[Coco] Personal OS-9 on Atari emulators

[Paul Fitch]

I tried it and got the same results.  I suspected at the time that the
emulators were not "up to code" as far as OSK was concerned.  The 1st disk
CAN be read by the STEAM emulator, but, like you saw, on boot it crashes.
The other two disks were unreadable by the emulator, which was expected.

It seems to me that the people who did the original OSK port to the STs got
lazy by using the onboard roms.  I guess they didn't want to write an
assembly version.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com 
> [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On Behalf Of Joel Ewy
> Sent: Friday, September 07, 2007 12:04 PM
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
> Subject: [Coco] Personal OS-9 on Atari emulators
> 
> Hey all,
> 
> Has anybody tried the disk images Bob Devries uploaded on any 
> of the Atari emulators?  I have done a little experimentation 
> but haven't yet gotten it to boot.  I've tried a recent 
> aranym in fluxbuntu, and a number of different emulators in 
> Win2K.  The GEM/TOS bootloader runs and asks for a boot disk, 
> which I gather is the same disk that it's running from (disk 
> 1).  It goes something like this:
> 
> Insert your OS/9 BOOT diskette.
> PRESS ANY KEY WHEN READY
> [keypress...]
> 
> OS-9/68K System Bootstrap V2.1
> 
> After which the screen scrolls by with many repetitions of:
> Exception Error, vector offset $00B8 addr $0000B6C0 Fatal 
> System Error; rebooting system
> 
> Sometimes there is a string of bomb icons as well, and there 
> are other vector offset numbers and addresses.
> 
> The above is what I got with Steem Engine 2 in Win2K.  
> WinSTon crashes after putting up the "Bootstrap" message and 
> receiving a keystroke, and SainT sometimes does as well.  The 
> behavior varies slightly with different Atari ROMs, but what 
> I've used mostly is TOS 1.0, assuming that to be the ROM most 
> commonly in use at the time.
> 
> Bob Devries mentioned in an email on this list that Atari 
> Personal OS-9 makes extensive use of the Atari's ROM 
> routines.  Some of these Atari emulators are reputed to be 
> quite faithful implementation of the Atari hardware (though 
> it seems that most of them emulate the STE or STF, or one of 
> the other later machines, while the manual states that OS-9 
> is for the 520ST or 1040ST -- I'd have to look up the 
> differences between those systems and the STE) since they are 
> intended to run games and demos, which pound pretty heavily 
> on the hardware.
> 
> So I see several possibilities here:
> 1.  I'm making some dumb, really obvious mistake in my usage 
> of the emulators.
> 2.  There's some incompatibility between the disk image 
> formats Bob used and the formats expected by the ST emulators.
> 3.  None of the emulators emulate the hardware sufficiently well for
> OS-9 to run.  (Doesn't seem likely on the face of it, 
> especially if OS-9 makes use of the ROM to access the 
> hardware.  Aranym can run Linux M68k, and may even be being 
> used to build packages for Debian.  But the aranym package 
> comes with a free TOS/GEM compatible system -- it would be 
> worth trying it out with original Atari ROMs) 4.  I haven't 
> hit on the right combination of emulator and ROM. 
> 
> Anybody else have any thoughts or experiences to share along 
> these lines.  I'd love to be able to run OS-9/68K on my x86 laptop.
> 
> JCE
> 
> 
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