[Coco] Building NitrOS-9 on Mac OS X

[Allen Huffman]

> On Jan 22, 2015, at 7:45 PM, nickma2 at optusnet.com.au wrote:
> 
> I don't know if it were as bad. I never had to reinstall my MS-DOS on
> my Hard Drive. Just adding and editing the Config.Sys and
> Autoexec.bat. Many programs didn't even need this once a reliable
> config was setup.

We had a stack of boot floppies for various games that had different requirements. That, and all the IRQ/COM jumpers and stuff is one thing about the DOS days I don't mind leaving behind.

> It just amazes me that OS-9 software for hard drive use doesn't
> install easier. 

Yeah, though I bet it's like how most Mac programs today don't have installers -- you just drag it wherever you want. Most of the time, OS-9 stuff was just a COPY or DSAVE command to move the files to your other disk.

> I just got sick of stuffing around in OS-9 just to get things working
> all the time. I wanted to be creating applications that release the
> full power of the computer but OS-9 was more a deterrant to creating
> applications of the quality I was hoping for. 

For me, once I moved from RS-DOS to OS-9, I was able to leverage all the OS stuff and writing software became much easier. My MiniBanners was written in RS-DOS, then ported to BASIC09, and I ended up writing in assembly and C under OS-9. I don't think I would have ever learned C in RS-DOS, though I know at least on C compiler came out for BASIC in the end years.

It's why the only assembly game I ever wrote was under OS-9. I learned the system call to map in the screen and away I went. You may recall, Kevin Darling said he'd port anything to OS-9 to prove it could be done and the Kyum-Gai To Be Ninja game somehow was the one that volunteered.

So much more could have been done but game developers preferred writing to the metal so you got guys like me who knew OS-9 but not games ;-) I think the myth I was glad to learn was a myth was that you couldn't access video memory directly. However, doing cool scrolling things and all that would have definitely broken some rules but there's no reason by a custom video device driver could not have been written to handle all the basic stuff, then guarantee the device was "locked" for the app. Many sound players and stuff would live peacefully but they'd mask interrupts and take over to do their thing. You could then run them on OS-9, but they didn't multitask :)

I wrote a sound driver that played digital sound files. I don't know why no one else did this stuff -- OS-9ers weren't gamers I guess?

		-- Allen