[Coco] CoCoTools

[Roger Taylor]

Boisy, maybe in a few weeks or so I can come down there and work with you 
on adding support for these neat tools into Portal-9.  I'm still looking at 
the calendar.

Keep up the excellent work.




At 09:34 PM 3/8/2004 -0600, you wrote:
>Back on February 3 I posted a message to the list regarding an upcoming 
>release of OS9Tools.  It's now March 8 and I am finally getting this 
>done.  The package has been renamed to CoCoTools and has moved from 
>SourceForge to a new home: www.nitros9.org where the web page will be 
>updated shortly with links to packages for Windows, Linux and Mac.
>
>The name change comes as a result of a new focus of the project.  Not just 
>a command utility for reading/writing OS-9 disk images, CoCoTools contains 
>the os9asm/6309 cross assembler, and also a new utility: decb.  This 
>utility is the Disk BASIC counterpart to the 'os9' command, allowing 
>common Disk BASIC commands to be run on disk images.
>
>In fact, both the os9 and decb programs understand each other's disk 
>formats, so you can run this command at a Windows command prompt, given an 
>OS-9 disk image (os9.dsk) and a Disk BASIC disk image (rsdos.dsk):
>
>os9 copy os9.dsk,startup rsdos.dsk,
>
>OR
>
>decb copy os9.dsk,startup rsdos.dsk,
>
>Either utility's copy command knows how to read/write to either Disk BASIC 
>or OS-9 disk images, or of course, the native file system:
>
>decb copy rsdos.dsk,test.bin test.bin (copies test.bin from the RS-DOS 
>disk image to the current Windows directory).
>
>This will be a pre-release.  There are probably some bugs, and the Disk 
>BASIC write functionality is not in place yet.  That will come later, so 
>for now you can only READ the contents of a Disk BASIC disk image.
>
>Along with these tools will be the following C libraries for those who 
>want to integrate CoCoTools functionality into their programs:
>
>libdecb.o
>libnative.o
>libos9.o
>libcoco.o
>
>The first three, libdecb.o, libnative.o and libos9.o are for their 
>respective platforms.  They all have a C interface that is similar to 
>OS-9's calls for opening/reading/writing files via a path.
>
>So, libdecb.o has functions like:   _decb_open(), _decb_read(), 
>_decb_write(), _decb_close(), etc.
>Likewise, libos9.o has functions: _os9_open(), _os9_read(), _os9_write(), 
>_os9_close()
>And the native functions (which work on the native disk system) have: 
>_native_open(), native_read(), _native_write(), _native_close()
>
>The idea is that all three libraries have a very common interface to basic 
>file I/O.
>
>The really cool feature is the fourth library:  libcoco.o  This library 
>abstracts a path to a higher level, and provides functions: _coco_open(), 
>_coco_read(), _coco_write(), _coco_close().  These functions automatically 
>look at the target and can determine whether it is a native disk file, 
>coco disk image or OS-9 disk image.
>Applications using this library do not have to know the details of which 
>disk image or file type they are dealing with.
>
>I will be working towards documenting these libraries for the full 1.0 
>release of CoCoTools.  For now, I will pre-release the tools this week so 
>that as many people can use them as possible and report issues.
>
>Boisy
>
>
>--
>Coco mailing list
>Coco at maltedmedia.com
>http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


----------
Roger Taylor