[Coco] Creating /d1 descriptor for 2nd floppy?

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 21 April 2015 09:41:06 Christopher Barnett Fox wrote:
> Good morning!
>
> I'll expose my forgotten knowledge here... I have some old OS-9 Lvl II
> boot disks that already have a working /d1 device descriptor that I
> can use to access a second DSDD 40-track floppy drive. I have some
> others that don't have the /d1 descriptor.

I believe that you can copy the /d0 descriptor to a d1.dd, then use the 
dmode -d1.dd to adjust the drive number and its internal name so it will 
show up as d1, and if the sides & tracks aren't identical, you can 
adjust those too.

However, there are some bits in the device descriptor that weren't used 
in regular os9, but which are used in Nitros9 with its superdriver 
version of a nearly universal disk driver, some of which are cool things 
indeed if you have a hard drive that is also setup to have the HDBDOS 
vdisks on it.  Handier that sliced bread, and nearly as nice as bottled 
beer stuff.

> What's the process to create the descriptor? I have the old Rainbow
> guides to OS-9 and OS-9 Lvl II, but can't seem to find any
> documentation there. I see references to tmode?

tmode/xmode, are for serial devices, which a term or window descriptor 
is.  tmode operates on the existing open path of that shell you run it 
against, for the life of that shell. Which of the 3 paths for each 
shell, stdin, stdout and stderr are .0 .1 and .2 respectively.  Xmode 
works on the descriptor so that when the descriptor is brought up and 
used to make a screen, the changes are in effect. xmode and dmode from 
the Nitros9 kit can also work on descriptors in the modules/rbf (dmode) 
or modules/scf (xmode) using the xmode -filename or dmode -filename 
syntax.  Changes are then permanent.

dmode is the disk drive and such equivalent.

> Thanks!
>
> Christopher

Cheers, Gene Heskett
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