[Coco] OS9 68K, MM/1 software and questions

[Francis Swygert]

From: Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net>

On 01/07/2016 10:47 AM, Cocodemus wrote:
> Well any software with direct access would not work . Dunno if they exist
>

I don't think there would have been much of that on the MM/1.    It may 
make some sense on the CoCo, but I (think) you'd gain much by bypassing the 
operating system and reading the scancodes directly from the keyboard on 
the MM/1, even for games. I wish there was enough MM/1 software for 
somebody to have gone to the trouble of breaking the rules.
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The problem is if you "break the rules" the software is no longer portable between systems. Like the few CoCo1 games that don't work on the CoCo3 because they used unsupported features of the 6847. OS-9 is modular and does everything through drivers, one reason it is so robust. So you may gain a little in speed, but then the software may not run if there are any future hardware upgrades. I agree, you can get a little more speed from games that way, but you have to make a new version for any hardware upgrades. With OS-9 you can change a few drivers, and include them with the game. On the CoCo that's why many of the OS-9 games have to be started from boot -- they just load the drivers they need to save on memory, and I'm sure a few had tweaked/special drivers to make the game work better. Harder to do that when loading from a hard drive without rebooting, though it is possible if there is enough free memory to do it. 
 Frank Swygert
 Fix-It-Frank Handyman Service
 803-604-6548