[Coco] CoCoTools

[Boisy G. Pitre]

Roger,

Bad news... My wife just informed me that we had a prior committment on 
Saturday the 20th.  I'm sorry, but we're gonna have to move our get 
together back another weekend.  Will the 27th work?

Boisy

On Mar 8, 2004, at 9:58 PM, Roger Taylor wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
>
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