[Coco] Thought

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Fri, 2004-09-24 at 10:23, Neil Morrison wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Mark McDougall" <msmcdoug at optushome.com.au>
> 
> > I'm not sure how the CoCo drive works - I'm guessing from your comments it
> > doesn't interrupt the 6809 when data is ready?!?
> 
> IIRC the drive HALTs the processor until the buffer is transferred. That's
> why the OS-9 clock gets off time when you do disk I/O.
> 
> NM
> 

Yep. Hence the disto no-halt controller. But no-halt is more important
for smooth multi-tasking. I remember being SO disappointed when I
finally got a rig where I could hook up another coco to a shell prompt
on the serial port, and tried some disk commands. Choppy, Ugh...

OS-9 is really happiest with a RTC... sucks having to enter time in at
each boot. Once we get ethernet we could get time via NTP.

Actually ability to read the host's time would be a nice feature for
Drivewire as well if it isn't already in there... (my Drivewire is
in-the-mail).

-- John.