256, 35-track "floppies" 
Both the OS-9 and floppies on the hard drive have 256-byte sectors.

Backing up drives is easy.
DRIVEOFF
BACKUP 0 TO N
Will backup any 35-track single sided drive to hard drive "drive N" with 
N=4to255. If you need to backup a floppy to hard drives 0-3, you could backup 
floppy0 to hard drive4, then turn off the floppies and backup4 to hard drive0.

Now the .vhd image at
http://www.coco4.com/data/vcc/nitros9.zip
does not have any AUTOEXEC.BAS files but drive 254 does contain utility programs 
and drive 255 is the NitrOS-9 boot disk. Just enter DOS255 and NitrOS-9 will 
boot. The version is 3.2.8 but you can update it.

Robert