[Coco] Open Letter to those who will be attending the The 24thAnnual "Last Chicago CoCoFEST April 25-26, 2015

[Tormod Volden]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 3:57 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> Now, ISTR my tc^3 controller was originally set so the nv clock did not
> clash with the clock in my scII controller, but now the 4n1 board has
> been removed, leaving the no-halt floppy which I am using.  However, its
> been years since I have been able to format a floppy without the whole
> thing "going away", aka crashing, from 1 to sometimes 15 or more tracks
> into the format operation. So what mt "mb" scripts have been doing is
> deleting everything so there is a clean disk to os9gen and that works,
> but what a kludge!

It sounds like you are running your very own version of NitrOS-9 with
an amalgam of old and new modules and tweaked descriptors. Is a plain
NitrOS-9 build (like one of the "official" disk images) also unable to
format a floppy on your drives?

Tormod

>
> My "format" command in /dd/cmds is the same length & crc as this mornings
> build, as I tried to fix the crashing by copying the latest version into
> my cmds dir a year or so back, to no avail.  Apparently nothing has
> changed in format in the meantime.
>
> And my default boot(s) apparently contain a crashomatic version of
> rb1773. Its longer then the present default, and shorter than either of
> the scii versions by quite a good number of bytes. But I need to
> actually do some formatting of the virtual floppies that the /sh
> descriptor can be set to access via the "dmode /sh stp=hexvalue"
> command, as I don't want to overwrite the 2 working vdisks I have until
> such time as I have fixed a wrong displayed value error I found just
> recently in bootlink.  As I've destroyed the working version of that in
> my fix attempts, to fix it needs some reorganization I am not done with
> yet, I'll have to ezgen /sh, then reboot to DECB and run "link.bas" in
> its place to bring in the bootfile I just edited with ezgen. The next
> bootlnk release will be the improved version AND will have grown the
> ability to show how I/we are presently linked if the argument is a ?
> mark.  Something I left out of the original.  Its srcs are so big now,
> that vim (the old tsedit with patches, and set for a 56k buffer by
> default) is the only editor that can handle it in one load. Minted it
> turns out, is out of memory and crashed long before it has loaded that
> source file.
>
> So, if I ezgen one of those and swap out the crashing rb1773.dr in it,
> with one from this mornings build, I might be able to fix the crashing
> format.  smap says I should have enough sysram to be able to do it, 46
> pages free, 11K available with at least 10k contiguous.  With the
> present boot.
>
> I see an rb1773_scii_ff58.dr, and an rb1773_scii_ff74.dr as the
> selections available.  The FF58 version is in use. Or does it make any
> diff if the 4n1 has been removed, leaving only the no-halt?
>
> Or, and I hate to give up the no-halt, should I use the plain one for
> this test to see if I can fix my inability to format problem?