[Coco] Nitros9 Boot Disk "issues"

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Roger Merchberger may have mentioned these words:

Oh my gosh! I'm hearing voices in my email, and they're mine! ;-)

>I have another issue, but it's with the 3.2.4 release that came with 
>DriveWire. If I can figure out how to setup a DW-bootable 3.2.6 release, 
>I'll test that too...

No love so far - I think it's because DW can't boot Nitros9 from a 
"standard" .DSK file. After a couple of false starts, I realized I should 
dmode the /x0 driver & see what's in there, and boy howdy - the settings 
are *completely* different. So, I guess it's no real surprise that it's not 
a drop-in replacement, if ya wanna boot from it. Are DW "hard drive" files 
[ for wont of a better term ] compatible with anything "hard drive" based 
in MESS?

Here's crazy idea time...

... Or, should I see if I can get MESS to 'conduit' the virtual serial port 
of the virtual CoCo to the real serial port on my computer, then hook in my 
laptop (the DW server) thru a null-modem cable, to try to build a new 3.2.6 
disk.

Building an emulated boot disk from an emulated CoCo with an emulated 
serial port all on PCs is just crazy enough to maybe work! ;-)

>I'll prolly tinker with that tonite & see if I can get something up & 
>running, and I'll let y'all know tomorrow how well (or if) I fared.

Well, I didn't fare too well, but as I mentioned above, the cards were 
stacked against me...

If I get it figured out how to build a DW boot disk, I'll type 'er up into 
a HOWTO & make it available to all.

=-=-=-=

In other news, I can tell you that Athlon64 CPUs are *schweet* for running 
MESS, except it's not multithreaded, so it'll only run on one CPU. I have 
.103b on my flash drive (to make sure it's a similar test) and my Athlon64 
4400+ (dual core 2.2Ghz) runs it over 600% natural speed with no frameskip; 
twice as fast as my Athlon 2600+ MP which runs at 2.13 Ghz. @ about 280%. 
Now all we need is Nitros9 Beowulf cluster software, so I can run 2 copies 
of MESS (one for each core) and have them work together... {{ Evil genious 
adjusts monocle & wrings hands together menacingly... ;-) }}

Oh, and at 600%, one would need to adjust the keyrepeat values, as it's 
*way* to easy to get multiple letters whilst typing.

Laterz!
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger  --  SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
  _±±_                          zmerch at 30below.com
(©||®)  If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead
  _)(_   disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.