Nitros9 for the masses (was) Re: [Coco] COCO4 Emulator

[Boisy Pitre]

On May 7, 2006, at 3:29 PM, James Hrubik wrote:

> Yup, converts one by one.  BUT -- we need to hear from the  
> important people on this -- the ones who maintain Nitros9.  Curtis,  
> Boisy -- what is YOUR opinion regarding a port of Nitros9 to the  
> Intel chipset, ala Linux?

Porting NitrOS-9 to an x86 would be a major undertaking.  So much of  
what NitrOS-9 is, is because it welds itself to the 6809/6309:  
registers, memory footprint, etc.  I just can't see it being done in  
a reasonable amount of time, nor could I see it being done without  
some major design changes and concessions to the OS itself.

If one wanted to truly write a NitrOS-9 type OS for x86, it could be  
done, but in some higher level language such as C.  That said, I  
don't see how this is anything remotely close to a CoCo 4.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the CoCo 4 is a myth.  In  
my opinion, the only organization that could have ever put out such a  
thing as a CoCo 4 would have been Tandy, and they are defunct.  The  
best we can hope for is a CoCo 3+ (ala the SuperBoard).

What has piqued my interest of late is getting the 6809 on other  
computer systems that were conventionally 6502 based, like the Atari  
XEGS.  A colleague of mine is working on this and I think that would  
open up some interesting avenues for NitrOS-9.  It's not a CoCo 4,  
per see, but perhaps another avenue to get other retrocomputers into  
our fold.

Boisy

> On May 7, 2006, at 11:12 AM, John Donaldson wrote:
>
>> Alex,
>>   What you said is all true. I forgot that the COCO3 could display  
>> 16 colors, not 8. I kinda like the idea of porting NitrOS9 over to  
>> the PC and let it be a real PC OS. This may be the best of both  
>> worlds. It would allow a new hardware platform and allow use of  
>> upgrades that are coming out for the PC's. The OS source could be  
>> kep the the Net Dispostory so upgrades, changes, bug fixs and such  
>> could quickly be implimented. We then have true 80 column screens,  
>> all the colors we will ever need, speed would be determined by  
>> which PC Process your using. You could then envoke the current  
>> emulator programs to give backward compatiblity to the COCO2/3.  
>> Just think Multi-View could become our verison of Windows.
>>
>> John Donaldson
>>
>
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