[Coco] DECB development under OS9

[Dave Philipsen]

I tried both the RSDOS and the HRSDOS utilities.  The syntax of the two 
seemed pretty similar. It seems that perhaps there is a special setup 
needed for HRSDOS as it would not do what I wanted it to do "out of the 
box".  To be fair I did not go through all of the documentation although 
it seems it was more specifically designed for a SCSI HD with multiple 
RSDOS partitions.

The RSDOS utilty, however, seemed to work as expected.  Using 'rsdos 
-dir /sd1' yielded a directory listing of the disk image I mounted to 
drive 1 before booting OS9.  Using 'rsdos -put README.TXT 
/dd/readme.txt' copied the OS9 file to the RSDOS disk image.  When I 
rebooted to DECB and mounted the drive I found the file that I had 
copied there from OS9.

So the ability to move files back and forth between OS9 and DECB is 
already available in OS9 and has been for some time.  And it seems my 
idea of developing an m/l program under OS9 for DECB will work. It would 
be a fairly simple matter to write a script that would assemble the 
source file and copy the binary output file to the DECB image on /sd1.  
Then just reboot the computer and test it out.  I might have to look 
into how to 'AUTOEXEC' a file on startup with the CoCoSDC and then I 
could just write a program that would present a menu for either booting 
into OS9 with the DECB partition mounted on drive 1 or just booting DECB 
with the DECB partition mounted to drive 0.  (Just so I don't have to 
manually mount the drives every time I reboot.)

Perhaps Robert may chime in to clarify how I might use HRSDOS to 
accomplish this as well.

Dave


On 5/11/2018 5:13 PM, L. Curtis Boyle wrote:
> I think the RSDOS utility will do this already, so you could set that up in a script to copy to/from a DECB disk image directly.
>
> L. Curtis Boyle
> curtisboyle at sasktel.net
>
>
>
>> On May 11, 2018, at 4:02 PM, Dave Philipsen <dave at davebiz.com> wrote:
>>
>> I have a possible project that I'd like to get a little input on.  I would like to use NitrOS9 as my development platform for programs that will run under DECB.  The reason for this is that NitrOS9 is well suited in that it has plenty of disk space and several assembler options available.  It would be easy to include the headers inside of the source code for compatibility with the DECB LOADM format as I've already done this with a cross assembler under DOS/Windows.  I'm not really keen on the idea of having to develop on a PC, transfer the output file via drivewire to the CoCo, and test.
>>
>> I have a CoCo3 with 512K and I have CoCoSDC that has disk images for booting NitrOS9 as well as images for DECB.  What I was thinking is that I could write a utility program that runs under NitrOS9 that would allow me to copy files back and forth to one of the DECB disk images on the CoCoSDC.  Maybe it has already been done.  Has anyone ever attempted this?  If not, is there anyone who would want to give me a little advice on how, theoretically, it might be done?
>>
>> I see there is a low level driver for the cocosdc and I'm wondering how difficult it would be to mount a DECB disk image and access the image as another drive under NitrOS9.  I realize that because of the difference in disk format the drive would not be natively read/writeable from NitrOS9 but as long as all of the virtual sectors were accessible then I could write a program to access the data/programs in the DECB file system.  So I guess I'm asking whether it would be feasible to mount one or more DECB disk images on the CoCoSDC as virtual drives; /SD1, /SD2, etc.
>>
>> This would allow me to write a program under NitrOS9, assemble it, copy the DECB format binary to the correct DECB image on the CoCoSDC, then reboot the computer and test the program out in DECB. Another idea I have which would be an add-on to this would be a way to actually compile a NitrOS9 C program and either trap or replace the system calls and have the program usable under DECB.  I know this is a bit of a stretch but it might be possible if only certain limited system calls were used from the C program.
>>
>>
>>
>> Dave
>>
>>
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>