[Coco] NitrOS-9 and VDGINT

[Allen Huffman]

> On Jan 24, 2015, at 5:49 PM, Bill Pierce via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Allen, since you're getting the info in bits and pieces, here is a rundown of setting up a VDG screen in L2

Thanks -- just confirming CoVGD == VDGINT, etc. is useful.

When and why did things change that prevent dynamically loading and using these? On my old system, I was able to just load in VDGINT and term (renamed to termvdg) and iniz and go. That no longer seems to be the case.

Could you check on your system? I merged CoVDG.io and term_vdg.dt (with term renamed internally using ezgen) and can't get them to go.

I just merged CoVDG.io and V1.dw together, and loaded them. When I iniz /v1, I see a green empty screen with blue cursor, and when I CLEAR to that window, that's it. No more CLEARing to swap windows. Same problems.

Is something busted and no one knows 'cause no one has used VGD in ages? Or is it no longer possible to dynamically load drivers and use them? I was always able to do that in the past, though with 8K less system space to use from the 64K map :)

> To explain a lot of the renaming conventions, if you remember, the old drivers/system modules had names like "CC3xxx" and CCxxx"...
> You must consider that the NitrOS9 repo compiles disks for all Cocos (1-3) as well as all Dragons, the Coco Arduino, and Boisy's "Liber809" Atari 6809 card. So the naming didn't quite fit the other machines and names were changed to reflect more the hardware/software implementation instead of the machine it is run on. Example.... "CC3Disk" is now "RB1773" which better describes it as a driver for the"RBF WD1773 controller" no matter what machine it's used in. Another would be the "VTIO" mentioned above which was renamed from "CC3IO", which I assume is short for "Video Terminal IO".

Those I agree with -- moving the naming to where Microware's OS-9 evolved (mostly; to this day, there are still some poorly named official modules). A writeup of "Differences between OS-9 and NitrOS-9" is what would have helped me. Maybe that is there somewhere. I am using two .doc files (with OCR typos) in docs, but don't know what all the other formats are.

> It took me a little while to get used to the naming, but in the end, I think it was maybe a good decision since we build for different machines.
> 
> If you really want to check out (almost) all the modules available, get a distribution disk and look under:

Yes indeed -- I am glad these are part of the .DSK images so I can tinker and play on a CoCo rather than having to run the SD card to the backroom where my other computer is :) I've been digging through source code (a luxury I didn't have when I last used OS-9 full-time on my CoCo 1 in the early 90s). 

> I hope this clears up a few things for ya :-)

Yes, and confirms what I am doing should work, but is just broken.

After my initial failure getting CoVDG and term_vdg (renamed) to work, I then took ezgen to my boot disk and inserted the modules IN to it. Same issues.

All this just so I can see some LEDSHOW assembly program I wrote who-knows-went that scrolls messages on the screen. THis must have been written before I learned how to do that using WINDINT with the later NitrOS-9 system calls.

		-- Allen