[Coco] Personal OS-9 on Atari emulators

[Joel Ewy]

Paul Fitch wrote:
> 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.
>
>   
The other two disks are (I think) in an RBF format.  But since we don't
even get to the point of needing them that probably doesn't even enter
into it.
> 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.
>
>   
But the Atari OS-9 version's reliance on ROM code would tend to mitigate
against imperfect hardware emulation, I would think, since we don't have
OS-9 hitting the hardware in weird ways that TOS/GEM never did.  Of
course, I don't know how much and for what exact purposes OS-9 uses the
Atari ROM code.  No doubt it still does touch bare metal at some point. 
And I suppose it's possible that OS-9 calls obscure ROM routines that
almost no other TOS/GEM programs ever used.  That could show up
incomplete hardware emulation, even if OS-9 isn't directly prodding
those hardware bits.

JCE