[Coco] [CoCo] NitrOS-9 on real CoCo (Was DriveWire 4)

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 02 January 2018 17:01:51 Allen Huffman wrote:

> > On Jan 2, 2018, at 3:55 PM, David Ladd <davidwladd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > After the conversion of NitrOS-9 Project to be built with lwtools
> > and the defs files were updated with longer more meaningful labels
> > you can no longer build NitrOS-9 on a real CoCo. :(  As normal ASM
> > is limited to 8 character labels and I believe RMA is also.
> >
> > Personally I wish that NitrOS-9 was still able to be built on a real
> > CoCo 3, but I guess the powers didn't think it was important to
> > maintain that ability.
>
> When I was getting my CoCo set back up, I recall discussing with
> William about the possibility of porting lwtools to OS-9. I forget the
> details, but it did not sound doable.
>
> However, if “ansifront” can turn ANSI-C to K&R C, I wonder if all we
> need is a front-filter that would change the code back, generating
> labels that fit the 8 character limit on demand?
>
That would I think, have to be a twostep conversion, because of the 
longer length, a translation would have to be done on the defs, and a 
new defsfile suit built that did the same thing but the labels would 
probably resemble a long list of random 8 char assignments.  And it 
would have to be redone anytime a t was crossed differently in the real 
defs. Having been the cause of a couple defsfile fixes myself, and 
witnessing the difficulty of getting us all back on the same page, the 
current built it on an x86 machine is by far the lessor of two evils.

You are just an hg pull 3 or 4 minutes away from having a fresh copy of 
the repo on your own x86 box, and not more than 5 or so minutes away 
from a copy of the latest version built, ready to feed drivewire and 
build a new boot from that on your coco.

But don't forget to save and reuse any special descriptors you've built 
to fit YOUR hardware. I've had a directory on my hd forever, and a 
script that edits that drivewire image in place so that a list of my 
descriptors is written to the dw mounted image, and then is used to 
build a new boot image. In my case, the descriptors for both hard 
drives, a customized sh.dd, and all 4 of my floppies. I have one slot 
rigged so I can plug in a 5.25" or a 3.5" drive.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>