[Coco] NitrOS9 question

[Bill Pierce]

Dave, I seem to remember an issue a while back where it was found that the bootfile had to be at least a certain size (Aaron just confirmed this). I don't remember how big, but I think it's due to how some modules set up the data areas and some HAVE to fall on 256 page boundaries. And when you get near the 8k/16k boundary, if a module breaks across that boundary, it will fail. Also, certain tables are expected to be in exact locations.
It's not so much the boot order bug, but just the way it works. I'm not sure this is what's happening in your case as you're using the ccbkrn which throws a wrench in the works as we're removing main modules. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, Brett did a good job with this (and Boisy) and it works.

As for term_6551 VS T2... it looks to me that OS9 needs to know screen restraints (#cols, #rows, cntr codes, etc) which is set with the term, regardless of whether the screen is on the Coco or a remote, it's still under OS9 control. T2 provides no such info, term_6551 does. This is why all the headless boots use the term_xx for what ever type of system is used (6551, dw4, etc). I may be wrong here, but that's the way it looks to me.

Oh, and the systype reference... the "levelx/defs/defsfile.asm" you mentioned is NOT used to build the NitrOS9 modules. That file is in place to be copied to the distro disks for backwards compatibilities. It's not part of the current build process. The defs are defined in "levelx/defsfile" in the root dir of each system build. The defs used in the build process are in the root/defs dir (os9.d, scf.d, rbf.d, cocovtio.d, coco.d, etc), not the defs in each system dir. There's a lot of stuff in this area that seems to have never been updated to match current convention and really needs some work (maybe soon). The name changes to the defs files throw a wrench in everything once you actually move to OS9 and try to use the repo disks without renaming the defs back to the old names. I was working on fixing this stuff when I got sidetracked into a bunch of recording (real life, who needs it?). I hope to get a break soon so I can finish all the patches I started (fixing a bunch of things), which will bring a lot of things like this back in order.

 

 

Bill Pierce
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