[Coco] Salutations and an Introduction

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 9:27 AM, Brett Gordon <beretta42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all fellow coco-heads,
>
> My name's Brett Gordon.  I have recently signed up on the list at the
> suggestion of Aaron Wolfe.   I grew up in the 1980's with my CoCo2 (64K with
> melted keys), and a Tandy cassette drive.   About ten years ago a friend of
> mine asked me to take good care of his CoCo3 setup, which got me started
> with the 6809 again.   I now sport a coco3 with a 2 meg disto upgrade, the
> '87 Gime, a weird Disk controller (allows 2 DS IBM 360 drives, not 4 SS
> ?!?), and a nice big 20" NTSC RGB display.
>
> My current project, and my favorite so far is a ANS compliant Forth for the
> coco3.  Which  Arron suggested would make a neat "OpenBoot"-like system for
> the CoCo.  Anybody have suggestions how/where I could find information to
> support IDE/DriveWire/SD in my forth?
>

Welcome :)  I have been playing with your Forth and it's really nicely
done.  I haven't had as much time as I'd like, but like we talked
about I think a simpler implementation of something sort of like
openboot would be a nice way to support lots of hardware.
You could use such a thing to bootstrap a bigger Forth environment or OS9, etc.

There is lots of documentation available online.  The NitrOS9 wiki has
details on the boot process:
https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/nitros9/index.php?title=The_NitrOS-9_Boot_Process_Explained

(BTW, this wiki is awesome! I just revisited yesterday and was
impressed by how many documents are wiki-fied and how well they've
been converted.  great job to everyone who worked on this.  The
command guide and system call docs are really nice)

If you want to look at the drivers for the various hardware, these are
in the NitrOS9 CVS:
https://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=cvs&group_id=174026   The DriveWire
3 specification is here:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~mmarlette/Cloud-9/Support/DriveWire%203%20Specification.pdf
 (DW4 is 100% compatible with this).

This list has the best group of CoCo experts around, so I'd bet
someone here can answer almost any question.  Many of the people who
designed the hardware can be found here.


> I've been lurking 'round here for a couple of weeks, really enjoying the
> technical discussions.
>
> --
> Brett M. Gordon,
> beretta42 at gmail.com
>
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