[Coco] NitrOS-9 V3.3.0 and DriveWire

[J.P. Samson]

Boisy,

I probably should have no say in this since I'm not involved in the  
NitrOS-9 Project, let alone the CoCo world too much right now.  I also  
know zero about the work involved in building and maintaining  
NitrOS-9.  But I'll give my own two cents anyway, just 'cos you asked.

I'd like to see some minimum support for the various floppy disk-based  
variants of NitrOS-9 that have been developed.  With that in mind,  
here are my desired additions to your recommendations:

1.  For those who like running souped-up CoCo hardware, keep the 6309  
with 80-track DSDD distribution (for 3.5" floppy disk systems).  All  
your other recommendations for the OS distribution are fine with me,  
and maintain compatibility with the standard "Radio Shack-approved"  
CoCo configurations (i.e. 6809's and 40-track floppy drives).

2.  I don't know how much the various games benefit from NitrOS-9  
going forward.  If they run just fine with whatever is the current  
stable NitrOS-9 release, then build the various disk images and freeze  
them.  In a sense, these become the final commercial releases of the  
games (on floppy disk, at any rate).  You may wish to freeze a copy of  
the system as it is used to build these disk images, too, just in case  
something goes wrong and needs to get rebuilt somewhere down the line.

-- JP


On Mar. 29, 2010, at 9:50 PM, Boisy G. Pitre wrote:

> As most of you know, the NitrOS-9 Project has grown massively in
> scope.  There are all sorts of disk images that can be created, from
> the OS disk images itself to the Sierra games, and more.  Moreover,
> myself and a few people are actually actively maintaining all of this
> work.
>
> What complicates this is the sheer number of bootable configurations
> we are supporting.  For the OS alone we have:  NitrOS-9/6809 Level 1,
> NitrOS-9/6809 Level 2, NitrOS-9/6309 Level 2
>
> For each of those we have:  40 Track DSDD, 80 Track DSDD, 40 Track
> DSDD 50Hz, 80 Track DSDD 50Hz, DriveWire Boot
>
> In order to make all of this manageable, I am considering the
> following: - Drop 80 Track DSDD support for the OS and have only 40
> Track DSDD disk images.  This would leave each OS with: 40 Track DSDD,
> 40 Track DSDD 50Hz, and DriveWire boot disk images.
>
> - For all other packages (Sierra games, other games like Koronis Rift,
> Rescue on Fractalus, etc) we will drop the floppy disk images and make
> these disk images exclusively DriveWire bootable.