[Coco] OS-9 Floppy / Printer configuration?

[James Jones]

On 07/25/2010 10:04 PM, Chad H wrote:
> Here's the issue I'm working on right now: trying to configure it to take
> advantage of the printer and floppy drive setup I have attached.  I have a
> FD-502 with dual 5.25 double-sided 360k drives with a modified RS-DOS EPROM
> that allows the top unit to be drives 0/1 and the bottom 2/3.  How do I
> configure OS-9 to take advantage of the other sides of the drives, either as
> /d2, /d3, etc. or by making /d0 and /d1 double-sided devices.
There's a utility out there called dmode that lets you modify RBF device 
descriptor modules (the ones in memory; you'll want to save them out to 
a file). If you don't have that, then you'll have to either create one 
with an assembler or use a program that will let you modify a file 
containing the device descriptors (and update the module CRCs). In 
either case, you will then want to recreate a boot file with the 
modified device descriptors.
>    Also, a
> person on this list was gracious enough to sell me a serial-to-parallel
> converter that allows me to print to a old HP DeskJet 540 printer rather
> well.  I've coded some RS-DOS BASIC programs to work properly with it (i.e.
> setting 1200baud and CRLF) but is there a way to set such parameters in
> OS/9?  If memory serves, the printer is /P device, right?  I've seen a
> couple of OS-9 applications allow the setting of the baud rate inside the
> application setup, but not much other settings.   Only way I could get these
> to printt down a page instead of all text on the first line was to run a
> RS-DOS BASIC initialization program to initialize the printer and then go
> into the OS-9 apps and print.
>    
For that you'll use tmode (the program that inspired dmode and its 
name), which modifies SCF flavored device descriptors.

     James Jones