[Coco] funny discovery

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 8:19 PM, Wayne Campbell <asa.rand at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I looked again at the os9 archive for the level 2 version. I found that the master boot disk was indeed there! The Basic09/Config disk is named OS9BOOT.os9 and the master boot disk is named OS9SYSMR.os9. I put OS9SYSMR.os9 in as disk 0, and OS9BOOT.os9 as disk 1, and typed DOS.
>
> It showed the OS9 BOOT screen with the black text and green background, then the screen went black, and a blue cursor showed up. I could tell I was at the first screen, but I can't see anything because the text and background are both black.
>
> I tried entering the date (in 2-digit year format), it did something, but it's been too long for me to remember what happens when you boot off the system master.
>
> Has anyone else had this problem? Know what to do about the screen colors?
>
> Also, I want to set up a virtual hard disk in MESS to use as a bootable hd from OS-9. Because of the way the NitrOS-9 disk I am using is set up, I can't access a hard drive with it, and the only 720K floppies I can use have to be /d0 to be read. To create a new boot disk, I'm going to use OS-9 Level 2. I want to be able to use a hard disk image. When I had my CoCo3, I had a 20-meg hd that came with a Tandy 2000 I bought back then. I had it set up as my boot drive, and it worked fine. I want to do that with MESS. Can anyone help me with this, as I am at a total loss for how to do it, and MESS isn't very informative on the subject.
>

Hi Wayne,

I am no expert, but in the Nitros9 source is a driver called "emudsk"
which I think is what you'll need.
I built a boot disk with emudsk.dr and it's h0.dd.  I was able, in
MESS, to create a virtual hard disk using the MESS menu.  Then I
booted the emulator with my new disk image and was able to format /H0
with nitros9's format from within in the emulated coco.  copying data
onto the virtual HD seemed to work fine.

So that would get you a hard disk within MESS.  I'm not sure what
would be required to boot without a floppy image to assist, since I
think the coco's roms would have to have support for MESS's virtual
drive, or a rompak in the virtual rompak slot.. something like that.
maybe it exists somewhere.

Like you, I wasn't able to find out much about this, maybe there are
better disks already made somewhere?  the stock nitros9 disks dont
seem to include the emudsk driver.

-Aaron


> Wayne
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