[Coco] [Color Computer] The evolution of the Coco..

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 16:38 +1000, David wrote:

> I know this is probably a no-no, but has anyone considered some sort of 
> mini-DOS for the coco? something along the lines of FreeDOS/MS-DOS 
> rather than the UNIX-style OS.. I ask this because OS9 has a high 
> learning curve as I see it, whereas I've always found DOS more 
> straight-forward (maybe it's just my heritage of cutting my teeth on DOS 
> 3.3?)
> 
> I guess a decent C compiler and some work might have us a stripped 
> FreeDOS kernel running, but who knows?

You could pick one of the RS-DOS enhancements/replacements like ADOS-3.

Then there's always FLEX, SK*DOS, and some other things I'm not
remembering right now...

Take it with a grain of salt though since I've never used any of those.
Went straight from RS-DOS to OS9L1 then OS9L2.

MS-DOS is tied to the PC architecture so although you could make a
MS-DOS command prompt simulator, binary compatibilty with DOS utilties
is not possible. MS-DOS is a reasonable way to run a coco emulator on a
PC though.


Hey, I recall ads for some giant sidecar thing for the coco that ran
some kind of alternative OS. Was it CP/M?

My choice for a minimalist coco OS would boot up in a nice forth
development environment + assembler in ROM, with no OS and just the
blocks system to access the disk drive.

-- John.